Torp working with mind coach - how can they help?

The pressure in professional sport is huge. For the Championship promotion contenders it is that time of the season when the gauge is in the red.

Coventry City, nine points clear at the top, are dealing with not only the weight of finishing the job off but also the burden of ending the club's 25-year wait to return to the top flight.

How they deal with that pressure will be crucial and one player who has been working on that is key midfielder Victor Torp who has revealed he has been using a mind coach to help.

So what does a mind coach do? What aspects do they work on? And how might it help improve performance?

"The main thing we're trying going to do is keep them consistent in what their approaches are and help them go into a performance environment as confident as possible," Phil Clarke, a sports sports psychologist at the University of Derby, told BBC CWR.

"When we're under a lot of pressure, whether it's a big outcome at stake, we often try to change things to maximise our chances of success.

"But actually what ends up doing is we overthink it. We start doing things that we don't normally do.

"Hesitation starts to creep in. So it's just trying to give them confidence to just continue doing what they're doing and keep moving forward."

Clarke added footballers feel nerves "just like any other person" before a match but helps them use their experience of performing under pressure and in front of crowds "to help remind them, help ground them" because "it's very easy to keep looking at what if we win this, we'll get this and that gets us into the Premier League".

When the Sky Blues had that wobble at the start of 2026 as their 10-point lead disappeared, boss Frank Lampard spoke about "correcting the negatives" and "promoting what we've done" and Clarke agreed that is a key strategy.

"When it comes to your mindset, you want to be able to, when the pressure's on, trust your ability," he said. "And that trust comes from years of work on that side of your game.

"Often the best performers in the world have that added aspect of knowing how to perform under pressure - that is why they work on their mindset.

"Every human being is different. It's not like you apply the exact same process every time. It's about understanding what works for that individual to get them into that ideal performance zone."