Sky Sports' Johnny Phillips: Jamie O’Hara mistake is one that won’t be repeated at Wolves

That Benjamin Franklin quote resonates with just about everyone at some stage during their life. It is particularly true in relation to football careers.

Very rarely is a player equipped with the requisite tools and knowledge at the stage of his career when he can use them best.

Jamie O’Hara acknowledged as much this week, in a revealing interview with The Independent ahead of his non-league team’s big day. Still only 32-years-old, O’Hara is turning out for Billericay Town these days. The Essex club take on Chesterfield in the first round of the FA Cup today.

O’Hara was just 24 when he signed the biggest contract of his career – a five-year, £30,000-a-week deal with Wolves.

He admits: “I took my foot off the gas. I look back and think it could have gone so right, and it went so wrong.”

O’Hara came to symbolise the fall of Wolves in the final stages of Mick McCarthy’s reign. If Michael Kightly and Matt Jarvis are shining examples of McCarthy’s shrewd transfer business on the club’s way up, then O’Hara and Roger Johnson are the blots on his copybook on the way down. The two men arrived with burgeoning Premier League reputations and left with tails between their legs.

O’Hara’s decline was startling. After a promising start at the beginning of the 2011/12 season, his £5 million fee looked like good value. But, in hindsight, it could be asked if the management did their due diligence on the player off the pitch.

A call to one of his former managers, Harry Redknapp at Portsmouth, would have been revealing. Down on the south coast, where O’Hara had one of several loan spells, he was warned by Redknapp that his celebrity lifestyle was getting in the way of his football career.

The player did not come to Molineux with an entirely clean bill of health either. When the injury problems mounted up, O’Hara’s idea of rehabilitation involved nightclubs and holidays. His marriage to former model Danielle Lloyd ensured there was plenty of noise around him. The quiet life was off limits.

By the time he left the club in 2013, with Wolves in League One, manager Kenny Jackett had removed him from his first-team squad altogether.

O’Hara left with his reputation in tatters, having had more than one public fall-out with supporters. History does not judge his time at Molineux kindly, but it is worth holding a thought for the human being as well as the footballer on the pitch.

Twenty-four is an incredibly young age to be handling that sort of money. Without the guidance of his mother, who died when he was 17, and a self-confessed desire for approval, he made bad decisions.

Whilst not everyone would seek the limelight in the way he did – and still does, judging by his recent Celebrity Big Brother appearance – there are pitfalls that are hard to avoid when so much comes so soon in life.

It is unthinkable to envisage such a player ending up at Wolves today. As if to illustrate the type of character that now struts around in midfield, Ruben Neves eschewed an end of season club-sanctioned promotion party in Las Vegas with his team-mates this summer in order to take his girlfriend on holiday to propose to her.

This is not a criticism of McCarthy and his assistant Terry Connor, both of whom did an admirable job with a fraction of the resources Nuno Espirito Santo has enjoyed.

But there was certainly not the management structure in place at the club in that era to cope with recalcitrant characters.

Morale collapsed pretty quickly during McCarthy’s final season. It was not just O’Hara’s fault. Johnson, as captain, did not lead by example and there was an unwillingness to pull together during troubled times.

Nuno rules with a combination of fear, respect and trust. His players are scared to step out of line. They know that the management’s methods will make them better players. And the management places their trust in the players to perform.

The results are there for all to see. There are big-name players on big contracts at the club today – far bigger than O’Hara’s – but there is no sense of player power at work.

There is another factor at play too. With the majority of the first team coming from overseas, there is a cultural benefit. Away from their homeland, these players tend to stay away from the nightlife and other distractions that can draw in the British and Irish players. And it is worth pointing out that the current Wolves team has some rock-solid characters from these shores too.

None more so than the captain Conor Coady. Could you ever envisage him allowing a player to take his eye off the ball like O’Hara did?

At 32, it is to be hoped O’Hara is young enough to get the rest of his life back on track, even if his best playing days are behind him.

His time at Molineux was nothing short of a shambles. It was not just the player who learnt a hard lesson, the club paid a heavy price too. Under the current ownership, it is impossible to imagine Wolves ever going down a route like that again.