AFTER Lewis O'Brien's best season came his most difficult.

When O'Brien joined Nottingham Forest last summer after shining and starring for Huddersfield Town and inspiring the Terriers in an unlikely charge to the Championship play-off final, the gifted midfielder looked ready to make his mark on the Premier League.

But it was no ordinary summer at the City Ground. In what was a quite remarkable and never seen before transfer rebuild, O'Brien was one of 21 new Forest faces. There was no way it was going to work out for all of them.

The early signs for O'Brien were promising but after five starts before the end of August, only one more would follow. That was just the start of it.

Desperate to play, O'Brien looked set for a loan switch to Blackburn in January but the deal dramatically collapsed after what Rovers described as a "tenuous late intervention" from the EFL. Blackburn took the case to an arbitration hearing but failed to get the verdict overturned.

"It was tough," admits O'Brien, who learnt a lot and is hugely grateful to his nearest and dearest for helping him through the most testing spell of his career and far.

"I learnt about the need to try and keep level headed," he says.

"You can never get too carried away with the highs or too low with the lows. Football is a crazy game.

"You have ups and downs and you have to have a good family behind you to support you.

"Throughout the last year when I've been struggling a bit, my family and fiance are the people I've had to lean on, and I think some people kind of don't see football players as normal people, but off the pitch it's nice to have that stability."

Rather than feel sorry for himself and see out the season on the fringes at Forest after the failed Blackburn move, O'Brien set about "making the best of a bad situation" and when the opportunity to join Wayne Rooney's DC United presented itself in March, he grabbed it with both hands.

"That was really good," he says.

"I wanted to play football and take my mind off everything that had happened. Once I come back from there my idea was clear, I wanted to get into somewhere and play as much as possible.

"I could sit here all day and talk about the lifestyle over there. It's completely different to anything in England.

"The lifestyle is really good, but the football, I wanted to challenge myself again and definitely wanted to come back and prove some people wrong really. I had to come back and show people what I could be."

Which brings us to the here and now and Middlesbrough.

O'Brien might have been out of the picture at Forest but there was plenty of interest in his services this summer. Sheffield United were keen, Leeds United were linked. Other Championship clubs wanted the midfielder. But Boro were rewarded for their patience and persistence, working on the deal for two months before the season-long loan move was confirmed on the penultimate day of the window.

They signed a player who's not only previously starred at Championship level, but is hungrier than he's ever been.

"My career trajectory was on the up at one point then it levelled off and things went wrong and I just feel like I still have places to go and to prove I can get to these places," he says.

"There was outside factors that contributed to the things that have happened and it wasn't that I wasn't great at football or whatever people might think. I just want to get on the pitch and show people what I can do.

"If you look back at my career, I've played every game I possibly could then got to Nottingham and didn't play as much as I wanted, then obviously the thing in January. So it just made me more hungry and have more desire to play and prove to people that I still am the player I used to be and I'm better than the player people used to see.

"I'm absolutely delighted to be here. As soon as I heard it was on the radar, it was something I tried to push through as quickly as possible. I just want to get game-time and having seen how they did last year, it was something I definitely wanted to do.

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"It seems like I'm just following the ex-Manchester United players around. I learnt a lot out in the MLS under Rooney and coming here with Michael Carrick and him being a midfielder, I'm definitely going to learn a lot.

"Playing for him was a big draw. As soon as I spoke to him I knew which pathway I wanted to take.

"The football they play is excellent. It's very possession based but attack quickly as well at the same time. I hope I can bring something different to the team, get on the ball and drive forward and bring something that maybe they didn't have last season. Hopefully we can go one step further."