The my pointer automaticly refers to the entity which uses it.
Imagine a bird (dumb example I know), when he is born he instantly knows who he is. (well kind of)

But when the engine loads the level it might happen that the statue entity is created _before_ the player and thus does its action start to run earlier.
Now on the first frame cycle there might be no player, so trying to access the player pointer (which is not set yet) will maybe create an "empty pointer error" (thats because that pointer is empty )

Hope this explains the thing a bit, still I have no idea why the code does not work for you.

- Do you have an entity which call itself "player" ?