GAA journalists

[buck02]

I find Humpries a bit overbearing at times - I think he also tries to put at least one word in per article that many people dont know the meaning of!

But his book on the Kerry/Dublin rivarly was very good alright, even though his Vincents bias did take somewhat from it.

[watchdehop]

Not sure if Jacks articles are Ghost written in the times.
For one reason why are John Allens not ghost written. His articles are terrible stuff. They read like primary school compositions. He will never keep the gig up if thats the best he can do..

[kerrygold]

toms article about the net hangers where he attempted to defend amatuerism in the gaa must have been composed on the back of a beer mat after a night on the tear.

i think eamonn fitzmaurices articles are superb in the kerryman,like wise dara o cinneade is a very good writer also.Two very bright lads.

[superdoc]

Must disagree about Jim O'Sullivan -for years he was the only reporter who saw the same match as I did. Most of the others got the score and little else right. Always thought O'Sullivan was fair to Kerry but too lenient on bad refs!

[Sons of Pitches]

Can't stand Roy Curtis in the Sunday world not only does he pretend to know the all the ins' and outs' of the GAA, which he dosen't, but then he moves onto other sports such as rugby and soccer.

[Mickmack]

Focus on the fine points, not the final points
KIERAN SHANNON




IT was deja vu, as they say, all over again. Two weeks ago in Clones, Armagh, for the second time this summer, were in control of a championship game. They were three points up on Derry with scores at a premium, and if any team looked like scoring more, it was Armagh.

But then a strange yet familiar thing happened.

Armagh seemed to sit back, inviting Derry onto them. Before they knew it they were out of the championship proper by the same manner as they had left the Ulster championship. Just like against Donegal in Ballybofey, they had been cruising, only to again lose by a point, again being outscored by 10 scores to nine. It would take a lengthy discussion with the Armagh players to know exactly what went on in the closing quarter of both their defeats to Donegal and Derry, but we can hazard a good guess that they made the cardinal if common mistake of thinking of the outcome instead of the process of winning. And as a result of such a distraction, their play became more cagey and less aggressive.

To avoid that trapdoor, they could have done with setting what sport psychologists call 'performance' goals. In Ballybofey Armagh had scored 1-8. With 10 minutes to go that looked like being enough to win but nine scores had been the lowest an Armagh team had scored in the championship in 10 years.

Before playing Derry it would have been a reasonable goal to say that whatever happens, any Armagh team should register at least 10 scores, minimum, probably 12. Armagh though didn't push on like a side that had set out that performance goal.

It's strange that the lack of performance goals might have contributed to the demise of Armagh because performance goal-setting had been the foundation of their greatest success.

It is now part of folklore how at half-time in the 2002 All Ireland final, Joe Kernan chucked his 1977 runners-up plaque against the shower wall to "motivate" his troops. But motivation by definition is both an intensity and direction of effort. By throwing the plaque, Kernan might have helped raise Armagh's intensity of effort, but that would have been futile if there was no way of channelling effort. Something else he said during that half-time break provided that, something far more significant than the plaque theatrics.

After his players had trooped in, trailing Kerry by four points, Kernan read out a series of stats from the first half, one of which instantly startled his players: "Breaking Ball . . . Kerry 19, Armagh 17." It had only been the second time all season that Armagh had been beaten in that category after a half of football. Armagh resolved to win that category in the second half. They did, by 71 per cent to 29. And they won that game by a single point.

Kerry themselves would later benefit from such a principle. Before last year's All Ireland semi-final, Jack O'Connor set the performance goal of keeping Cork to five points or less per half; achieve that and winning the game would take care of itself. Kerry kept Cork to five points per half . . . and won, with five points to spare.

It applies to every sport. At the start of last season Alex Ferguson realised that just trying to win the Premiership was too vague a goal; a better way of achieving it would be to meet the goal of at least 90 points.

Before the 1996 All Ireland final, Liam Griffin told his team that if they held Gary Kirby to four points from frees, Wexford would win the All Ireland. Wexford held Kirby to two frees . . . and won by two points.

Earlier that same year, the Tralee Tigers won the national basketball superleague under the inspirational leadership of their coach, Timmy McCarthy, the RTE basketball commentator who also acts as Ger Canning's stats man for GAA games.

With RTE, McCarthy's signature comment is to exclaim "Get that stuff out of here!" after a defender has jumped up and blocked an opponent's shot, yet one of McCarthy's signature rules as a coach is for his players to refrain from even attempting such a defensive play. While 'checking' is a spectacular and athletic play, to McCarthy the coach it's a low-percentage play that invites much more foul trouble for his players than it reduces opponents from scoring.

Instead he prefers his players to stand straight up and put their hands up straight. If teams can shoot and score over them, fair enough, but they're not going to get cheap visits to the free-throw line.

In 17 of Tralee's 18 league games that season, they went to the free-throw line more than their opponents. Only twice all season did they reach seven team fouls in a half and have a player fouled out. By setting the process goal of his players being merely shot adjusters instead of shot blockers, Tralee achieved their performance goal of avoiding foul trouble and getting more free-throws than their opponents and, in doing so, achieved their outcome goal . . . winning the league.

Elite athletes in individual sport especially know the value of performance goals. When the UK swimmer Adrian Moorhouse was a youngster, he changed clubs shortly after seeing David Wilkie win the 1976 Olympics. When his new coach asked him what his long-term goal was, Moorhouse said, "To win the Olympics." The coach instantly replied, "Okay, what time are you going to win it in?"

After that Moorhouse would set a series of performance goals and on the eve of the 1984 LA Games, was favourite for gold. He only came fourth;

the reason, he would later admit, was because he was so worried about whether he'd win or lose. In Seoul his goals were different. Naturally, one of them was to win . . . that's what kept him motivated for four years . . . but the others were to swim in a particular time and particular way, to stay strong and hold his stroke in the last 10 metres.

Moorhouse won that Olympics. By a fingernail. By holding his stroke in the last 10 metres.

The lesson is there for everyone. Think of outcome and you're likely to get the outcome you don't want. But focus on performance and process, and the outcome you desire is more likely to care of itself.

Kieran Shannon is a qualified and practising sports psychologist and can be contacted at kshannon@tribune. ie

[kerrygold]

Sorry meant to post this earlier,vincent hogan has a good article on paul galvin in todays indo,its an interesting read if someone could post it up here,or if maybe anyone of ye who have escaped from the more remote parts of the kingdom wish to nip down to the local service station and secure a copy, before the flame draws the midnight oil up along its wik from its resting canaster and herald its withdrawl from the shelf.

[Mickmack]

Jesus Christ Kerrygold.............. thats poetry in motion man...........

[MrRasherstoyou]

Nice one KG!

So Shannon is a shrink, that figures.
Regarding the Armagh theory, my own belief is that Armagh this year did what alot of fading teams do, they lost the nerve to close out tight games, the hallmark of successful teams.
Then again, Armagh were missing two of their best players through injury, which means it's hard to judge that they couldnt have won the games they lost..........

[Mickmack]

Yeah..... Kieran Shannon is a sports psychologist. I didnt realise that either.

Wouldnt it be great if Owenabue or some one could paste his weekly article into a special thread......... just like we do for that other psychologist Jack o Connor!!

[sullyschoice]

Just read a few more pathetic offerings from Mr Curtis today in the Sunday World. How does he make a living from it, That Mc Goldrick fella isnt much better today

[scoobydo]

Outsider on the inside looking back out

By Vincent Hogan
Saturday August 11 2007

"He was grim and cold, he was bad and bold. He was Dangerous Dan McGrew."
YOU don't know him and you probably don't much like him. He understands. That comes with the territory.

All his life, Paul Galvin has found strength in isolation. In picking at private sores. He belongs to a county where footballers, traditionally, have music in their feet. Jazz mostly. Sax and trombone and clarinet. Lazy rhythms. Then they pluck this kid from Lixnaw, hurling territory. A sworn rocker.

This stuff was never in Galvin's dreams. He never went to an All-Ireland homecoming in his life. His only vivid childhood memory of Kerry winning the Sam Maguire is of '86, his Ma roaring at the TV set as Micko's boys came back against Tyrone. He was seven at the time and, when it ended, he went back to the lawn with his hurley.

Football, to him, meant Manchester United. Glamour. A kid's pipedream. Later, he would play a bit with Listowel Celtic, but he was first and foremost a hurling boy. An outsider.

In his remarkable book, Keys to the Kingdom, Jack O'Connor devotes almost three pages to Galvin. He talks of him being "work sometimes", of him having "a tendency to get in trouble on the pitch". But O'Connor is unequivocal about what he brings to Kerry.

Describing Galvin as "the answer to a pile of worries", he says of his type "they'd be my men, hard bastards who'd go through walls for you. I can't get enough of those fellas around the place. They set the tone."

PAUL GALVIN leads a kind of double-life and some see one as being incompatible with the other.

He is a school-teacher. By all accounts, a good one. Next month, he takes up a new post at St Brendan's in Killarney, gentler waters after eight years across 'enemy lines' at Coláiste Chríost Rí in Cork. Last year, when he was sent off in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Armagh, some pundits set upon his character with a scalpel.

On television, one referred to him as "a corner-boy", seeing fit - it seemed - to question his suitability for the classroom. Another, in a Sunday newspaper, offered the view that "if there were All Stars awarded for acting the bollix, Galvin would win all 15". His family chose not to travel to the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork.

He rode the storm. He seethed.

This isn't the story of a wounded angel though. Galvin doesn't profess to any purity of soul. In Keys to the Kingdom, O'Connor also reveals his possession of a "little black book", in which Galvin writes down the names of people who "pissed him off".

That image expresses an ocean. Galvin's strength is his capacity to channel energy, good and bad. To remember who he is, where he came from and what brought him here.

"I have to keep proving myself," he says impassively. "And, to do that, I have to keep working very, very hard. Maybe this feeling of being an outsider is what keeps me going. The slights I might have had along the way. I always keep them in my head.

"I would never think of myself as an established player. You can't in Kerry. Maybe some of the greats can, fellas like Darragh Ó Sé and Gooch. But I'm not a Gooch. I have to keep on the edge and that means always having an angle.

"I'd be quite conspiratorial the way I work out things in my own mind."

His first three Championship games pretty much armed him for the hard road. Clare, Cork, then Limerick in '04. He was taken off. He was dropped. His marker got the TV vote for man of the match. The tea leaves had only bad news.

Accolades

Yet, he hung tough. Kerry won the All-Ireland, Galvin collected the 1,000th All Star. Last season, they got the old canister again and Galvin made another All Star selection. Two All-Irelands and two All Stars in three seasons. Not a bad haul for a hurling boy.

He loves this life now, yet it makes him wonder too.

His best friend on the Kerry panel used to be Eamonn Fitzmaurice. Eamonn didn't make the cut this year and retired. Watching him leave set Galvin thinking about the strange tyranny of the lives they lead. Fitzmaurice won more than most as a player but, when his time was up, he just left with a pat on the back. That jarred a little.

You see, not long ago, Jimmy Deenihan told Galvin a story of this year's Munster final day in Killarney. He stores it now.

Jimmy, an old Kerry legend and a stalwart with Finuge (where Galvin plays his club football), met an American at the game. The American had, literally, just followed the crowd out of curiosity to Fizgerald Stadium. He'd bought a ticket at the stile. He'd sat, slack-jawed through the contest.

Coming away, he tried to articulate his sense of wonder to Deenihan. At the atmosphere. The pace of the game. The physicality. Then Deenihan told him something that the American just wouldn't swallow.

That the stars of the show were amateurs. Ordinary boys who'd be working on Monday morning. And the American spun away from him, all but slapping his sides, laughing maniacally. Hooting at the thought of it. Amateurs indeed. Hysterical.

"Do you know this party line fellas have about pay-for-play?" says Galvin now, stiffening in his chair. "Where they say 'No, we don't want that. We just want to be looked after better.' I think that's a joke. Just fellas being politically correct.

"I was interviewed for a magazine recently and I said 'Yeah, I'd love pay-for-play!' And the fella interviewing me said 'Maybe we better not say that.' Why not? Why take the big step of letting the soccer and rugby boys into Croke Park, why be that open-minded and still push amateurism on the boys who have made the GAA what it is?

"I don't think the GAA can justify it much longer. Players are going to resent this when they see all the money being generated. I mean Kerry look after us well, but something dramatic is going to happen in the GAA. It has to.

"They can no longer justify what's going on. How much bigger is it going to get? I just think it's a joke at this stage and I've no bother saying it."

You ask him if he is a member of the GPA?

"No!"

Why?

"I'm just not, that's it. I was, but I'm not now."

You were unimpressed?

"Yerra, I'm not too sure what's going on there."

In what way?

"I don't know what they're doing. They need to get a hold of something. Of an issue and nail it."

He changes the subject. He wants to be sure that the interview doesn't depict him as a moaner. This isn't his thing. He has mixed views of media and how they dress things. They like to pigeon-hole. To caricature. To view everything in straight lines.

Of late, he senses he's being prejudged. In the Munster final, he was booked for his part in an altercation with Cork's Noel O'Leary. Yet, TV pictures showed O'Leary's boot swinging in Galvin's direction. The Cork man served a one-month suspension.

Galvin says that he is paying for how people see him.

He talks of another incident in that game, of tracking back and tackling James Masters as he came in along the end-line. Of a free being given and a point being scored. "It was never a foul," he argues.

"But I can sense it coming now. You just give a dog a bad name. That day against Cork, I just knew that my reputation had gone before me. Especially from last year and the big hullabaloo. The way I was labelled by certain pundits. Referees definitely have their eye on me now.

"The Sunday Game was only the tip of the iceberg last year. Look, I'm not moaning about it. It didn't affect me high up or low down last year. I mean I've been in scrapes since I was that high (spreading his palm about a foot from the ground). I know I'm no angel.

"But maybe it's having an effect on how people judge me this summer."

THIS IS NO apologia for what's gone before. It can't be. Galvin has been in enough bad places to know that there's a price to pay.

Not long after Kerry's defeat to Tyrone in the 2005 All-Ireland final, he was sent off while playing for Finuge against Ballylongford in the North Kerry final. A young Ballylongford player sustained a broken jaw in the incident, for which Galvin received a six-month suspension (subsequently cut to four after representations to the injured player's family from Jack O'Connor).

He understands too that, had Armagh won last year's quarter-final, the repercussions could have been ruinous to his inter-county career.

Galvin admits: "I was praying on the sideline, saying 'God, don't let this go wrong'. We won that game but, for a while, it was close to going belly-up. Don't think I don't know that. Because, if it had, I'd be gone. I might never have got a Kerry jersey again. That's how close it was.

"That day I was silly. It could have blown up in my face. I'm always conscious of that. Of the need to be careful. But then, I'm no good if ... Look, I can't stroll out there like Gooch and wait for it to happen."

Regrets? He's had plenty. But his style invites conflict. He is ravenous (and fearless) in pursuit of a ball. He plays without compromise. He hunts, scavenges, presses the space around a ball-carrier. In other words, he's not quite cut from the traditional stone of a Kerry footballer.

Galvin's a maverick who, maybe, occasionally suffers for his difference.

"Maybe there's been one or two incidents I regret," he accepts.

"But I've been sent off only once with Kerry. So, sometimes, I just don't know what it's all about. Maybe it's because people associate Kerry football with the greats, the Mikeys, the Jackos and the Gooches.

"Then I come along and I'm doing stuff Kerry footballers aren't supposed to do.

"I mean, sometimes I look at it and I wonder where did I get the name from? Who have I ever lamped? Who have I ever opened up? Who have I ever stamped on or head-butted? Or punched? Or kicked? Really? One red card in 30-odd games for Kerry? It doesn't really stand up.

"I'm not painting myself as an angel, because I'm not. Have I done a few things I regretted? I have probably, yeah. I might say to myself 'I shouldn't have done that. But it's done now. You can't go back. Power on.'"

Reputation

Famously, he was sin-binned before the ball had even been thrown in for last year's infamous second Test in the now suspended International Rules series against Australia.

The game descended into a wretched fiasco and Galvin watched the first 18 minutes from the sideline.

He had been drawn into an altercation with a muscle-bound Aussie called Chance Bateman.

His memories of the day capture the prevailing thread of farce.

"Sure we were walking around in the parade beforehand and the Aussies were yapping over at (Graham) Geraghty, 'We're going to f***ing get you!' All this s**t. And I'm just going 'Aw man! Am I mad here?'

"Next thing, this guy comes at me, all dreadlocks, shouting and hopping off me. So I just let fly once or twice. Sure, t'was the only way. Because he was going to do it if I didn't. And that was that. I missed the worst of it.

"I couldn't believe it when I got to the line. Tadhg (Kennelly) was on the ground in agony.

"I mean I'm off before the ball has even been thrown in and I'm wondering 'How did he get here before me?'

"But he'd just been nailed by a team-mate from Aussie Rules. A knee into the back.

"When I heard Hall had done Tadhg, I was thinking 'Anything goes here, I might be safer where I am'."

The series left Galvin with a low opinion of the visitors and their motives.

He senses they just travelled with a bully's charter.

"I remember one guy, especially," he says. "Massive, with black hair. He had no interest in playing at all. For the two games, he was just acting the maggot. So why did they bring him?

"They brought a lot of guys like that. Guys with no interest. All they wanted was to break us up and laugh at us then. They're looking at us as bums, amateurs. Laughing at us. There's no respect. That's the problem I have. The Aussie boys look down on us because we're amateurs.

"And yet, a lot of them are only mouth. If you do go for them, they're not too sure what to do. All they do is give off the oul' macho image. But, when they have to back it up, some of them can't. Looking back, we probably had a team that was too young and too light. They didn't do that to the John McDermotts, did they?"

Would he play the game again? His response is admirably honest. "Well, you take a selfish view. Would I like to go to Australia for three weeks? Yes, I would."

TOMORROW, the challenge is to rope down Monaghan now the other bulwarks of Ulster football - Armagh and Tyrone - have been breached.

Galvin daren't glimpse beyond it. He suggests that Kerry's form has been "scratchy" this summer and that the six-week break from the Munster final leaves them, essentially, starting cold. There is also the sense of still acclimatising to a new voice in the dressing-room.

O'Connor placed a big trust in Galvin and he likes to think he repaid that. But yesterday is history and history is worthless now.

"Jack is no good to me now," he says. "We had plenty of run-ins, but I'm inclined to have them anyway. I tend to talk straight. But it's all about Pat O'Shea for me now. And Pat owes me nothing. So the ball's in my court again. It's up to me to prove myself, to prove I'm good enough."

Same as it ever was.

- Vincent Hogan

[Owenabue]

mickmack said:

Yeah..... Kieran Shannon is a sports psychologist. I didnt realise that either.

Wouldnt it be great if Owenabue or some one could paste his weekly article into a special thread......... just like we do for that other psychologist Jack o Connor!!

Mickmack, if I start getting the €2+ a week from the Kerry county board I'll post what ever articles ye want!
Anyway, I'm off to enjoy the rest of my holidays deep in enemy territory. Til next week..... Slán

[tabbyie]

Big headline in the Herald this evening.

"Dara O'Cinnéide is a Dub"

Are they that stuck for news. Apparently he was born in Dublin but moved to Kerry when he was two.

I can see the headline for tomorrows paper already:


"Colm Copper sings Molly Malone"

[austinstacksabu]

"Aslan sing Goochshakalaka"

[pony]

Great interview with Galvin. Great stuff on the Aussies.

He doesn't mince his words anyway, legend!

[MrRasherstoyou]

Superb piece. Very interesting to hear the views of a hard player like Galvin about the Compromise Rules thing.
Also shows that a new manager coming into a successful team can re-invigorate motivation in players who thrive off having to push themselves against the odds

[MrRasherstoyou]

PS Cant wait for the Clash of the Teachers, Galvin v Rhyano, the irresistable force v the immovable object ;D