Monday, August 08, 2011
THERE’S no point in beating around the bush: the stand-out flashes of genius in the hurling and football championships have come in the last couple of weekends.
Darran O’Sullivan’s spectacular goal for Kerry against Limerick in the All-Ireland SFC quarter-final was one.
Joe Canning’s elegant reverse handpass against Cork in the hurling qualifiers was the other.
Both were options selected in the time it takes a nerve ending to crackle, but our question is this: were those reactions entirely intuitive, or can they be coached into players?
We think that if you can’t say yes to the second question, you’ll never be able to say yes to the first.
Recently a notion promoted by Malcolm Gladwell was eagerly seized upon by sports commentators of all stripes.
Gladwell, a plausible conveyor of the faddishly self-evident like his lineal predecessors Desmond Morris and Alvin Toffler, suggested that virtuosi in various fields of endeavour achieved eminence after 10,000 hours of training, practice and commitment.
(Of course, who wouldn’t be accomplished at what they do if they spent several thousand hours practising?)
Clearly there’s merit in the idea that, as the late Mick Doyle said once, perfect practice makes perfect. Long hours of dedicated skill work creates a confidence in touch and command of the ball, say, in hurling and football, but to what end? Is it to create tight-jerseyed automatons bashing each other endlessly? No, but it establishes the repertoire the gifted can select from. O’Sullivan’s goal for Kerry against Limerick is a case in point.
We’re a little agnostic about the Gaelic football championship, but we noted O’Sullivan enjoying a fine return from heading for the near goalpost — he scored goals against Limerick and Cork via that route — but the last day in Croke Park he moved towards the far goalpost instead, which meant re-calibrating the options as the ball came across.
The result? Goal.
The hurling cameo came in the Gaelic Grounds, just after Joe Canning had clashed with a Cork defender on the wing.
The ball broke past them and Canning stepped off his man to rise the sliotar, with his opponent winding up for serious contact a yard behind.
The Galway man’s lift and reverse handpass to Cyril Donnellan behind him, taking about half-an-acre’s worth of hurlers out of the play, was stunning. Most of us responded only when Donnellan took his shot, as though what happened had to be processed in the memory before it could be accepted as fact.
Once-a-year flashes of lightning that occur when the feeling overcomes a player almost against his will? That dismisses the grinding hours of practice those players have been through: Gladwell’s 10,000 hours writ large. Technique comes first.
Consider a throwaway comment by the actor Timothy Olyphant we came across in an interview.
Olyphant has been a favourite here since the TV series ‘Deadwood’, though this interview was focusing on his role as Raylan Givens in ‘Justified’, based on the novels of Elmore Leonard. We’d be inclined to see Olyphant as a bit too young and pretty for the role, maybe Robert Forster of Jackie Brown would be better...
Anyway. Olyphant was talking acting styles and methods when he remarked that technique was only good insofar as it freed the imagination. As a justification for the slow acquisition and steady maintenance of skills it could hardly be bettered, even if O’Sullivan and Canning are unlikely ever to seek to find the inner motivation for playing wing-forward.
The incremental improvement of touch eventually leaves a player with the wherewithal for those flashes of genius, which is why, though kids all over the country are replicating same at summer camps and in back gardens, it’s the endlessly repeated drills, paradoxically, which give them the skills to accomplish that kind of play.
A final word on the reaction to Cork’s exit from the football championship.
It was entertaining to see Joe Brolly perform a John Gielgud-type reversal with John Fogarty of this parish earlier in the week.
(Gielgud was at a dinner party in the 50s when the guest next to him asked if he was starring in a new play. "Not likely," said Gielgud, "I hear that awful Claude Rains is in it." He turned to find Rains sitting on the other side of the table. After a few seconds Gielgud added: "I meant... the other Claude Rains, of course.")
Brolly’s original, at least. Or at most, maybe. But as for the chorus of after-the-fact football mavens that has sprung up since... at least pay us the compliment of novelty in your prejudices.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
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