The setting was the wine lands of South Africa, the sport rugby, but it could just as easily have applied to soccer in Manchester and Ireland, or to Gaelic football, especially in Ulster.

Dillon remained underrated both inside and outside his own county, right up until he announced his retirement yesterday morning, writes Kieran Shannon

A couple of months after Martin O’Neill took a sabbatical from football management to help look after his then ill wife Geraldine, this writer interviewed someone who had played minor inter-county Gaelic football with one of O’Neill’s great foot soldiers at Parkhead, Neil Lennon.

For a media working off morsels to understand what really makes Jim Gavin tick, his keynote presentation at the HPX High Performance Conference back in October, when everyone from Maslow to Mandela to MLK got a mention, was rightly considered revelatory.

During Jim Gavin’s presentation at Sport Ireland’s recent HPX Conference, the Dublin manager noted that there were “some competitors in the audience”, past and present, which probably explained why he was so big on philosophy but so scarce on actual detail, writes Kieran Shannon.