Dr Ed Coughlan: The best are the ones always searching for ways to be better

THE THIRST FOR TROPHIES: ‘If you want to be hunted, loyal to your players, and not the traditions of the game, then look to innovate.’ Picture: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho

Hurling is as innovative as they come. The move away from an All-Ireland championship in 1974 to create the B championship was significant.

This became the Christy Ring Cup in 2005, which itself now feeds the Joe McDonagh Cup since 2018, and an opportunity for weaker hurling counties to have a cut off the big guns from Munster and Leinster while experiencing silverware along the way.

There is nothing that breeds innovation and competition like a pathway to success.

How some football counties still dream of lifting Sam Maguire is almost cruel in its absurdity.

Football’s dated structure of trying to convince everyone that they all have a chance of winning the big prize has only romanticism left as a rationale. The best of football is as good as the best of hurling. The thing is that hurling has more heavyweight matchups each year that may skew our perspective, and no doubt drives innovation within the sport.

At the beginning of every season, the battle lines are drawn for the diehards of our national games. Football people profess that their game is the best there is because of the history and romance of winning The Championship.

Hurling people lean on the speed and wonder scores of their game to edge the debate in their minds. But of course, both are class, and both have an indisputable right to being our country’s best sport because they’re incomparable.

It’s like when people compare women’s golf to men’s golf, or women’s tennis to men’s tennis. They’re incomparable.

If you’re comparing sport across the sexes, then you’re missing the point of what each can offer.

The same can be said for hurling and football.

Football may have edged the innovation stakes at the turn of the century when it embraced sports science and especially strength & conditioning.

Hurling can be accused of being slow off the mark in this regard, apart from a couple of outliers, none more so than the work of Sean McGrath with Cork during the Donal O’Grady and John Allen years.

Next came the tactical revolution, again led and embraced by football first, before hurling began to meddle in the once unspeakable art of game management. The age-old phrases of ‘win your battle’ became less frequent, even if their importance remains. 

There isn’t a field sport in the world where it isn’t imperative that you win your battle against your opposite number, but it’s not enough to build an empire. And before people suggest that the greatest hurling empire of them all, Kilkenny, did nothing more than ‘win their battles’, they’re undermining the brilliance of the split personality of Brian Cody.

Behind the scenes, scheming and sweating the detail of every element in the game. Whilst in front of the camera, putting forth a simplicity and nonchalance that threw others off the scent of constant innovation. The sort that underpinned their ability to stay ahead of the pack for so long and occupy the loneliest place in world sport, the top of the tree.

There are examples of this capacity to stay ahead of the chasing pack throughout the history our games. The legacies of Kerry football for much of the 20th century, Kilkenny themselves of the 2000s, Cork ladies football of the 2010s and of course Dublin football more recently.

Individual sport also has its dominators, athletes like Michael Phelps, Serena Williams, and the unrelenting Lewis Hamilton seem to survive and even thrive in the hypoxic environment of being an innovator, knowing that everyone will try to copy what you do and yet as much as they try, they’ll fall short more often than not.

Last weekend on winning his 97th Grand Prix in Portugal, Hamilton was heard speaking on the radio to his engineer, Peter Bonnington, shortly after crossing the finishing line, reminding him and the rest of the Mercedes team about the size of the task that lies ahead and how they still have so much work to do. This from the man who already has seven world titles.

One of the best examples of what innovation for success looks like comes from Roger Federer. One of the few remaining global athletes who has been there, done that, wore the t-shirt, and even managed not to soil it with unfortunate indiscretion.

Imagine that, a sporting role model we can admire without having to separate his athleticism from his personal life.

The story goes, he was unhappy with his win-loss record against Rafael Nadal and took to his training camp to once and for all commit to addressing the imbalance. Up until 2007, Nadal held a slender lead of 8-6 in their head-to-head. But by the end of 2014, it had ballooned to a 23-10 lead.

Hitting partners were recruited (mostly left-handers), and engaged in set after set of match play, where bonuses were agreed based on certain Nadal-like shots being attempted, into more generous court dimensions beyond the baseline and tramlines to account for the fact they weren’t the master from Mallorca.

Opponents were rotated as Federer himself stayed on court deep in the process of problem-solving. His growing capacity to cope with high-spinning, looping forehands into his once flat, drilled backhands led to a more adaptable shot emerging.

The stroke developed and with it, one less target for Nadal to build his game against. They’ve played each other seven times since 2015 and the most recent head-to-head stands at 6-1 in Federer’s favour. Not bad for a guy closing in on his 40s.

The point about Federer is that he had the humility to realise that his game was not good enough against Nadal, despite the millions and the majors. However, he had sufficient ego to drive him towards innovation and change, but not so much that he was afraid of failing, which he no doubt did along the way. 

This is a recipe for success.

Not changing because of what others have done before you but changing because of something burning from within. Because the competitive spirit is so intense, so relentless, that you either innovate or evaporate.

The kind of innovation that led Dónal Óg Cusack to reinvent puckouts, and Davy Fitzgerald to experiment with the sweeper.

However, most hurling counties looked to Kilkenny for a template to copy, rather than looking to the evidence from which to innovate. A lot like Limerick hurling decided to do over a decade ago.

The fruits of Limerick’s recent success started with a proper structure around youth development. The physical development of their underage teams was patient and methodical. Movement capabilities and developing a training age were priorities over swift progression. 

Embracing the research about having more games in training than drills and deciding to forego short-term benefits in favour of long-term investment became a shared commitment across the county.

No doubt, the likes of Paul Kinnerk and Mikey Kiely have been hugely influential with Limerick under the stewardship of John Kiely. The fact that they both have a PhD in their respective areas probably contributes more to their willingness to be curious than anything else and incidentally, curiosity breeds innovation.

The county had already shown a capacity to innovate before Kinnerk’s evidence-based approach to coaching was presented. His use of scenarios of the game and the game as a whole to coach the players was met with less resistance than it would still be in other counties.

So why do some innovate, and others replicate? Fear.

If you want to be the hunter, always one step behind, then just keep what you’re doing.

But if you want to be hunted, loyal to your players and not the traditions of the game, then look to innovate.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

You’ll either win or learn.

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