Dr Ed Coughlan: What the mind wants the body often cannot deliver
For players in every team and sport, you would hope the opt-out option was available to them, but horror stories soon emerged of players and athletes from teams and squads feeling pressured into attending yet another Zoom call.
Throughout Covid-19, anyone with an interest in sport wanted nothing more than our games to be opened up and for us all to be let loose on the pitches, courts, tracks, and courses around our locale.
There were various strains of intensity in the messages of how important such a return to formal sport was for people. For parents of little ones, it appeared to be about their sanity and having more options to keep them busy. Incidentally, a newfound appreciation of what primary school teachers do every day emerged.
For parents of teenagers, it appeared to be about their safety as tensions rose in the home and stories were heard about a lost connection with their peers who they met regularly at training sessions each week. Not surprisingly, a deeper understanding developed of how important volunteer coaches are to the adolescent journey.
For the rest of us, there was a slow realisation of how integral sport and physical activity actually are to our health and well-being. Especially for those whose livelihoods were directly impacted. Whether it was the loss of a job, the pause of a job, or the fact that the job now was being done on the kitchen table along with the homeschooling, people began to feel how that five-a-side soccer match, or Sunday fourball, or Junior B game, played such a big a part of their week and general sense of wellness. We craved separation from the limited space we were now expected to do so much within.
The cliché: you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, had never been more pertinent.
There were appeals to the authorities about opening up some sports that apparently had social distancing embedded in them all along before any of us even knew what social distancing was. But it is likely there would have been uproar if the golf clubs and tennis clubs of the country were opened before others, leaving common sense itself stuck in a quandary.
Now spare a thought for the coaches of all those squads whose seasons were put on hold indefinitely, without any sense of when they’d be allowed to return, nor in what manner that return would look like, knowing there would be constraints they would have to adapt to when the green light was finally given.
Should we ever find ourselves back in Level 5 lockdown again, it is likely that many of those coaches would do things very differently than they did first time around. Initially there was a sense of waiting to hear from the authorities about what was going to happen, when it was going to happen, and how was it going to look when it did happen.
However, this quickly turned into a sense of idleness and coaches felt they had to be doing something for their players to keep them engaged and occupied and to ensure their connection with the team was maintained in the absence of seeing each other in person.
This noble concept resulted in some fun ideas popping up, such as online quizzes, home-based treasure hunts, and buddy systems for checking in on each other. But the reality of keeping up with the Joneses and the modern-day phenomenon of the Fear Of Missing Out meant that squads of players were soon doing online gym sessions in their living rooms, fitness sessions in their back gardens, and video sessions of matches from the previous season.
This would have been fine if it was kept to the senior inter-county squads. But it became the thing to do for every squad at every age and stage, and quickly oneupmanship took over. The why was lost to doing things just for the sake of doing them. Zoom fatigue quickly set in and what was once a novel way to engage with people became yet another unwanted reason to be in front of a screen.
For players in every team and sport, you would hope the opt-out option was available to them, but horror stories soon emerged of players and athletes from teams and squads feeling pressured into attending yet another Zoom call.
For inter-county players there is little chance there was any such opt-out option. At that level, commitment to the cause is oftentimes used as a metric of someone’s ability to last the pace and show what they’re made of, a test of character. Zoom became Covid-19’s answer to the vomit runs in the sand dunes of old.
Those in the know, the specialists in preparing the players from a strength and conditioning and sports medicine perspective, are clear that spikes in training and competing are responsible and who are we to argue with them or the research that informs them?
However, it may not be the only contributing factor, which will not surprise anyone. The rhetoric of this season is that it only began in earnest in April, but as the aforementioned narrative points out, this season has already been going on for months now, long before the spring restart.
How much of these injuries are related to the psychological fatigue of the players? It is all but impossible to lay the blame at the feet of those who tend to the physical preparation of the players, we have never had a more qualified staff minding them than we do today. But in the midst of the challenges of Covid-19, and the interest to stay connected, did we overlook the importance of having time to ourselves?
In the excitement of making a return to training, there were more good stories out there than bad of teams easing themselves back into the swing of things, but if they’ve never been away, what was there to ease back into? If it was just the physical side of things, most teams would be in good hands, so maybe the problem we are seeing at the moment is less about spikes in training or competing, but exhaustion from a never-ending season, and we are only halfway there.
Is now a time for a mini switch-off?
Will any manager have the wherewithal to build time away from the humdrum of the inter-county set-up and recognise the power of a moment to pause and take breath? Or will the lure of the Championship be too much for them?
How much more can the players take?
You can almost hear the soundbites about taking the lessons from the league and building on it if it went well or moving on from it quickly if didn’t go to plan. Surely a break from the intensity of constant connection would serve them well?
The players may want to play ball, their bodies may be ready for the toll of training and competing, but their minds may have already had enough, and this is before we head into the Championship.
Timber!
