Players won’t respond to the old-school coach
The more you read the Tipperary hurler’s collaboration with Damian Lawlor, the more you realise the title is a pop back at his detractors and that his performances levels through the years have generally coincided with the mindset of his coaches as much as his own. Another thing you come to appreciate and question is this: how many Lar Corbetts have been let through the net all around the country through sheer ignorance?
Before Corbett was ever even an infuriating talent, he was merely infuriating as a purposeless teenager but under Nicky English he would become an inter-county player and under the guidance of Liam Sheedy and Eamon O’Shea he would adorn the game, playing it with a consistency and brilliance only a handful of forwards ever have for a sustained three-year period.
What they understood was the astuteness of the maxim that words are like weapons; used wisely they can conquer a world, used flippantly and they can shatter one.
“What you say to your players can determine how good their dinner will taste and how well they sleep that night,” the legendary high school basketball coach Morgan Wooten once wrote. “An incidental cutting remark which you forgot as soon as you said it can be a source of pain longer than you may ever know.”
Michael Doyle and Michael ‘Babs’ Keating hardly appreciated the wisdom of those comments. Corbett to his credit more than once recounts their humanity, mentioning how genial Doyle was away from the field and how Keating, instead of admonishing Corbett’s clubmate Ger ‘Redser’ O’Grady after a poor day’s shooting, took ‘Redser’ down to Semple Stadium the following day to help him refine his shooting. “I thought that was a nice thing to do,” observes Corbett. Unfortunately, such empathy for their players was in short supply during Doyle and Keating’s respective tenures in the ’00s.
In one spell during the 2003 league Corbett rattled in five goals over two games. “I suppose deep down I was waiting for Michael [Doyle] to offer a word of praise or encouragement but it didn’t happen. Mostly what I recall is that he’d be on the sideline roaring at me for keeping only one hand on the hurl.”
Something which Mickey Harte would have considered part of Corbett’s uniqueness, something to be respected and celebrated, Doyle saw as non-conformity to be confronted. It didn’t work. As Corbett wrote: “I felt he was always shouting at me and I was always wary of making mistakes.”
Johnny Leahy was one of Keating’s selectors and admonished Corbett only 10 minutes into a league game in Nowlan Park for not being more involved in the play. In their last game together, the 2007 All Ireland quarter-final, Corbett had scored a goal and a point by half-time. When Leahy approached him in the dressing room, Corbett assumed he was finally going to get some hint of praise. “Instead he let me have it again over a couple of mistakes. I was never as gobsmacked in all my life.”
It was quite the opposite under Sheedy and O’Shea. Two years later Corbett again found himself in a dressing room at half-time in Croke Park, only this time he had barely touched the ball, let alone scored. Yet when O’Shea approached him, the coach was brimming with positivity. “Larry, those runs you’re making are absolutely perfect. You’re only an inch away from everything falling into place.”
Corbett would score 3-2 in the second half of that All-Ireland semi-final against Limerick. It’s no mystery why — or why he scored another hat-trick in the following year’s All-Ireland final.
“Encourage, encourage, encourage,” Liam Sheedy told a group of underage coaches in Limerick 18 months ago at a conference.
“If they keep getting bollocked out of it for missing the ball, they can nearly hear your voice before they even go for the ball. In this country we knock too much. There’ll be enough others to tell them when they messed up without you joining in. Shine a light on what they’re doing right. If you do, they’ll never forget you.”
Corbett will never forget Sheedy and O’Shea, and now that the latter is back with Tipp as team manager, Corbett will probably conjure up some more unforgettable hurling with him. But you just wonder how much more magic he could have offered up if his spirit hadn’t been knocked so often through the years.
It’s a recurring theme in some of the best recent hurling autobiographies. Tony Griffin’s Screaming At The Sky contains multiple passages of Mike McNamara and his mentors screaming at demoralised Clare hurlers, many of whom could recall the more expressive and joyous environment Anthony Daly had once created.
They say kids don’t so much remember what you say, only how you made them feel. Adult hurlers are no different. Even as they get older, old-school coaching doesn’t work with them. Corbett’s book and career is testament to that.
