Skill must become the cornerstone of success
Newly-hired Gaelic football managers or coaches taking over some club or even county team and the creed will be to “toughen these boys up” and raising the “intensity” they train at.
There’ll be plenty of talk about needing to get much better “in the tackle” and very likely developing some defensive system.
There’ll be a lot less talk about developing the skillset of their players though. Improving, coaching, kick passing. The club committee didn’t ask for it and it wasn’t being offered either.
Actually, a good number of these hired hands stake and make their name on “calling it straight” by instructing certain players that they’re not to kick the ball.
Do that and they risk losing possession, losing the game. They’re there to win. So know your role and know your limitations and don’t even try to challenge them. Just “work your bollix off”.
Think about it. That’s actually considered good coaching in many circles. To not coach your players basic fundamentals of your sport.
It would have been so easy for Pat Lam to follow that template with Connacht rugby. A club with limited resources and little tradition of flair but a reputation for being plucky.
He could have just looked to reaffirm that identity while looking to pick some easy low-lying fruit in the area of general professionalism. Instead he did more than that. He got that the easiest thing in coaching is to talk about “working hard” and the hardest thing to do is work on skills, silky or otherwise. He got that instead of just throwing sweat at Connacht’s problems, they should be looking to throw the ball around.
“It is all about the ball,” he’d tell reporters after his team’s landmark win over Munster in Thomond Park at the weekend. “There are skills that we get everyone to do: catch, pass, running lines, holding lines, tackling. Ultimately we want to be a team that can go through a team, around a team or over a team.”
A fundamental reason why Connacht are now able to go around and not just through teams is because of Lam’s appointment of a dedicated skills coach, the Kiwi Dave Ellis.
Between the pair of them they recognised early on exactly where players were deficient, but instead of just summarily concluding that certain players couldn’t do certain skills, the pair of them crucially recognised that certain players couldn’t do certain skills – yet. In time they could. Now a lot of them can. And that is why Connacht are now winning.
Someone in a completely different sport but on a similar wavelength is Conor McGregor.
The willingness to try out and learn new moves and forms of fighting, the appetite to initially look foolish and ‘fail’. He’s studied and aped the movement of apes, arrived unannounced at ji-jitsu gyms asking if he can roll with their best grapplers so he could learn new techniques from them.
That’s exiting your comfort zone, not training “with intensity”.
“Not a lot of people... know how to train correctly,” he’d observe in an interview with this column last month. “They get into a rhythm of heavy sparring and heavy work but through that they’re limiting movement.
People are afraid to almost move in a new way because there is so much intensity in the gym. So they don’t actually learn. [If you do that] Your skill level remains the same...
“[In this gym] We fight to win but we train to learn. To train smart.”
Just think of the plethora of qualified Strength and Conditioning coaches this country is churning out now.
Yet how many qualified skills acquisition coaches have we in this country? Answer: Two, PJ Smyth, the retired UL professor, and Dr Ed Coughlan now of CIT – and yet when teams contact him it tends to be for his expertise in S&C.
That shortage of Irish skills coaches and ignorance of what they do encapsulates why in this country we struggle to produce players with the required technical skill.
Think of your typical Gaelic football team and coach. A coach or a manager might come in with a big reputation for coaching “the tackle”.
But how comfortable or proficient are they at coaching the kickpass? Or coaching point-taking, the way your nearest U14 basketball coach is coaching a set or jump shot? Too many of them aren’t and so too many of them shirk away from it. Easier to coach teams to run the ball than to kick it.
Ronan Clarke is one Gaelic football coach bucking that trend. The former Armagh full forward is now the county’s ladies football manager. Last week he explained that he personally felt an obligation to improve the skill level of every single player. Every night every player will get to work on passing off either hand and foot.
A good few of them might get it wrong more often than they get it right at first, but over time, they’ll get there.
Because that’s the irony of it all. If you tell certain players they’re not to kick the ball, you may get a couple of wins in the short term; you may even squeeze a championship.
But in the long term you’ll get more wins and more likely to win a greater number of championships by being able to move the ball by foot.
The same in rugby. Playing through them might win a provincial schools cup but as the World Cup keeps showing, playing around them is what wins on the big stage.
There’s been a direct correlation between Dublin’s dominance in recent years and their improved proficiency at kicking the ball.
Clarke’s fellow county men, Crossmaglen, are again champions of Ulster because they champion the footpass. New Zealand are champions because they coach, treasure, passing the ball. And it’s why another Kiwi has a team out west playing and throwing it around like they never have before.
“It’s all about the ball.” Skills. It might just catch on, you know.
