Comfort not an option when it comes to winning edge
Otherwise, there’s a good chance you’re not going to be comfortable enough when things get uncomfortable in competition.
A couple of weeks ago, on the eve of the Six Nations rugby championship, I interviewed Shane Jennings, who offered a fascinating insight into the cultural and generational change that has undergone at Leinster, the province which remains the biggest provider of players to the national team.
Jennings, who retired last May, may not have been a household name like some of the other players that won three Heineken Cups with him over four seasons.
Yet ask those household names – Brian O’Driscoll, Johnny Sexton, Jamie Heaslip – and they’ll tell you that two of the most important players in establishing a winning culture at that club were Leo Cullen and Jennings.
When the pair of them returned from a couple of seasons with Leicester, they brought a harder-edged mentality.
You had to train as hard as you played.
The closer as a team you were off the field, the closer you tended to be on it, too.
Along with Michael Cheika, they pushed for the players to have the one dressing room.
Prior to that, Jennings had changed out of his mother’s Volkswagon Polo by the pitchside of Old Belvedere.
Afterwards they might go in drips and drabs to the leisure club in Riverview to shower and change alongside other punters or maybe just head straight home.
They literally weren’t together after a session, which meant they often weren’t sufficiently united out on the field either.
The first year they had communal dressing rooms, they won the Heineken Cup. In their eyes, that was not a coincidence.
In recent years, though, Jennings noted a certain slippage and softening in the Leinster psyche.
The facilities had to get better, but they may have become almost too good.
Now a Leinster rugby player togs out with his teammates in a state-of-the-art facility in UCD.
“The fellas coming into that,” Jennings would tell us, “there’s a part of them with all this being lined on for them that has to be thinking ‘This is kind of easy.’ I don’t know if they have that same appreciation of what it takes.”
In his book Bounce, the former Olympic tennis table player Matthew Syed was struck the national centre in China that produced so many exceptional players in his sport was a very basic facility: the exterior and interior and their walls were extremely plain and grey.
Seeing the place in operation though was phenomenal: within each room there were dozens of players playing on dozen of tables, “moving, sweating, ingraining excellence; enough piston power to light a city”.
Rasmus Ankersen found the same while researching The Goldmine Effect: The Secrets of High Performance.
He looked at Chelsea’s FC Academy, a £100-million facility where young players arrived in taxis.
No wonder the place hadn’t produced a first-team regular since John Terry.
Young players get lulled into a sense of complacency.
Subconsciously they think they’ve already arrived, made it, when they’re supposed to be only starting out.
A few years ago, I was talking to Malachy O’Rourke, who had taken a family holiday in Kilkenny.
He had stopped off in Ballyhale Shamrocks and was astonished by just how basic the facilities were; multiple junior and intermediate clubs up north would surpass them.
But the message wasn’t lost on him.
It was part of the reason Ballyhale was such a talent hotspot, producing the likes of the Fennellys and Reids and Shefflins.
Last week, in these pages, John Fogarty noted how sparse and spartan the Kilkenny gym in Nowlan Park is. As Ankersen would observe, a performance environment is designed for hard work, not comfort.
Less frills means less entitlement, less distractions: more focus, more hardwork.
Of course proper facilities are vital for sustainable success. By right, this country should be a basketball powerhouse – with all the rain we have, it should be driving us all indoors.
But our hoopsters aren’t getting enough gymtime to get in the required hours of shooting; we don’t have enough affordable gyms.
Our tennis players suffer from not having natural clay courts.
Our outdoor sports need more all-weather pitches; in the coming years that facility will become far more widespread.
Decent and suitable meeting rooms are essential.
But all these GAA Centres of Excellence going up around the country need to be mindful of what subliminal messages they’re sending.
The photo of the minor team that won last year is the same size as the one of the seniors that won back in the day? Have you arrived already?
In those dressing rooms, then, there are ways to gain an edge, keep your edge. Players by nature are habitual and territorial and possessive about their dressing room seats.
There’s a passage in Dónal Óg Cusack’s autobiography where shortly after the third strike in 2009, a newcomer is sitting where Tom Kenny usually sits because Kenny is sitting where Cusack sits.
It’s a delicate moment, though one Kenny is enjoying until Cusack says, “Look, Barry, I know this is awkward and you might go out of here saying that Cusack threw me out of my place, but the fact is that’s my seat there.
Now Tom Kenny is sitting in my seat because you’re sitting in his seat. You’ve to sort it out amongst yourselves but that’s my seat.”
That wiped the smile of Kenny’s face.
Maybe Cork had enough upheaval as it was to disrupt their normal seating arrangements, but in a settled – too settled – set-up, there’s a lot to be said for shaking it up.
At the first meeting of every season, Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll will notice his veteran players settle into the same seats they had occupied the previous year.
“That just seems to be human nature.”
Shortly into the meeting, he’ll tell them to find a different seat. They’re literally to have a new perspective for the coming season.
One season when he spotted a player too proud and stubborn to move, the same player was moved – traded – the next week.
He thought he’d arrived, so he was asked to leave.
