The hard questions Mayo must ask to reach the summit
To understand why Mayo have been so remarkably competitive over the last six years — more than your own county if you happen to be from somewhere other than Dublin, Kerry, and for a couple of seasons there, Donegal, so the last thing you should do is sneer at them — and then to understand why they continuously and depressingly fail to be the best of the best, it is worth exploring that word they and Jim Gavin’s Dublin continuously use: “The process”.
The first time I spoke with that group of Mayo players a little short of five years ago in my role as a performance consultant with a background in sport psychology, a fundamental principle we laid down was victory had to be earned. As Ali so eloquently put it, you had to put in the work away from the lights in order to shine and win under those lights. The better you got, the better it got.
