What does the GAA performance coach do? Don't ask. 

Everyone has their own recipe. No one wants to show how the sausage is made.

KEY ROLE: Bernard Dunne was a performance coach with the Dublin footballers during their great run under Jim Gavin, and worked with the Galway footballers. Pic: Inpho/Laszlo Geczo

By the end of 2009 Tipperary’s drought left them with a crippling thirst. They finished that year gathered in a room with emotion pouring out of them. Psychologist Caroline Currid facilitated the session, a sentence here or there initiating the dam’s tumble as players opened up and let tears flow.

A few months later Padraic Maher texted fellow Tipperary man and Munster player Alan Quinlan. In the GAA’s never-ending arms race, he yearned for external ammunition. Would it be possible to sit down with the Red Army’s commander? Maher travelled across to The Treaty and met Paul O’Connell.