Gavin advises McGinley on coping with hype

Jim Gavin has revealed how he passed on advice to Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley about the pressures of managing teams that are strong favourites for success.

Dublin fan McGinley phoned Gavin just days after the All-Ireland semi-final loss to Donegal in a bid to extract potential nuggets of wisdom ahead ofEurope’s defence of the Ryder Cup which begins at Gleneagles tomorrow.

European skipper McGinley stated in a recent interview that he wanted to know how Gavin coped with regularly being strong favourites for success and particularly so against Donegal, a game they lost.

McGinley said that Gavin was “very honest” with his response.

“It’s a private conversation,” said Gavin yesterday. “But the essence of it was dealing with the perception of being favourites going into a game or a competition.

“(I said) that’s just an external thing that we couldn’t control and the most important thing was to control the internal thing when trying to get a performance. The most important thing was what the players thought and what the management thought and the relationship between them. That’s the nature of sport. People have opinions, journalists have opinions and that’s what they are. That’s why people are passionate about sport because people have plenty of opinions about the game. Who’s going to win, who’s favourite? That’s just sport.”

McGinley’s first love was Gaelic football and the Ballyboden St Enda’s club man was so interested in becoming an inter-county player that after being overlooked by Dublin he drove to Donegal for a trial with his father’s native county.

But the trial didn’t go ahead and he never returned. Gavin described McGinley as a “friend” but said he wasn’t sure if his advice was helpful or not.

“Well, we talked about other things as well,” said Gavin. “Maybe. Sunday will tell.”