Sport

John McEntee: Kieran McGeeney might have the motivational edge on Eamonn Burns

Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney may have the edge on his Down counterpart, despite being confined to the stands
Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney may have the edge on his Down counterpart, despite being confined to the stands Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney may have the edge on his Down counterpart, despite being confined to the stands

IN the GAA, we love rivalries. We love the ding-dong battles served up by Kerry v Dublin or Kilkenny v Tipperary, but most of all we love the local rivalries.

As Enda McGinley, my fellow Irish News columnist, noted last week, there is nothing like a good old match-up between Derry and Tyrone to get the blood boiling and the bitterness flowing.

Yet it didn’t happen. Unfortunately, thus far, the fabled tales of titanic Championship battles in Ulster are dying on

their feet.

One final local rivalry awaits us this weekend. Armagh v Down is a battle of two evenly-matched teams seeking their first Ulster Championship victory in three years and four years respectively.

This recent game between Derry and Tyrone has prompted me to ask the question: is the age of local rivalries a thing of the past?

In my time as a player many managers would trawl newspapers and recite stories of old about how one player or another would have done this or that, their aim being to motivate his players.

A false perception is created – although often an effective strategy – which channels players’ energies into the game to ensure every breaking ball in pounced upon and that every man-on-man challenge is delivered with maximum intensity. The occasional unintended consequence occurred when a player was perhaps sidelined for an attempted decapitation of an opponent or, worse still, the poor wee water boy, having listened to the manager’s speech, would think it was his duty to trip up the opposing number 10 as he slalomed along the sideline

Rivalries develop out of jealousy, controversy, one-upmanship, previous skirmishes, resentment. The breeding ground for this is often in the school grounds. In 2002, when Armagh won the

All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, 10 of the 15 players who started attended a grammar school in Newry.

At that time, the intense bitterness with our near neighbours was nurtured on the playing fields and from watching every Down man wave five fingers and a fist in our face to signify the five All-Irelands they’d won to our zero All-Ireland successes.

As Down’s challenge at the top table faded, so too did the rivalry. The inevitable consequence was that both counties became relatively friendly.

Added to this is the fact that, of the current squad, only five or six players were educated alongside Down players in Newry.

Armagh’s other great rivalry – that with Tyrone – was a slow burner for me. I’d rarely meet their kin on or off the field. On the contrary, I cheered them on in 1995 when they lost the final to Dublin and watched in awe as ‘Peter the Great’ scored 11 points that day.

This great rivalry was borne out of an insatiable desire for one team to be better than the other team.

The ensuing battles widened the rift between both teams and sets of supporters for the best part of a decade and, like the rivalry with Down, petered out when one team – Armagh – slid into irrelevance.

As we approach this weekend’s encounter between Armagh and the Mournemen, I get to relive my memories of previous encounters.

My heart races a little quicker, I get edgy and ever more unbearable to live with.

I lose hours of sleep thinking of days of old. For a while I thought the current players should be preparing in the same way, but that would be ill-conceived.

We all accept that it is difficult to become motivated to play some teams because that ’hatred’ is just not there. Current players cannot be motivated by stories of bygone eras. Such motivation is derived from a negative standpoint and can actually have the effect of making players focus on the opposition more than themselves.

Forget about the referee. How many times does he figure in poorly thought-out GAA motivational speeches and for what reason?

Surely it is prudent to point out his style of refereeing, but to shout words such as ‘Let’s go out there and beat the 15 men in front of you as well as the referee’ before leaving a changing room

in targeted motivation is nonsense.

Motivation has to be relevant. It has to trigger something within the current crop of players which maximises not only their self-determination, but also to control their will to do what is best for the team.

Critically, the style of motivation must be flexible enough to balance the dynamic relationship between being in that ‘just right’ state of mind that psychologists refer to as arousal and performance.

It is my assertion that Armagh are better than Down and have learned a number of hard lessons during the League which equips them best for this game.

However, in a game like this, the manager who is able to get a great deal more out of a team than the sum of its individual parts is going to be victorious. The manager who focuses on their team’s performance, on tapping into each player’s intrinsic motivator with the aim to do his best for his team is the one who will be smiling on Sunday evening. Kieran McGeeney is not renowned for smiling, but cameramen should

be advised to be in position.