Confirmation bias.
One of the easiest and most comfortable traps to fall into, particulary so with our increasingly driven online world.
There, behind the scenes, algorithms feed you what they know you like.
We all like having an opinion we hold confirmed by further evidence.
The, ‘see that, I told you so’ line massages our intellectual egos.
It is of course a basic human trait.
There are no algorithms controlling peoples thought in the GAA world yet our games are rife with it.
Ever meet someone that just didn’t rate a certain player.
You might’ve had a very different opinion yet they would continually see evidence to the contrary.
A 'Man of the Match' performance would be written off as media hyperbole or because the opponent they were against was so poor or, foregoing all other excuses, an inevitable consequence of constantly being played and so eventually the stars align to produce a good display.
The new rules are a good current example.
Many of us will have doubts and see ample evidence we think backs this up yet the supporters of the rules would similarly point to the good games we are currently enjoying and see nothing but obvious evidence of the rules positive impact.
For me, my bias is seeing big matches, as still being decided more often than not by old school virtues like basic skills, competitive spirit, work rate and courage to stand up when it really matters.
Many however will see the winner’s enclosure as filled by those teams who are the best-conditioned, best-drilled and who are tactically superior, i.e. better exemplify the ‘modern game’.
I simply do not see it.
Of course all modern footballers and teams must be well-conditioned, intelligent on the ball and playing with a tad more than a basic concept of structure, key match ups and common approach when faced with various game situations.
A naïve team, working hard and flailing into everything that moves, will be quickly cast aside, probably with more ease than ever before in our game.
In any case there are very few such teams left, particularly the higher up the levels and deeper into the Championship you go.
What many of our tightest matches have revealed however is the lasting necessity and glory of the raw ingredients of winning teams and of the leaders within them.
Last weekend, the news coming out of Fermanagh was, for me, like a love letter to our game.
Step forward one Martin McGrath to confirm everything I believe about the game.
I was lucky enough to get to know Marty well over our playing days.
He’s an absolute gent and typical of the player who, while maybe the most eye-catching or audaciously skilled, would be first pick every time for who you’d want in the trenches beside you.
My playing days are sufficiently long enough past that seeing any of my old peers still playing has went long past jealously.
It's basic bewilderment now to see them still at a playing level but when they go and serve up a show like Marty did for Ederney it moves to a whole new level.
Ederney are not a one-man team.
Dethroning the favourites and five-in-a-row champions Derrygonnelly, they required many players to turn in great performances and the entire team to work with that raw hunger that only true underdogs can usually exhibit.
Yet Marty was the colossus at the centre of it all who stood head and shoulders above everyone on the pitch.
His performance was such that through sheer force of will, he dragged his Ederney club into the promised land.
Marty McGrath was not worried about GPS stats or whether his conditioning program was suitably scientific.
He wasn’t wondering about whether their tactical plan was suitably water-tight or what system the opposition was deploying and the strategy Ederney should use to counter it.
No, he would’ve prepared and kept himself right during the season just as he has done over the past 20 years.
On Sunday, he togged out and got to work.
Just play the game. And compete for everything. And never take a backward step.
And when the team needs you, stand up and do what needs done.
And repeat, repeat, repeat.
Repeat until you cannot go on or until the ref blows the final whistle or ideally both.
Given his experience, he would’ve known more than anyone that there is never a guarantee of victory.
He has played in a similar fashion his entire career yet plenty of times ended on the losing side.
Yet there is never anything else for it bar getting back up on the horse.
Aged 39 however, he would have known that time was running out.
That had to be a factor in pushing his performance to the levels he reached.
Dylan Thomas’ famous lines, “Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage against the dying of the light” are, in words, what McGrath produced in action.
Human spirit can be unassailable in its tenacity when faced with an all-or-nothing situation.
Is that another weight on the balance for old school values.
For me it is.
It is the absolute opposite of something of which I was guilty of on plenty of occasions and that I think is endemic in the modern game.
Fellas getting caught up in their own heads about tactics, systems, positioning or whatever and forgetting that it’s still a simple game that, first and foremost, just needs played with everything they have to give it.
When the hunger borders on desperation, when a team or player enters that zone that they grab a game by the scruff of the neck and force it to bend to their will, they aren’t thinking tactics or any of the other fashionable aspects.
They are in a battle and they are the warriors determined to win it.
So forgive the confirmation bias.
Pick holes all you want.
For me I’m happy enough to have it confirmed, in my mind anyway, that class is permanent and that our game, whilst changed in so many ways, still manages to reveal and reward, first and foremost, the warriors within.
