Believe before you can achieve

One of the things most that I miss about playing county football is the drive into Croke Park on the team coach. The thought of playing in the best stadium in Ireland in front of thousands of supporters. The butterfly feeling in your gut getting more and more intense as you drive down Jones’s Road behind the sirens of a Garda escort. Looking out at the thousands of supporters lining the streets and knowing that you could potentially do something great in the next couple of hours that could well make their day, their week or even their life. That is satisfaction and that is why county football is such a drug to many.

This weekend we approach the business end of the championship and I for one am jealous. I would love to be there. We have four teams that totally believe in themselves and have complete confidence in their team’s ability to kick on from here and win the Sam Maguire. This type of confidence is not easy to instil in a team but a lot of it comes from the experience that they have gained by playing at this particular stage.

The confidence is also instilled in them by their high-performance management teams. The confidence that a manager can instil in a player gives you a real sense of total belief that can’t be understated. On a personal level, I always loved it when Joe Kernan or indeed other managers told me how good I was. It didn’t always have to be the truth, of course, but it built me up as a player and made me feel unmarkable as an attacker. I would have heard Joe in particular telling me that I was the best forward in the country and that no direct opponent was capable of stopping me if I was on form. No doubt the same was being said to Oisín, Clarkey, Paddy McKeever & Diarmuid Marsden but that’s exactly what a player wants to hear. 

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