Last weekend four teams competed in the Ulster championship. Let’s say there is an even 30 players on an intercounty panel, of which 26 were rewarded and selected for the matchday squads.
That means a total of 120 players would have been asked to prepare in detail for their first championship match of the year. In the end 78 players – or 65 per cent of them – saw game-time.
Now let’s consider the rest of them. That means 42 players either togged out and weren’t called upon to play or else they went to the games in Brewster Park and Healy Park through the turnstiles.
Derry and Monaghan were delighted to progress to a semi-final, while Fermanagh and Tyrone had to deal with the disappointment of a premature end to their Ulster championship.
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Very different emotions rest on each seat as the team bus heads towards home. Each individual player will take the emotion with them. Some will carry it into a week ahead. Some won’t.
This got me thinking about focus. You hear lots of people in sport talk about it without ever really saying what they mean by it.
To me, focus is all to do with paying attention to your performance standards. It can be very easy to let it drift. Like your ever-present mobile phone, your attention is always on and each area of your life is constantly competing for it. Everyone’s attention battery drains – it is critical that each player makes sure it is recharged.
Some intercounty set-ups will use mindfulness. Look around the world and you’ll find that lots of teams and high-performance programmes have it as an essential part of what they do.
When you go to the gym to perform sets and repetitions you get physically stronger. Mindfulness can do a similar job with your mental strength.
Mindfulness helps a player to create space in his head. It allows him to be present, to recognise his thoughts. What gives you most energy? What makes you feel most alive?
This leads to higher levels of awareness and allows you focus on the most important tasks. When you are breathing heavy in the middle of Croke Park, mindfulness separates the performer from the high performer.
For someone like Ash Barty, the former tennis world number one and Wimbledon champion, being able to tap into this underlying reservoir has been critical to her success.
Being able to dial attention up and down is also a vital skill for a GAA player to develop. Think of all the instances where your attention is needed – managing a season, in-game performance, training, learning, personal relationships, professional careers. At this time of year, when the championship is really getting underway. Your attention has to be parcelled out accordingly.
The point of all this work on your attention and your focus is to put you in a position to get into a flow state.
Flow is another term that sportspeople use all the time but it can be hard to pin down what it means. In performance psychology, flow follows focus. Flow materialises when what you are doing is savouring, challenging, engaging and motivating. It’s that state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.
Flow will feel, sound and look different depending on the environment. But it has a common ‘wow’ thought response. We will get to feel, see and hear players totally absorbed, at times almost lost in the moment in the GAA games this weekend. Potentially in flow. Months of previously detailed preparation permit self-trust and intuition to now take the reins. An optimal performance state.
It’s fun. It’s now their world. As a player this feeling is extraordinary. Although hard to achieve at once, a team with many people in flow is a powerful force to handle.
This is where you see the kick pass option before the run is visibly created by an inside forward 40 metres away. Or like Paul Flynn on dozens of occasions, perfectly collecting a breaking ball through a maze of bodies at full pace, and going and kicking it over the black spot.
Where am I going here? The focus levels of a player, where continued self-improvement and achieving flow in their game is on offer, is a subtle clue to the future.
Last weekend there was triumph and last-minute defeat, some players got minutes and others didn’t. All four cases will potentially disrupt focus in some aspect for a player and by extension, the team.
In this agile season, the constant framing of a player’s next move is as important as the move itself. Whether you didn’t play any minutes or had a good day hitting most of your pregame targets, you still strive to fulfil potential and get better for the next match. One challenge will be to not allow emotions to cloud your reality.
As a player, you need context and facts. You might think you had a good game but did you really? The first job is to clarify your perception.
Different players have different ways of doing this – I always asked my team-mates. They helped me highlight my many blind spots. Other players rely on feedback from coaches. Some just get out on the field early and practice. Everybody is different.
But the target is the same – to re-establish focus, preparing for the next task. Starter, finisher, panel member – each will be doing their best to bring focus to the right space. Attention is a valuable currency with players now.
So, this weekend, 10 more games are up for decision. Beyond the scoreboard, that’s 600 players with an opportunity to learn and in some form obtain feedback to further improve based off context and fact.
As the players and their emotions depart on the team bus, or in New York’s case board a transatlantic flight, a rocky road or a rich story of focus lies just beneath the surface.
