FORGET PEP – MICKEY HARTE HAD THE ORIGINAL PLAYBOOK

I was more explosive at 30 than I was at 20 because of plyometrics

THE soundtrack to that perfectly cruel storm that was the 2003 All-Ireland semifinal against Tyrone will always be etched deep into my memory. Any time we got our hands on the ball that day the heat was turned up full blast as we were buffeted from one Tyrone rock to another.

‘Ten seconds, ten more f**king seconds boys,’ they were roaring at each other and more often than not they never needed the full allotted time to get it back.

Half a decade later and the sports world was raving about Pep Guardiola’s high pressing style with Barcelona where he had a ‘six-second rule’ in place for his team to get the ball back.

Down our way, we just reckoned that Pep had got a peek into Mickey Harte’s playbook.

One of the absolute privileges of being an inter-county footballer for a decade and a half was being exposed to a sport that was constantly evolving.

For anyone who loves their sport that’s a great thrill, to be on the front line in the search for that inch that might just take you the extra mile.

I have often felt for an obvious reason – inter-county set-ups are such watertight environments that details rarely get out – that the public really don’t get how advanced and scientific preparations are at inter-county level.

I will be accused of bias here but that is why we will not see a better sports series this year than Dara Ó Cinnéide’s GAA Nua programme which aired last Monday night on RTÉ.

I thought it amounted to a great promotional tool for the GAA in that our games are not just about pride, passion and place – those absolute core values – but also are about top players who are being prepared to the very highest of international standards.

Watching it also reminded me of my own journey as a player and how the game has changed in that time.

I remember Páidí around 2000/01 having two VCRs set up at home for his own video cutting studio.

If we were playing opponents who had not been shown live on television, but whose highlights had featured on The Sunday Game, he had a friend in RTÉ who would send a full tape of their game down on the train and he would drive into Tralee to collect it. He would then stay up until the early hours of the morning editing the clips he wanted to show for our benefit.

That might have sounded and looked agricultural by today’s standards and if you called him a ‘performance analyst’ he would have thought that you were mocking him, but that is what the best do.

They always seek an edge, looking for the sliver of information that will ensure that when the ball bounces the next day, it will break your way.

That is the one thing that I found in our dressing room, there was nothing that we would not try if we thought that there was an edge to be gained.

Remember Robbie Fowler’s white nostril band? Well they made it into a lot of our gear bags too.

When ice baths came in we hated them, but fellows would have overnighted in them if it weren’t for the threat of hypothermia.

Some worked, some didn’t. Kildare manager Cian O’Neill introduced us to those occlusion goggles which featured on Dara’s show, but he might as well have brought in canisters of laughing gas.

Fellows were falling over in a heap – the principle of developing spatial awareness is fine but the goggles are only suitable for a perfectly consistent surface like a basketball court where the ball bounce is true.

Lads were stumbling over the ball, getting hit in the face by it when it squirted off the ground and everytime that happened to an unfortunate, everyone else was rolling on the ground with laughter.

But even if it did not work, you had to admire the innovative thinking behind it. In the main, though, I know being exposed to that environment made me a far better player.

I could give you any number of examples. When Jack O’Connor brought Pat Flanagan in he introduced me to plyometrics.

It basically reconstructed my running action from a standing position. They say you don’t get faster as you get older, but because of plyometrics I was more explosive from a standing position when I was 30 than when I was at 20.

When I started doing weights we finished up at Christmas as if we were beefing up just to carve the turkey but when I finished they were a constant and programmes were tailored specifically to each segment of the season.

I am still in the gym as a club player but in the short time I’ve

been away from the inter-county gym programme I have shed half a stone – trust me, it’s not puppy fat that has melted away, but power.

There is an uneducated view out there that the increasing prominence of sports science has gone some way to sabotaging skill levels and has numbed the natural instincts of managers and players.

That is simply not true, rather it has served to empower. I remember when I started off I had to search for my own stats. When I knew I was coming up against a player who I rarely got to see in the flesh all I could do was scan the report of his last game and check what numbers were posted in the brackets after his name.

If it was a high one I would convince myself he was on a hot streak and if he had drawn a blank I lived in the fear that he would be out to make up for it and I would be the one to pay.

The truth is that I did not know and there is nothing worse than the unknown. Now it is common place in the elite counties for players to have a video package sent to their smart phone or tablet, which would compile every single play that their next direct opponent has made in a season.

There is comfort and knowledge in having access to that kind of information. When I started out, the only stats that were recorded were the scores and wides.

Now there is a number on everything but for a reason; GPS readings, kick-outs, heat maps, ball retention, tackle count, turn overs and more.

We are playing a different game now but it is all the better when you can get a measure on what the outside world might deem as inconsequential.

But like those batches of dialled up 10-second heat bursts which Tyrone visited on us all those years ago, it still all boils down to having the stuff to make the number count.