Ready To Go

It is what you make of it. ‘It’ may not be a one off Championship game at home, but it is Championship none the less. Saturday is the first of three tournaments which will decide who becomes the 2011 European Football Champions.

The week of a tournament is hectic; chasing jerseys, doing the paperwork, confirming numbers and picking teams. The latter is the toughest part and takes a few painful days of deliberation between myself and Conan to settle on it. Some guys will be happier than others but all you can say to lads is that each case is debated to the full. There is no magic formula to selection.

Yesterday I got a mail from Eoin. I’d been meaning to get onto him with an update as I knew he’d be thinking about it. We had a couple of lengthy enough exchanges. He knows the stresses I describe above and the to and fro relaxed me a bit. I feel mentally fresh and enthusiastic about the weekend.

We wrapped things up last night. Numbers were up above the twenty five mark and Conan focused on getting the basics down to a tee. There is a good focus in the whole group; as good as we’ve seen in a while. Not even our guest broke the lads’ concentration. Michael O Muircheartaigh is in town for the weekend’s tournament and his presence should be a great boost to the profile of the event. He’ll be closely observing his son Aonghus’ work with the all conquering Belgian ladies.

Making a training session run smoothly isn’t an easy thing to do. We ask injured guys to make the effort to come down and help laying out cones, pumping balls etc. It’s especially important for the sessions directly preceding a game or tournament to go well. In that sense, Hieler was a massive help both nights this week. He came out in the p1ssing rain and did all the dirty jobs. His input was greatly appreciated.

From the lads’ point of view, we’ve worked very hard on getting everyone on the same page in terms of how we want to play. It’s not an easy task when guys are coming and going but it gives me the perfect opportunity to get out my magnets and start moving them around to try and visualise what we are talking about!

Up until now (i.e. since 2008), we haven’t really tried to get the whole team working in tandem. There have been different kick-out strategies and simple instructions of the what to do’s and what not to do’s but not a total plan. We’re working towards that now but it will take time.

The biggest danger when you try to implement something is that fellas have something to blame when things start to go wrong. If you have no plan, you can’t blame it. It’s a point I raised last night. The only thing that can let us down on Saturday is our concentration, our work rate or our attitude. Success and failure rests in our own hands. We own it. We’ve seen the effectiveness of what we are trying to do but now we must believe in it, without reservation.

There will be times in every game when a team gets on top of you but you must stay calm and keep believing in what you are doing. When the likes of Dublin and Cork put the panic button under lock and key in the last couple of years they began to thrive. I think the word is composure.