The most enviable person in Ireland is the player hoisting that shiny Sam Maguire trophy above their head in a sunny Croke Park in September.
If you’ve even played just one game of football in your life, the jealousy you feel starts to transform into a deluded sense of ‘what if?’
What if I never quit after minors, what if I went back now, sure I’m flying at them 5km runs, what if I just lost a bit of weight?
This is because we only see the end product, the single moment of success and let’s face it; lifting that trophy looks handy enough. However, we’re missing the point.
Speaking on the Late Late Show, All-Ireland winning manager Jim McGuiness revealed where his Donegal side really won their All-Ireland title in 2012.
“We won the All-Ireland in Dunfanaghy, at Trá Mór beach,” disclosed the Glenties man.
“We won it there in the winter months. We would train for maybe two hours, leave the pitch, head for the dunes which is maybe a 3km jog. The beach just opens up, it just expands, it’s absolutely beautiful, but from the foot of the beach there’s about a 400m incline and at the end of a two-hour session, you could potentially end up doing six, eight, ten 400’s – sprint up and jog down.”
In some ways, All-Ireland final day is the easy part. The months of hard work and sacrifice beforehand is what really separates the champions from the deluded ‘that should have been me’ brigade, who are laying back on the sofa, cracking open another tin of beer and criticising their team for simply not “laying into the b*****ds!”
“I was just thinking about it coming up the road today,” confessed McGuinness. “Those fellas and what they did, what they sacrificed – they pushed everything down the line. Their social life, getting out into world, what they ate, they delayed everything in the hope that they could be successful for something bigger than themselves, something more meaningful.”
Doing it isn’t enough either, you have to know why you’re doing it. McGuinness believed that you needed to fully buy into what the team were trying to achieve, because if you don’t believe in it then you won’t commit to it, and if you don’t commit to it, then you can’t achieve it.
“A big part of it is emotional attachment. Why are you doing something? To ask that question, ‘why are you here?’ That was one of the first questions we asked them.
“Why are you here? Are you here because you’re a really good footballer and ended up here? Are you here because this is the only thing in your life and you want to achieve the ultimate goal in your life?”
“We were coming from a very low base. We hadn’t won anything in 19 years, so we were also doing it for the people of Donegal and we were trying to connect with that. Then you start to merge those types of things in a culture that’s honest and there’s a purity so even if you do fail, you’ve given it your absolute best.
“We said to them a thousand times, once you’ve given everything, there’s nothing else to give.”
