The amount of GAA teams that are motivating themselves off the mentality that everybody else hates them is ridiculous.
Siege mentalities can work for certain teams, but they will only work if your source of inspiration through hatred revolves around people who are meant to be against you anyway.
That’s real life. if a GAA player has a grudge against a certain team, they don’t like that team’s attitude, they’re jealous of the success that team is having, they want to sit the cocky f*ckers on their arses, that can work for them.
For example, if a club team is playing in a big championship game against their neighbours or a team that has been the club’s rivals in years gone by. Then, it’s okay to motivate your troops with the mentality that a degree of hate can power them to glory.
Take the Tipperary – Kilkenny rivalry in hurling, Dublin – Kerry in football. These teams can easily be motivated off the rivalry alone.
On top of a will to win, a will to succeed that is instilled inside so many players, this extra added grudge mindset can give a team the fine edge that they need.
Sometimes, it goes too far, however.
This is when the team is lead to believe that the whole wide world is against them.
A few hate-filled figures in the team feel the need to spread the attitude that nobody wants them to succeed, everybody is criticising them, making rumours about them and don’t have any belief in their abilities.
It’s when a team is trained to hate things that they don’t really hate, for example, their own club members, their own supporters, that’s when it has gone too far.
It’s an all-too-common trend throughout club teams in Ireland whereby a leading figure in a squad feels the need to take a stance against the attitudes of their own people.
It’s an “us against the world” attitude and it just doesn’t work.
Many top managers of today’s world are said to employ these tactics themselves. Jose Mourinho, one of the best managers in any sport is famed for his hate-fuelled teams.
Closer to home, Davy Fitzgerald is renowned for his programming of his players to resent all others.
It’s working for Davy at the moment in Wexford, but that’s because they’re fighting for their own, they’re at one with their supporters. There’s unity within the whole county.
In Davy’s last two years as the Clare manager, hate seeped within the county and within the squad. This can happen when it’s taken too far.
Davy Fitzgerald’s success at Clare was instant, but it ended unceremoniously with the likes of Nicky O’Connell, Davy O’Halloran, Cathal O’Connell dropping being dropped or dropping themselves off the panel. That’s when it has gone too far.
A team is in conflict within itself. Players may have issues with how their team-mates were treated by management or by fellow players. A team will not succeed if the conflict is between themselves.
The trend with these managers is that a siege mentality can only last for so long.
Jose Mourinho’s success only lasts for limited periods, take for example Chelsea’s Premier League win in 2015/2016, which was followed up by a disastrous next season.
Jim Gavin’s recent outburst has been referred to as the beginning of a siege mentality in Dublin. Dan Shanahan’s remarks about Stephen Bennet’s suspension arising only because of The Sunday Game is another.
As Donegal’s former All-Star Eamonn McGee said recently “I think it would be a hard-sell for Gavin to convince all the players that everyone wants them to fail, players can smell bullshit a mile away and there’s a whiff of that off what Gavin has been saying.”
What McGee is saying makes so much sense because players are human, they have their own personalities and many of them won’t buy into this us against the world attitude.
The topic of the ‘siege mentality’ came up for discussion in The GAA Hour Hurling Show on Thursday.
“My opinion on siege mentalities is that some players might fall for that but others will be like ‘ah come on, surely you’ve got something better than this for me… I think it’s an insult to players’ intelligence at times,” said host Colm Parkinson.
Conal Keaney recalled the mindset encouraged by former Dublin manager Paul ‘Pillar’ Caffrey during his time on the Dublin senior football panel. Caffrey’s Dublin never won an All-Ireland, and Keaney regrets this approach and claims that while it can work for a limited period, it’s not the way forward in the modern game.
“It was like ‘us group against the whole of Ireland,’ because nobody wanted us to succeed, ever…We had a big siege mentality at that time, it was like keep everything in house, say nothing to no-one, two fingers to everybody else, we’re doing our own thing here. When you actually look back, it was probably the wrong thing because you’re just antagonising people all the time… If you’re at that, you can only do it for a year or two, you can’t keep doing it, it just doesn’t work. The way the footballers are now really, they’re good sportsmen, they’re good people off the field, the way they play, the style of football that they play, it doesn’t lead to that,” said Keaney.
Hate can only inspire success if the hate is derived from what players actually hate. When personal things are brought into it, that don’t actually bother players, that’s when it has gone wrong.
You can listen to the siege mentality debate here from The GAA Hour Hurling show at 7’30”.
