Former Clare hurler Tony Griffin has given an insight into his role as a performance coach for the Kerry senior footballers.
The former All-Star describes his task as ‘working with management, working with players and then working in the background.’ He acknowledges however that the role he has held since 2022 is “very, very vague and very tricky to define.”
He recalls All-Ireland final day in 2022, to give a taster, when Jack O’Connor called on him to give a half-time team-talk to the players.
“They call it Performance Coach,” said Griffin at the launch of his Laochra Gael at the Lighthouse Cinema on Monday.
“After the 2022 All-Ireland I sat down and I wrote out what I actually did that year and it was three foolscap pages.
“Because you work with management, you work with players and then you work with the background.
“In the All-Ireland final against Galway, Jack turned around to me and said ‘Speak to the lads before they go out’.
“I’m like, ‘In 15 seconds I’m going to have to say something that sends these guys back out’. Luckily I’d been taking a few notes in the first-half! So very varied. But it’s great,” he says.
Keen to differentiate between performance coach and sports psychologist, Griffin says his role with Kerry came about ‘by accident.’
Having previously worked with the Kildare footballers under Jack O’Connor and Dublin hurlers under Anthony Daly, Griffin really immersed himself in Kerry by moving down to Ballyferriter for a few months last year.
It was there where he was struck by the Kerry public’s infatuation with football, which leads to something of a pressure-cooker for players.
He name-checks former captain Joe O’Connor as an individual who is unfazed by such pressure, however.
“There’s certain players among the group, like, Joe O’Connor is a brilliant example, he’s one of the most comfortable in his own skin people you’d come across and I think he’s going to have a huge season this season.”
“You hear ‘Football is a religion in Kerry, well not until you live there do you realise it.”
“People come up to you in ALDI when you’re only in the backroom, and I’m in the back of the backroom, and they tell you what they think of things and you’ve only moved to the parish.
“It’s a different world down there.
“As someone said to me recently, the best analogy in any other sport is the All Blacks. It’s the same for Kerry. At least in Dublin, players can be anonymous, in Kerry you’re not anonymous, you’re never off really and it’s just a fascinating construct.
“And if the process is more enjoyable then it’s not a chore to go to training.”
This will be his ‘last twist’ with the team, however, with novels and other such individual projects on the horizon, though he has enjoyed all aspects of his work with the team, none-more-so than getting the chance to work with David Clifford, who he descibes as ‘Michael Jordan-esque.’
“I think some people are born with certain things. David Clifford was born to be David Clifford. He’s just, he’s ice cold. The other part of it is, he’s a young man. He’s 24, he’s going to be 25 next year.
“Last year was a big, big mental load for any human being.
“I don’t care who you are, you can only push things away so much and try to perform and, you know, the All-Ireland final showed probably that David has areas of his game that need work.
“And maybe it’s getting parts of his game where the mental and the skill intersect.
“But that’s brilliant, that’s good news because everyone says he’s the complete player. He knows he’s not.
“And he knows his ‘complete’ is different to most other people’s complete. But that’s what he’s after. It’s Michael Jordan-esque. It’s how can I perform? And you know last year was a hard year for him. He’s an exceptional person.”
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