A key component talking right lingo

TALK TO some GAA coaches and you'll do well to get the time of day. Talk to others and you get a series of clichés and not a whole lot more. Talk to Ned English and you get a lengthy psychology lesson, references and all.

Although he repeatedly plays down his role, English is one of the key reasons why Dromcollogher-Broadford beat Nemo Rangers to make their first Munster football final. While the almost unanimous reaction elsewhere was "fluke" - or at least one of the great upsets of club championship history - English is convinced it was merely a team believing what everyone else thought was impossible.

"As a coach you are a sponge," says English. "You've got to soak everything up, and then squeeze it out to the lads. So as a coach you're just feeding off everyone else, and their work. Because at the end of it all, the coach is just a facilitator.

"He's either a good facilitator or a poor facilitator, because he never kicks a ball. So if you can't get into the players' heads first of all, into their minds, so that you can then alter their physicality, then you're going nowhere.

"Because they've got to make it happen, and also believe it will happen. The biggest factor in all of sport is doubt. In order to remove that doubt you need to break things down into different tasks, the same as you do going into work every day. It's the same in sport. Teams like Munster are very task focused. Nothing upsets them on the field, and teams like that are not brittle."

Talk to English and Sunday's Munster final against Kilmurry-Ibrickane is merely another test of Dromcollogher's mindset, another task. He believes the Limerick club, despite its tiny community of players, has the ability to win, just as they proved in beating the Cork giants two weeks ago. He's just there to tell them that.

After establishing his potato farming business, English, a Cork native who lives just 10 miles from Dromcollogher, has moved increasingly towards his true passion - sports psychology.

"I believe that no muscle ever works unless the mind tells it too. People talk about coaching, and the mixture of the mental and the physical. But the physical is always submissive to the mental. It's like a car. A car is a wonderful machine, can be designed and engineered very well, but unless you put the right driver behind the wheel it won't go. And by the same token you can have a wonderful driver but without the right car he can't go far either.

"And there is no magic wand. Players are human beings, and they have marvellous resources within themselves. If you can generate those resources to come to the front, in the way you behave with them, and the right choice of words, then that is the art of coaching, to me.

"Sporting success is a recipe, and if you apply x, y and z in the right order then you'll come up with something. It's about making people be the best they can be, both collectively and individually, and has to be about them. Because if it's ever about you, you fail. No one person can wave a magic wand over a group of players. And you've got people all over the world trying to do that. It has got to be a collective effort, about convincing the players what innate ability they have.

"And two principles have to override everything. One, that you're dealing with human beings. And two, if these human beings don't enjoy it, absolutely nothing you do will work. So we have great craic down there."

When he was approached last year by former club captain Neil Conway he had to think about it, given his involvement with his own club, Duhallow, but in the end English volunteered his services, clearly excited by the prospect.

"If anything happens out on the field that seems negative then you will lose. But this team is very task focused now. And if you are task focused, you become very formidable people. If you're focused on the result, you become very fragile. This team is not result focused, nor is the manager here, John Brudair. We're all talking the same lingo now. And being task focused also means giving respect to your opponents.

"It was like playing Nemo. You don't have a right to win. And I'm never into hating opponents in sport. I hate to some extent the tribalism of the GAA. Because ferocity on the field is the only way you respect your opponents. We have that for Kilmurray. If you play with hate or anger that will shove you into emotional overload, and the minute that happens, the brain starts making all kinds of bad decisions."