Mind games: Enda McNulty’s significant contribution to Irish rugby

On a wet, gloomy Monday, 14 years ago, Michael Cheika asked Enda McNulty if he would meet Brian O’Driscoll. The Ireland captain was in a slump. Just a few weeks earlier he had scored his first Leinster try in more than 20 months. Nobody has all the answers. The Leinster coach suggested an intervention.

McNulty was a 32-year-old Armagh footballer and a budding performance coach, with whom Cheika had built a rapport, and slow-cooked trust. At short notice, the meeting was arranged for Cheika’s pokey office at Riverview gym.

Sitting opposite McNulty, with his arms and legs crossed, was a sceptic dressed in a hoodie. Cheika pulled down the blind on the only window in the room, made the introductions, and left. Like any blind date, he hoped for chemistry.

“Up to this point I’ve resisted sports psychology,” wrote O’Driscoll in his autobiography, “partly because I’ve always thought it gimmicky, but mostly because I never felt the need . . . I like Enda from minute one. He talks to me like a peer.”

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McNulty’s relationship with Leinster Rugby still had a platonic quality. The commitment was loose. They were free to see other people.

How did it start? He met Gordon D’Arcy by chance one day in a coffee shop in Ranelagh, ostensibly as strangers, though they were both able to put a name to each other’s face.

“The greatest enemy throughout my career was never the opposition,” wrote D’Arcy, in his Irish Times column three years ago. “It was silencing the voice in my head.”

Over time, D’Arcy invited McNulty to be the third party in that dialogue. He found the interaction so beneficial that he introduced McNulty to Luke Fitzgerald. Another conversation started and continued.

And Cheika? They were introduced by Mick Kearney, manager of the Ireland team now, and manager of the Leinster A team back then. McNulty and Cheika agreed to meet. For 2½, in the back room of an Italian coffee shop, McNulty was interrogated by a man he barely knew, hiding behind dark sun glasses, screening his eyes from any soft contact.

“Did it go well? I had no clue.” McNulty says now. “I had no clue if I had impressed him or whether he was satisfied. I had no clue. It was probably another six months after that meeting before the next meeting. No contact. No feedback.”

When contact resumed, Cheika sent Leo Cullen to meet him. The Leinster captain was the moat in front of the drawbridge. For 90 minutes Cullen frisked McNulty for anything that didn’t align with their values.

McNulty didn’t need to be told about dressing room dynamics: it wasn’t enough for him to enjoy Cheika’s support; to work with Leinster he would need the confidence of the mood-makers in the group. Without Cullen and O’Driscoll he was sunk before he left shore.

In O’Driscoll’s autobiography, he devotes four pages to his first meeting with McNulty. “Did I come away from the meeting thinking I’d made a breakthrough? Yes. Absolutely. Unreservedly,” says McNulty.

“He knew it was a breakthrough meeting too. It was brilliant because he completely opened up about what was going on. He was at a stage in his career where he had to really address some big things in terms of his overall performance.

“What was more important was the follow-up. Once-off meetings don’t add value. Over the following few years we had lots of those meaningful meetings. Some of them formal, some informal, some at his kitchen table, some at Leinster. Always a joy. Always straight up. Would always challenge you. If I said, ‘I think you can significantly improve your motivational stamina,’ he’d say, ‘Stop, what do you mean by that?’ Wouldn’t let you go on without explaining.”

In this environment, McNulty was an outsider. He didn’t come from rugby, or another professional sport. Up to that point, his body of work had little relevance to the role he hoped to play in Leinster. He was like one of those start-ups pitching to the investors on Dragon’s Den; the Leinster players needed to see something in him that was worth their investment.

The sports science he was bringing depended to some degree on the faith of the congregation. He knew it was a volatile space. He was still a psychology student in Queen’s when one of Armagh’s joint-managers, Brian McAlinden, asked him to compile a mental preparation document before the 1999 Ulster final.

It was presented to the players at training on the week of the game, and as they left Davitt Park, in Lurgan, McNulty saw a couple of his team-mates throw it in the bin.

“I’ll never forget it. They thought it was a load of b-s.”

When he started working with Leinster they still hadn’t won the Heineken Cup. Mental weakness was the commonly accepted diagnosis for their ills, yet they couldn’t agree on a cure.

“Some of the players were unbelievably resistant,” he says. “Some of the players were unbelievably sceptical. Some players were hugely supportive. Shane Horgan would have been one of the first to say he was very sceptical, but then we had some major breakthrough meetings. Addressing that group was daunting. You feel absolutely inadequate. You feel absolutely out of your depth. You feel very vulnerable, to be honest.”

Malcom O’Kelly challenged him in front of the group one day. Using footage from a match, McNulty made a point about negative body language; O’Kelly rejected the charge, claiming it was nothing more than exhaustion.

“’I don’t care,’ I said. ‘You can’t show that weakness. And more importantly, you can’t show it to yourself’.

“The guys would have said my communication in Leinster in the early days was very weak. They were probably right. I had to work on that. Alex Ferguson used to say, ‘There are no secrets in football. The secret is how you communicate the message’. I realised very early that I had to be better at communicating.”

Over the next 10 years McNulty’s business spread into other sports, and other fields that had no connection to sport; but his work in rugby was a constant thread, and a relentless challenge. Just like a player, he needed to keep proving his worth. Cheika left Leinster and Joe Schmidt came in. New whip.

He arrived to his first meeting with Schmidt carrying five moleskin diaries, containing notes of every interaction he had made with the Leinster players, and reflections from every match. Schmidt fired questions at him from all angles; he thumbed the pages of his diaries for answers.

At the end of the meeting he asked McNulty to come back to him in a month with a plan for leadership, mental toughness and “winning IQ”. There were only two grades: pass or fail. Schmidt kept him.

Working with Schmidt the bar never dropped. McNulty says they would meet for three hours or more in the Ballsbridge Hotel.

“The tone would be what I’d call adversarial collaboration. I’d present an idea and he’d say, ‘Hang on a second, where’s the evidence for that?’ Joe might take one of those ideas out of 10. Maybe one out of 20.”

When Schmidt moved on to the Ireland job, McNulty was already in that set-up. He had been appointed for Declan Kidney’s final season, although he’s sure the impetus for the appointment came from elsewhere in the IRFU. Senior Leinster players vouched for him.

In Ireland camp with Schmidt, the clock never stopped. McNulty might send him a document and get a text acknowledging its arrival at 2am. Two hours later, there would be an email with an initial response, and an invitation to discuss it further at seven o’clock. McNulty would know that Schmidt had been in the team room, poring over video with Mervyn Murphy, until 11.30 the previous evening. Sleep? Rationed. Postponed. McNulty reckons that in preparation for each opponent, Schmidt consumed about 40 hours of video.

“Was it a stressful environment? Absolutely. The players have talked about that. Every player, every staff member would say it was a stressful environment. The players would have said it to me, I would have said it to Joe. We would have had open conversations about it. He’d say, ‘Good. We’re building the best performance environment in the world. It should be stressful’.

“The leadership group would be brilliant at saying, ‘Boss, we need a day off. We’re tired. You were too intense with us here, Joe, you need to ease up’. Maybe towards the end Joe could have listened a bit more to that.”

McNulty was backstage for three Heineken Cups with Leinster, and three Six Nations titles with Ireland.

Before the pandemic, he was doing some work with Chelsea Football Club, and the head of their academy, Neil Bath, asked him to make a presentation to their coaches about Ireland’s failure at the last two World Cups. How long have you got?

“They asked me, ‘Why did you not learn from previous failures?’ The short answer was, ‘I didn’t learn well enough’. I’m okay at this stage of my life to say that. If you don’t show that vulnerability, you don’t earn the right to be in a high performance environment.”

“Were we mentally prepared enough for the Argentinians [in the 2015 quarter-final]? No. No question. Responsibility 100% on my shoulders. Not well enough prepared mentally for that battle. Why? Probably underestimated the Argentinians. Underestimated the impact of not having four or five very senior players – [Paul] O’Connell and [Johnny] Sexton among them. Underestimated that the World Cup is a 5X scale of difficulty to a Six Nations, in my estimation. I’d say I knew 90 seconds into the game we were in trouble.”

In a debrief with Schmidt after the tournament, McNulty held his hands up. Schmidt refused to allow blame to sit on any individual’s shoulders: the failure had been collective. Schmidt wouldn’t have asked him to continue if he wasn’t convinced he could add value to the group. McNulty stayed.

Four years later, the circumstances were different. Ireland had finished 2018 with a victory over the All-Blacks, and had started World Cup year as the number one-ranked team in the world.

But in the Six Nations, they bombed out against England and Wales; in the summer series of warm-up games, England beat them by 42 points. Ever before they reached Japan the wheels were spinning.

“When you become the best in the world, you get all the adulation and all the players are given the correct praise and recognition. But then all the scrutiny is on you, and no matter what we’re saying in camp, and no matter what the brilliant players are saying, you’re starting to let a bit of that seep in. ‘We’re number one in the world, we’re beating the best in the world – so, not an awful lot wrong here’. That’s when you’re at your weakest.”

After that World Cup McNulty moved on. David Nucifora, the IRFU’s performance director, handled the debriefing sessions, and they wanted a change in the sports psychology space. Schmidt had left and for McNulty it had reached a natural end too.

His portfolio of clients is more varied now than ever, with different needs. He’s working with Sarah Chamblee, for example, a surgeon who performs eye operations on infants.

Last week he sat down with Siobhán Walsh, the CEO of GOAL.

“She had just lost 30 of her team in Syria and Turkey. I just couldn’t believe her resilience.”

Different universe.

His relationship with Cheika turned into friendship long before they stopped working together. Thirteen years after he left Ireland, they’re still in touch. They spoke just the other day. He saw something in McNulty and took a chance.

He was right.

Commit 2 Lead by Enda McNulty, Whitefox Publishing.