Truths told as choice speakers have say

On Gaelic Games:There was an acknowledged sea change this year for the increasingly influential annual GAA coaching conference. Last year had seen a lot of celebrity contributors, culminating in a wide-ranging discussion on the state of the games among a panel of well-known personalities. .

Those proceedings were enjoyable but, in the eyes of many, too geared towards entertainment rather than the hard-core details of coaching and the consensus was that whereas high-profile intercounty managers can be fascinating to listen to, they're unlikely to be unveiling their routines and playbooks in a public forum

It brings to mind the old yarn about Geoff Boycott, the notoriously dour Yorkshire batsman, who in a Test series was faring notably better than his team-mates against a particularly tricky visiting bowler. During a bowling change he was out in the middle of the crease listening to some earnest middle-order colleague breathlessly explaining that he had worked out the opponent's technique. "Aye," drawled Boycott. "Spotted it weeks ago. Say nowt to anyone."

There was, accordingly, great interest in Pat Flanagan's address last Saturday morning, " Integrated Training for Gaelic football". Flanagan's work with Kerry and in the Institute of Technology in Tralee would be enough to attract a crowd but adding to the occasion was his recent decision to step down from the position of Kerry trainer. With no creeping anxiety about the extent to which his techniques might be turned against his own team, the former athlete would be more expansive - or so the sentiment ran.

In any event Flanagan gave a really interesting presentation to a good crowd. We learned, for instance, Kerry's aerobic training was conducted over maximum distances of between 150 and 200 metres, drills were kept to less than two minutes each and every session involved the ball at some stage as well as speed drills.

It emphasised the point that the legendary hardships endured under some management regimes were as much about mind subjugation as any calibrated attempt to get teams physically fit.

In general conversation that day, Jim Brogan, part of the management team that landed Dublin's last All-Ireland, chatted to former Armagh trainer John McCloskey about the need for managers to vary the science every now and then and the at-times usefulness of pushing players hard at a session to replicate the feeling of physical devastation that inevitably afflicts some during the biggest of matches.

McCloskey said that Joe Kernan was a good example of a manager with an uncanny ability to see when players needed to do something different to maximise what they would take out of the session. In other words it's not just a matter of getting the team specialist to draw up your collective and individual programmes and simply supervising them.

Pat Flanagan also presented some statistics that had been commissioned from Dr Liam Hennessy, the IRFU's national director of fitness. They showed that the ball had been in play for less than half of the game time, 34 minutes and 58 seconds out of 75 minutes and 34 seconds. Of the 74 bouts of activity during the match, the most common duration (47 per cent) for each bout was between 10 and 30 seconds.

Most scores come from movements of between four and six touches, rather than lengthy passages of passing - statistics that closely match a survey of Champions League soccer matches in which between 50 and 60 per cent of goals were scored after similar build-up - because concentration and the ability to keep the ball alive flag the longer a move continues.

There was another big audience for Mickey Moran's "Reflections on Coaching and Management", a marvellous affirmation of the joy of coaching from someone who has hurtled from peaks to troughs.

A theme that ran through many of the presentations was that less is more: less badgering, less subjecting kids to results-based targets. Dr Eugene Young, the Ulster Council's director of coaching, ran through the structures that have made the province the most advanced regional unit in terms of games development.

Benefiting from considerable public funding for sport provided by the British government, the Ulster Council has, together with the Sports Council of Northern Ireland, created a system and a body of expertise that helps explain how the province has won nearly half of the football All-Irelands since the start of the 1990s.

Dr Young took his audience through the process of readjusting priorities, now that support for elite performers is so well advanced, towards the question of participation and the importance of retaining the engagement of children whose participation peaks at the age of 10. He spoke of the need to get out of the comfort zone of approaching activities in the way they traditionally have been, gently chiding coaches who attend seminars to learn about modernising only for him to drive past their clubs afterwards and see kids running monotonously around fields.

Still some kids are lucky. The biggest laugh of the day was saved for DCU's Dr Siobhain McArdle's talk on sports psychology "Focusing on the Controllables", during which she screened a newspaper report about an Australian swimming coach who used - an admittedly gagged - saltwater crocodile to increase the speed of his charges. "The thought of something chasing them down in the pool certainly improves the speed of my swimmers," he told the unconvinced local swimming authorities.

Maybe it's a sign of progress but when one apparently serious delegate asked at the end what was wrong with this novel drill there was a fairly hysterical reaction from the rest of the audience - most of them, anyway.