At the end of the Westmeath game on Sunday, fellas were hugging and crying and roaring together. You could see how much it meant to beat Meath – not just to the supporters but to the team as well. The easy thing to say watching them making that comeback would be that they had great team spirit. Sure didn’t they have to have it? How else would they have come back?

To me though, the real question is this – if team spirit was so important, where was it when they were getting beaten out the gate in the first half? Meath scored 2-12 in the first half – 2-12! To concede that sort of score in one half of football, some of your players have to give up, other have to go into their shell, others have to start playing for themselves.

I always found that the importance of team spirit was overstated. It was the sort of thing that people looking in from the outside made a judgment on without having a notion high-up or low-down what it meant. Maybe there’s something romantic in people that they want to believe that every successful team is a band of brothers. It’s just not the case.

Whatever team wins the All-Ireland this year, we’ll automatically say they had great team spirit. But if you were drawing up a list of the things a successful team needs, you’d get a fair bit down the page before you got to it. You can have all the team spirit in the world but you will still lose to a team that has better players than you.

There’s that great quote about team spirit by Steve Archibald, the Scottish footballer who used play for Spurs. “Team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory.” I’ve often thought about that line. It sounds maybe a bit overly cynical when you hear it first.

The truth of it when it comes to soccer is obvious enough though. In an environment where players are bought and sold every few months, you could end up feeling a bit stupid if you were making out that you all had this great bond between you. Gaelic games are a bit different because we all hold on tight to the place we come from.

Great mates

Joking apart though, in the GAA we always have that thing that binds us together and you can’t help getting a certain amount of team spirit from it. But in many ways, Archibald is right. We’re all great mates when we’ve won.

There is one great moment above all. You keep it for the rest of your life. It’s those minutes when you’re on the bus coming out of Croke Park and Sam Maguire is sitting on the dashboard up at the front. You have the garda escort and you’re heading to the hotel.

And for that 20 minutes, half an hour, that’s as good as it gets. No feeling like it. People talk about the dressingroom being great but in all honesty, you’re too tired in the dressingroom after an All-Ireland final. You’re sore, your head is still spinning, everything is happening at once.

You go to the players’ lounge and have a beer and the whole thing starts to calm down a bit, but you’re still not quite there yet. It’s different once you’re on the bus. On that bus, everything else falls away. Archibald would see a lot of team spirit on that bus.

It doesn’t last long though. In fact, it barely lasts a few hours. It isn’t long before you’re mobbed by half the county at the function and then you’re taking the cup different places and you’re knuckling down for county championship and you’re always moving onto the next thing.

Gradually, that bus journey fades further and further away and you’re into pre-season and it starts again. The whole thing is such a drug that you keep coming back for more. But when you make that decision to go again the following season – especially as you come towards the end – you’re coming back for yourself. It’s a selfish decision.

Let’s get down to business. What really matters? What won you that All-Ireland? Was it the bond between ye? Or was it the game plan that ye’d been working on for nine months? Or the corner-forward who had the game of his life and scored 1-5 from play? Or the free-taker who didn’t miss a kick from the quarter-final on? I’d prefer to look at the tangible things that got you over the line.

Maybe that’s the problem with talking about team spirit – it’s hard to define. I often think it’s like the cloud. You hear people talking about the cloud all the time – your phone numbers are in it, your contacts are in it, your photos, the lot. But what is it? Nobody seems to be able to explain it.

I think too often people mistake team spirit for a gang of lads having the craic. Or maybe vice-versa – that because a gang of lads like each other and have a great laugh together, the team spirit they have will inspire them to great things. But it doesn’t work like that.

If team spirit matters in any way, it’s about motivation. What you must remember above all else is that players are selfish beings. The first thing they think about is getting themselves right so that they can get into the team. That’s first and foremost in every players’ mind. Who do I have to impress here? What do I have to do to get my place?

The job of a manager is to motivate all those separate beings to come together as one. To make it so that the thing each player has to do to get in the team is buy into the game plan and understand that it’s harmful for them to go off on their own.

Motivation evolved over the time I was playing. At the start, it was all raw, fire-in-the-belly stuff. The managers would be banging you in the chest going, “Are you going to lie down? Are you going to let these f**kers dictate to you?” And you’d be going, “No.” And he’d come back, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” And you’d roar it back, “NO!!”

Good definition

Real “sir, yes sir” stuff. But that changed over time. The thinking in management became more along the lines of getting five or six key leaders in the squad and getting the rest of the lads to follow them. I think if there’s any good definition of team spirit these days, it’s more along those lines. Creating leaders, giving them responsibility, motivating the others through them.

That’s the way serious teams do it now. Players don’t have to like each other, they just have to like the ultimate goal. I’ve been on plenty of teams where this guy couldn’t stand that guy or the other one. And I’ve been on plenty of them where it caused bad feeling.

There was one guy I remember who used go for coffee with the manager if it looked like his place on the team was in danger. It would be all in the name of player-manager relations, all above board of course. But when he’d be there, he’d be in the manager’s ear about all the good things he could do, all the plus points he’d bring the next day.

There wasn’t a whole pile of team spirit about it but, lo and behold, when the day came, my man would be in the team. it might have been a close call but invariably it went his way. And part of you would be saying fair play to him. A dumb priest never got a good parish.

The job for any manager is to herd all those different personalities into a team. Get everyone to realise that you live together or die alone. Appeal to their selfishness. This only works if we win, lads.

If there is tension between fellas, you have to use it. Call in on any team that’s chasing the All-Ireland between late July and early September and there will be at least one fight a week. Some of it is nervous energy, some of it is fellas who just aren’t fond of each other sparking off each other at the wrong time.

You have to make light of it, get a bit of slagging out of it. Above all, you have to take the energy from it and point it where it’s needed. Get the eyes on the prize.

I remember getting my eye split open one night at training by Séamus Scanlon. Now, we’d have played on each other for years and years and there’s no doubt I was probably owed this from a long way back. Good for goose, good for the gander.

In the dressing-room afterwards, I was trying to hold on to a bit of pride. The cut was bleeding but I didn’t want to be dripping in bandages or have any big fuss made of it. That would just draw attention from the rest of them, who were only waiting to make a big thing of it. They were delighting in my discomfort.

Genuine accident

“Ah, no big deal lads,” I said. “No big deal, a genuine accident. Happens all the time. Could happen to anyone.” There was silence for a second until Séamus piped up. “Yeah, but was it really an accident?”

There’s a fine line to walk around something like that. Two guys who get into a skirmish are ripe for the picking by everyone else. They both get decorated in the team WhatsApp group. They get made room together on trips. You have to brazen it out and get on with things.

The point about it isn’t team spirit, though. It goes back to team motivation. Who are we, lads? Are we the crowd who bitch at each other about the All-Irelands we lost? Or are we big enough to park it, move on, go and do what needs to be done.

This is a team game that comes down to individuals. To me, team spirit is someone like Michael Murphy going about his business.

This is the best footballer in Donegal, maybe the best in Ireland. He could get by very nicely just kicking a few scores when the mood takes him. But he takes it on himself to be more than that.

I was watching him in Clones on Saturday night and he wasn’t having a great game. But along with the two massive points he scored in the second half, he was back blocking down a Derry player late on. The best player in the team doing the dirty work for somebody else.

That’s nothing to do with having the craic together or liking each other or being linked forever by a common bond. That’s just a big player taking it upon himself to make a difference in a game.

If you have enough of that, team spirit will take care of itself.