BOB CASEY'S DIARY:In an era when the margins between winning and losing are so small, the importance of mental preparation can not be overestimated

I WATCHED the film The King's Speechand apart from marvelling at the brilliance of the movie it got me thinking about the mental side of rugby. There is a scene in the film where the excellent Colin Firth, as the king, is rehearsing prior to his inauguration to try to work around his speech impediment. He mimics both the moment of his speech and the delivery over and over again so that it desensitises him to what might have been an enormously different personal trial.

Sports people work with psychologists, who may be packaged under a variety of headings, but in essence it’s to develop their capacity to function under the extreme pressure of match situations. Teams and individuals are always looking to explore methods that will give them the edge.

Chris Malone told me about the time he was at Harlequins and they beat Stade Français home and away. To help the players cope with an 80,000 capacity at the Stade de France and all the pageantry that’s part and parcel of the Parisian club’s home matches, Harlequins’ sports psychologist got a bank of big screens put up in the team room.

On them was a montage of YouTube clips with music blaring, the can-can girls, the fireworks, the shocking pink jerseys and every gimmick that made a Stade Français home game a unique experience. It got the players used to the hoopla so they wouldn’t be distracted or overawed on the day. Harlequins won the match.

James Blaney, the Terenure-born former Munster hooker, told of how the team conducted their lineout practice in the week building-up to a big Heineken Cup match with the noise of a previous match turned up at full volume on the Thomond Park PA system.

People ascribe being mentally strong to certain individuals as if it’s something you are born with; it’s not. Everyone has varying amounts but those players that are noted for the character trait hone that side of their preparation as assiduously as they prepare physically. When I first went to London Irish from Leinster I walked straight into a relegation battle and a team that were struggling. Irish could not score a try for love nor money. I had come from a Leinster team that had just won the Magners League and were harvesting tries by the bucket-load.

I let my emotions get the better of me. I was constantly giving out, blaming others, over-reacting when things went against me or the team. We went to a session organised by a company called Gazing Performance: they work with the current All Blacks squad. In a group dynamic not everyone buys into it and there’s a fair bit of messing because the lads culture takes over. It’s more popular these days but back then there was still a little bit of a stigma attached to the process of working on the mental aspect of the game.

I saw enough in it to go back on my own a couple of weeks later and I have been working with a Kiwi called Bede Brosnahan every fortnight since. We go through rugby scenarios, but also life ones too. He uses a system called blue head versus red head.

Blue head focuses on the positive, I can, I will, I do: red head is I can’t, I won’t, I don’t.

He helped rid me of unhelpful behaviour, reinforcing the importance of staying on task at all times during a match. I had to work hard on not letting my head drop, not looking to blame the referee or my team-mates. I had to learn not to over-react or, just as destructively, under-react, retreat into my shell when things go against me.

An example of a strong mind would be Brian O’Driscoll. He threw a wayward pass off his left hand to Fergus McFadden against Italy that cost a try but when the situation arose in the French match to throw an identical pass he didn’t hesitate and nailed it. He could have elected not to but he didn’t.

You learn to stay on task rather than being diverted and focusing on the result. I had to learn how to do that and also ensure as captain that my team-mates did likewise. There was no point in me shouting and roaring or getting annoyed or frustrated because it would permeate through the rest of the team. I remember Leo Cullen, the captain, when we played underage representative rugby together; he would write the roles he felt he needed to fulfil in the week leading up to the match, the things that needed to be said, the play sheet for lineouts and scrums.

I do that too. It’s about game-play scenarios. You have a plan for when you’ve a player in the sin bin, when you’ve conceded two early scores, when you have failed to take three opportunities in succession: you take succour as a captain in the mental preparation you have done so that you don’t panic. It’s so important that you’re positive and measured and that you deal in specifics.

It’s not about focusing on the outcome, rather the process that guarantees the positive result. As a captain, you have to view your team-mates as individuals and understand that what makes one player tick will cause another to shy away. The days of the head banging in the dressingroom are long gone. Shouting at one player might work; an arm around the shoulder and a quiet word will have the same result for another.

I remember our coach Toby Booth putting out six cones when we were doing a pre-season in the French training centre at Marcoussis. Each represented different things like family, security, winning, international honours, and he asked us to stand beside the cone which best describes why you play for London Irish. It enabled him to know what drove us as individuals.

He would also work us hard at training: three scrums followed by fitness and then five lineouts in a short space of time and all the while he would be screaming at us, putting us under pressure. It was about training like you would play, recreating the match-day pressures and intensity.

It goes back to the old idiom of fail to prepare, prepare to fail and that applies to the mental side of things as well as the physical.