The Blue Book

[feetofflames]

Caffrey had too many people in the loop - another aspect of bad management. 

[JMohan]

The fact is that history is written by the winners.

That better not be a Vince Lombardi quote!

lol!
Probably more suited to someone like Joseph Goebbells!

[screenexile]

A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.

Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

Football is like life - it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.

I don't think there's a punch-line scheduled, is there?

I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

If it doesn't matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?

If you are not fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

If you can accept losing you can't win. If you can walk you can run. No one is ever hurt. Hurt is in your mind.


Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

It's easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you're a winner, when you're number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you're not a winner.

It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up.

Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!

Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent's pressure, and the temporary failures.

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.

Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will be judged by only one thing-the result.

Some people try to find things in this game that don't exist but football is only two things - blocking and tackling.

Success demands singleness of purpose.

Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn't do it for individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.

The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.

The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.

The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That's real glory. That's the essence of it.

There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game and that is first place. I have finished second twice in my time at Green Bay and I never want to finish second again.

We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.

We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

Winning is not everything, but wanting to win is.

Winning isn't everything, but the will to win is everything.

Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.

[Jinxy]

You forgot "The inches we need, are everywhere around us."
Geezer loves that one.

[the Deel Rover]

they didn't put lot of thought into the name of the book did they, then again there probably is a copyright on "mission impossible"

[corn02]

Nonsense, plain and simple.  Sport in general, and football in particular are simple games with simple codes.  To my mind there is only one rule you have to follow.  Do everything to get the next ball and use it properly when you do.  If more people broke the game down to the basics then football would be a better game, but tooo many people get wrapped up in tactics and fitness and psychobabble.

AHH you were going so well up into there.

Tactics are essential - basically they allow a team of poorer quality to defeat a team of better quallity.

Fitness is very important but I do agree that there is an over-emphasis on it and the basics in the game are being eroded quite quickly.

Corn, what I mean is that too much emphasis is placed on tactics and fitness.  It players are not comfortable with the basics of the game then no matter what sort of tactical genius you have over a team they will only go so far.  I have learned that a good manager fits his tactics around the abilities of his players as opposed to taking a set of tactics and trying to make the players fit in. 

Apologies, I picked you up wrong. Totally agree with what you say.

[Puckoon]

In fairness is the idea of a silly wee book full of quotes any more ridiculous than convincing several members of your panel to grow their facial hair for the rest of the campaign?

One team was unsuccessful so their idea is stupid. The other team is successful so their idea is ingenious. 

Thats an innaccurate description, which voids your comparison, unless you have sources which can tell me Im wrong.

Who did the convincing about the beards?
Was it an authoritarian decision by management?
Is it a bit of harmless craic, and/or superstition by a couple of players with above average personalities, or is it a ridiculous decision by management to enforce beardedness on numbers 2, 4, 12 and 27?

[INDIANA]

Just to say my only comment on this is that I think Hogan is an awful bollocks for bringing this up. I hope he's reading this. On an all-ireland final weekend this is all he has to report on. What a sad sack of a journalist he really is. It only re-inforces the sort of anti-dub bias that exists among the o reilly propaganda machine. It may have been a stupid idea but we haven't read any sniping about the practices of other teams? waterford had their own unique preparation but his fawning over them would make you sick. It only re-inforces that Hogan exists in the pantheon of sub standard Irish sports journalists like eamonn sweeney and tommy conlon, who all work for the same bullshit artists.

[Blue and Navy]

Not sure if i agree on the Tommy Conlon point but i'm with you about Sweeney and Hogan. The Independent do seem to want to make controversy as much as they can, but its really in my opinion since David Kelly became Sports editor. Now i don't want to start slurring anyone's name or anything but certain aspects of the Independent's sports coverage does seem to invite controversy..That scurrilous attack on Roy Keane last year for example.....could Hogan not have left this til the winter? Was he afraid someone else would grab it first?

[Puckoon]

Ok, so what about the leakee?

[JMohan]

Well it wouldn't be hard to find out ... It's obvious that Hogan has the book still ... just ring each man and give them 6 hours to drop it in to Pillar.
It would be interesting to see who it was  ... guessing it's someone either not too bright or a disgruntled player (sub).

[ONeill]

Shane Ryan evens
Pillar himself 2-1

[Mickeys beard]

All the payers were forced.  Get ready for the scoop of the year...







Cody simplicity exposes futility of 'the beard book'

Monday September 08 2008

So the big, stark patriarch with the flushed complexion delivered history. The temperance folk would have Kilkenny banned on the basis that excess is corrupting. But Brian Cody remains such an emblem of uncomplicated desire, it's hard to be aggrieved when his striped wonders start piling the silver high.

You could feel disappointed for Waterford yesterday, without begrudging Cody a single second of this day in the sun.

His management of perhaps the greatest hurling team ever seen has long been rooted in simple, understated delivery. He leads with a quiet ferocity that we like to tart up in mystery. We want him to be profound, even if he never feels that way.

And, so, he looks at us from under those slender eye-brows, his hard mouth pinched in quizzical discomfort.

Cody rations his animation to a once a year ignition, that giddy, self-conscious sideline dance once Liam McCarthy is secured. For the remainder, he is unreadable as stone.

He laughs at the idea of genius in what he does. To him, management is no more than housekeeping. Brian Cody loves hurling and the heroism it deposits into otherwise plain lives. That is the beginning and end of his story.

Cody is the great, surviving constant of a practice getting more layered and nuanced by the season. He is old-style, a one-man rebuke to the management by numbers impulse that seems so increasingly de rigeur.

You look at some county teams today and everything they do is so trussed up in theory and philosophy, it's little wonder that their thought processes seem robotic.

Tyrone footballers reside in a claustrophobic world and, increasingly, they look hairy by that world. The search for an smig has carried them into easily lampooned territory, the choreographed march to the hill, the arm-linking intimacy of the backroom, the practiced hostility to gillette.

In a sense, the harder Tyrone tried to distance themselves from cut-throats, the more fuzzy they became.

Somewhere within the camp, a lust for mind bending overtook the plain demands of preparing young men for hard football games. Mental preparation morphed into dangerous psycho-babble.

This year, Tyrone came up with the 'Beard Book'. You won't have seen one because it came with pretty stark 'rules of engagement.'

Holders had to (literally) sign up to a creed. And rule four of that creed declared: 'I will not show or admit to the existence of THE Beard BOOK to any other person except another Beard Book holder.'

It didn't quite promote the cyanide pill solution to interrogation, but this was loopy stuff. A constitution written in Branch Davidian language.

The Beard Book was constructed in diary form, running from January to September. Every month carried an assembly of quotations, each page topped with the line 'Tyrone, All-Ireland Champions 2008'. Page One demanded that the holder sign up to the seven-point creed, which had to be then counter-signed by a 'witness.'

And point number five of that creed declared that the holder would accept 'any disciplinary measures including withdrawal of MY Beard BOOK, should I not apply myself as a Beard BOOK HOLDER is expected to.'

The line between constructive motivation and oppressive thought control wasn't so much blurred as obliterated.

Thirty eight years after his death, Vince Lombardi's little wisdoms exist as such pet tools for lazy GAA psychology, he ought to be claiming Irish royalties from the grave. Lombardi's wall mottos have become clichéd through over-use. They need to be de-commissioned.

The Beard Book is -- naturally -- speckled with his words, but it's the company Lombardi keeps that leaves the starkest imprint.

The profundities of ZZ top, Osama Bin Laden, Bjorn Bjorg, Santa Claus, Jesus himself, Jeff Capes are all invoked within as a kind of booklet-form mission statement for the modern Tyrone man.

Page after bullet-point page itemises the specifics of preparation. Players are invited to fill in 'bush Reports'. Everything is segmented, broken down. Confidence. Success. Shine. Length.

The Beard Book seems intent on shining a light on every mental shadow.

[his holiness nb]

No intentions of reading through 5 pages, but this blue book thing isnt suprising. Sports phsychology gone mad. I've seen clubs do similar things.

All crap if you ask me.

[Radioulster]

As someone who has coached in the past I would have to say that people are being unfair on Pillar in this instance. I would'nt be a fan of the type of book they had but each to his own. Other teams have had similar strategies and they have being successful. I f the Dubs had won the AI then  we would all have been under pressure to have a book by players. The likes of Hogan are barroom slabbers with a much larger audience. To compare Cody's approach is completely nonsenseical he has by far the best players to work with, why would he complicate it. In football Kerry aside no team has that abndance of talent so Managers improvise with different gimmicks to help their team. Let Hogan take a team over..... Hogan for Celebrity Banisteoir and take some of those other geniuses with him.