Jun 05

Get with the Programme Beefy

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Has John Morrison lost his grip on the ball?
Has John Morrison lost his grip on the ball?
Talking Balls has heard many’s an excuse for a team not doing well, but John Morrison, the jovial manager of Leitrim has taken the biscuit (not for the first time) with his scathing attack on the publishers of the match programme for Leitrim’s Championship tie with Roscommon. In case you haven’t been following goings on in Connacht Roscommon won.

However rather than the performance on the pitch or ahead of it in training coming under scrutiny, much travelled-Morrison targeted the matchday programme for special attention. Apparently the programme highlighted Leitrim’s poor record at their home ground Páirc Seán MacDiarmada and other negative results down through the years. Not good enough sez Beefy, a self professed Master of the Mind:

“Who put those articles in the programme? ‘Leitrim never win at home’, ‘Leitrim have never beaten Roscommon’ and so on. They might have just said ‘lie down there until we whip you again’.”

“Outside our dressingroom plenty of people might have thought we were beaten before we went out, but inside the dressingroom we believed we could do it. But the mindset and perception has to change in Leitrim and the likes of that programme do little to change attitudes,” continued the experienced and widely travelled coach.

Under the heading “Seán not a happy hunting ground for home team”, the programme highlighted a string of poor results for Leitrim which Morrison felt added fuel to the “lack of self-belief” in the county.

Leitrim have won just seven of the 49 championship games played at the Carrick-on-Shannon venue, and have not won at home since 2005, a record that ‘hardly inspires confidence’ according to the wretched programme.

With a deft bout of handwashing that Proinsias Pilate would have been proud of, Connacht provincial secretary John Prenty said that match programmes are produced by Dublin-based publishers DBA.

Hardly DBA’s fault that Leitrim have such a record. Anyway, never ones to flag a problem without finding a solution, Talking Balls staff are getting in touch with our friend John to suggest he gets a hold of that selfsame skip he famously got the Derry team to put their negative mental baggage into a few years back; collects all those programmes and sends them for recycling. Let’s just hope he isn’t reading some of the Balls our man Ger Manas is publishing in the Ulster programmes. Now that would really makes his heart skip a beat!

For John’s latest musings visit: http://www.gaelgames.com/leitrim-coach-john-morrison-making-game-sense-with-new-coaching-manual/