To succeed in any walk of life you need two things - workrate and luck.
One of them you have total control over, the other is in the lap of the gods.
You have to work as hard as you possibly can to give yourself a chance at succeeding in anything you do.
But tomorrow’s two All-Ireland quarter-finals are similar to last year’s in many respects and I would imagine that at least one of them will be decided by a slice of luck here and there.
Usain Bolt may be the fastest man ever but if he picked up an injury or illness the week before any of his major championships, then he’d be a few medals lighter.
You could be the world’s most glorious tenor, but if laryngitis or a throat infection kicks in, you can forget about wowing the crowds for a night at the opera.
Similarly, in sport, you can be the better team on a given day but not get the result because too many things just go wrong for you.
Cork in last year’s quarter-final against Galway is a case in point. Patrick Collins dropped a ball into the net in the opening seconds. Cork had 13 more shorts on goal and were beaten by a single point.
In general play, they were much the better team but were sent packing out the Championship and the management team soon departed.
In the recent Munster final, Clare had 11 more shots than Limerick, were denied a blatant free to force extra time and were very unlucky overall.
The climax of the Leinster final a couple of hours later - Padraic Mannion’s kicked clearance could have gone anywhere but it landed into the hand of Cillian Buckley and, a couple of seconds later, it’s in the net.
People will say that you make you own luck, and there is an element of truth in that, but you still need a run of the ball in tight games.
There are so many games that are 50-50 and they come down to the finest of margins.
Take the drawn 2014 All-Ireland final, when John ‘Bubbles’ O’Dwyer’s free trails narrowly wide. A few inches to the left at Tipperary are All-Ireland champions. Instead they lose the replay by three points and the narrative flips back in Kilkenny’s favour.
The year before, when Cork were almost there against Clare when they had that sideline ball.
We all know the games where teams win because they’re comfortably better than the opposition, like Limerick on many occasions over the past number of years, the great Kilkenny team before them and the Dublin football team of recent times.
You have to put yourself in a position to win the game. You do everything in your power to ensure the result but, often, with a few minutes to go, it’s open country.
As I said, I expect that at least one of tomorrow’s two games will conclude in that fashion and it’ll come down to a decision or a break of the ball.
If Galway fall the wrong side of it again, Henry Shefflin comes under massive pressure even though a couple of weeks earlier he was literally a kick of a ball from major silverware and an All-Ireland semi-final.
If Clare lose, then while Brian Lohan has made great progress with them, it will be four years with no silverware and only one visit to Croke Park, which ended in disaster. And yet he’ll have been so unlucky not to have won at least one Munster title.
But this is what makes the game magic; it makes liars out of us at times. And it’s a ruthless, ruthless business.
Clare to dodge Dublin banana skin
To my mind, this is Clare’s biggest challenge this year.
Win, and what a prize it is for them to meet Kilkenny in a semi-final, 12 months after being embarrassed by them at that stage.
I say that it’s their biggest challenge because Clare have everything to lose and Dublin are in bonus territory. They won’t be happy with how they played against Carlow and any softness in the Clare mindset leaves them vulnerable.
But, in saying that, they have been super consistent this year. They are back in the Gaelic Grounds, where they like to play.
They struggled over Wexford at this stage last year but I think they are a different animal this year. It’s a banana skin, but I can’t see an upset.
Everything points to a Tipp victory
There appears to be a bigger edge to the Galway-Tipperary rivalry than what I imagined.
There’s been a lot of talk around how there’s never much between these two but I’m not sure there’s much relevance to that. This is a standalone game, a winner-takes-all fixture.
Tipp won’t see it like this but, similar to Dublin, they are in bonus territory considering where they came from last year. The pressure is all on Galway.
In all honesty, even though they were so close to being Leinster champions, have they really impressed this year? No.
Make no mistake about it, Tipp are the form team coming into this and they will be hunting for goals. Their work ethic has been far greater than that of Galway’s too and I can’t see them being beaten in this.
McManus squeezed out every last drop
You won’t come across a finer gentleman than Neil McManus.
As a hurler, he’s thrown Antrim up on his back and carried them the length and breadth of the country for the past 15 years, on good days and bad. More bad than good, by the way, which makes his endurance all the more commendable.
We played Cushendall in the All-Ireland club final in 2016, and we won well on the day. His sportsmanship afterwards was no surprise to me anyway. Genuine as hell.
He can walk away knowing that he has left that saffron jersey in a far better place than when he got it.
He has handed the baton over now and I’ve no doubt he is going to be damn proud when he looks back on it all.
