Flying below the radar is helpful route to success

CADDIES ROLE:Irish back-room team has done a good job in sheltering players from external expectations, writes COLIN BYRNE

SO YOU are leading a golf tournament by five shots with the final round to go and you need to sleep soundly for one more night on that promising but not insurmountable lead.

How do you do it?

Well, the first thing you don’t do is read a newspaper or listen to any form of media coverage, or the chances are your professional brain will get so muddled you will forget what you were supposed to be doing in order to secure the title.

Expectation is probably the most difficult emotion for professional sportspeople to deal with and it takes the most talented and experienced handler to deal with the likelihood of ultimate success.

It is a standard line that professional golfers churn out in post-round interviews, “I just tried to stay in the present, hit each shot as it comes and let go of any errors I made in the past.”

Living the moment – sure, weren’t us Irish experts at it before our recent dalliance with rampant capitalism?

Today we are regretting the past, trying to put up with the moment and really looking forward to a brighter future in six years, by all accounts.

I have been involved with numerous players who have had agitated Saturday night slumbers, resting on the lead of a tournament.

Most slept worse than others on tournament leads.

It takes a lot of emotion to cope with the fear of failure and even more to deal with the image of success. Of course knowing how to deal with it is the DNA of superstars: on top of their talent, this is probably the next most important ingredient to contribute to success.

Phil Mickelson won in Miami on Sunday having led from day one. I would imagine he slept as well as if he were on vacation: leading tournaments is part of a superstar’s make-up.

No psychologist can teach it to players who have not won and are not used to leading.

I listened and read with trepidation the pre-Scottish rugby match chatter last weekend and shuddered at the thought of a great team playing great rugby listening to the same probing questions about the Grand Slam.

I don’t know what mechanisms the Irish rugby back-room team has for sheltering their players from the optimism and focusing on the future, but they seem to have done a good job of it.

Whether it is sheltering them, or just dealing with it face on, it has worked so far.

When I caddied for Retief Goosen in the US Open at Pinehurst in 2005, he had to sleep on a three-shot lead going into the final round. He had won at Shinnecock Hills the previous year. Pinehurst was a completely different scenario.

In Shinnecock, he had played great golf for the first three rounds. In Pinehurst, he had held it together for three rounds and his statistics revealed the fact he was not really playing that well.

To make a comparison between Retief in Shinnecock and Pinehurst and the Irish team’s current flow of external expectation from an otherwise flagging nation, I hope I don’t hear or read any Irish player speculating about next weekend. I look forward to hearing from them after the game.

There were virtually no interviews for Retief in 2004 until he actually won the event.

In 2005, he gave a TV interview on the morning of the final round. It may well have been the start of the demise in front of that TV camera on that Sunday morning in June 2005 in South Carolina. Retief had a catastrophic final round.

I have never seen Tiger Woods give a pre-round interview before his multiple major victories, only post- ones.

Pádraig Harrington had an untimely – or timely – accident before his defence of his British Open Championship title in Birkdale last year. It deflected the conversation full of expectation of defending his title to whether he would get a chance to tee off in the first place.

There is no doubt that flying below the radar is helpful no matter how experienced you are.

A young Michael Campbell was rather insensitively asked by a Scottish interviewer as he led the British Open in 1995, “Well Michael, it’s all yours to lose now?” while thrusting the microphone in his face expecting a civil answer.

There is a sensitivity rule which prevails among competitors and caddies in golf which means that the awkward, doubt-triggering questions will never be asked and certainly not at an inopportune moment around the course.

So who gives a fiddlers if Brian O’Driscoll scored a hat-trick of tries at Lansdowne in 2002. It has zero relevance in the preamble to a game of monumental importance in 2009.

Or who cares if Ireland has not won a Grand Slam since 1948.

It will have no relevance to how they play a multi-layered, strategic game at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff next weekend if they stick to their clearly laid-out professional approach which has got them into this position in the first place.

It must be a hair-raising and stimulating position for the Irish team to be in with a chance for the Grand Slam.

It will be a great success of their collective lives if they win. Before it, of course, it is just another game where the sound strategic principles they have adopted throughout this campaign must prevail.

I have the utmost of faith in them to do their best next Saturday and if they do they will have earned immortality in Irish rugby lore.