Denis Walsh: Why Paul O'Connell thinks a sports psychologist will help Ireland get ahead

Irish Times

30-06-2025

In his autobiography, The Battle,
Paul O'Connell
devotes half a dozen pages to a meeting he had with Caroline Currid, the sports psychologist who will join him on
Ireland
's summer tour. At the time Currid was taking a psychology course through the Open University, and she approached O'Connell to be one of her case studies.
As he was one of the greatest rugby players in the world she expected to find an athlete in control of his mental preparation. What she discovered, however, was that O'Connell was essentially clueless.
'I was shocked by his preparation,' Currid told The Irish Times in 2016. 'I was really going down there thinking that this guy had it sussed and that his preparation would be really good and that I would come away with a lot of detail about sports psychology. But he obviously was doing nothing, and his preparation was not good.'
The conversation between them in O'Connell's book is only 17 years old, and yet it captures a faraway place in time. Sports psychology was still not mainstream in Irish sport, even among its elite athletes.
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The basic sources of O'Connell's motivation were self-criticism and emotion. In describing the ways that he goaded himself into performing, he kept returning to negatives: outcomes and feelings that he was trying desperately to avoid. He was leaning on fear: afraid of not performing, of letting people down, of losing.
'Sometimes my body reacts badly in the build-up, especially if it's a big game,' O'Connell told Currid. 'If I throw up before we go out, I know I'm ready.'
'But don't you know,' she said, 'that has a really bad effect on your body? You're losing a huge amount of energy by getting sick. It saps your red blood cells. Even your eyes dilate when you throw up.'
'Jesus. I don't really know why I do it really,' he said.
Caroline Currid with Gearóid Hegarty during her time working with Limerick's hurlers. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
And that was the point: he hadn't questioned his homespun techniques. In team meetings with
Munster
and Ireland, O'Connell was famous for questioning everything. But, through ignorance, he had let this pass.
The outcomes in O'Connell's career had been so good that maybe he could see no reason to interrogate it: he had captained Munster to win the Heineken Cup, had captained Ireland and toured with the Lions. It never occurred to him that he had succeeded despite not knowing how to direct his mind.
In O'Connell's book, the meeting with Currid ends with a conversation about the World Player of the Year award. He had made the shortlist for the previous season, but the award went to Richie McCaw. Currid asked him, straight out, why he thought he didn't win.
'Well obviously,' he said, 'Richie McCaw is a world-class player. And obviously the judges decided I didn't perform well enough to get picked ahead of him.'
'So,' she said, 'how do you know you wouldn't have got Player of the Year if you'd had a more positive mindset, or if you'd prepared differently?'
He didn't have an answer for that. In the same year Currid had asked
Mickey Harte
if she could work with the
Tyrone
footballers, as a kind of internship, and, generously, he agreed. O'Connell knew about her involvement and a few weeks after their meeting he watched them winning the All-Ireland. A day later he called Currid, asking if she would work with him.
Paul O'Connell used to think that if he didn't get sick before playing, he wasn't fully ready. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
'I was worried about heading down a new road when things were already going well,' wrote O'Connell, 'but the idea that I could maybe get more out of myself by being open to new things was a more powerful thought.'
The thing about sports psychology is that nobody can ever tell how much it will add. In that sense, it involves more risk than going to the gym or filling your GPS tracker with explosive movements. There is no hard data. Winners will often speak about their mentality. But what if the losers had a really good sports psychologist too? Does that mean it didn't work for them?
After
Limerick
's seismic defeat to Dublin in the hurling quarter-final nine days ago it didn't take long for Currid's absence from Limerick's backroom team to come out in the wash. Nothing was said after they beat Cork by 16 points in this year's Munster championship, or after they torched Clare in last year's Munster final.
But when Limerick were masters of the universe, Currid's contribution was regularly lauded by players. Though it was abstract in some ways, all of them felt her input. She applied the cognitive glue.
It is a vivid marker of how times have changed when the defeat of an intercounty team might be attributed to the absence of a sports psychologist. Currid was central to that revolution in attitudes, along with Gary Keegan and Niamh Fitzpatrick and Kieran Shannon and a handful of others.
Caroline Currid's job is to help players get in the right frame of mind. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
When Limerick won the 2018 All-Ireland her name wasn't listed anywhere in the match programme; when they won it in 2023, she was interviewed on The Sunday Game's evening programme, the first time that the sports psychologist from the All-Ireland champions had been interviewed on that show. Another small barrier had fallen.
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The line that has gained traction is that Limerick have failed to win the All-Ireland in the three years when she wasn't on board: 2019, 2024 and 2025. What is usually forgotten is that she was also there in 2017, when Limerick crashed before take-off.
One of the patterns in Currid's extraordinarily successful career is that breakthroughs have come in her second season: that was true with the Tipperary hurlers in 2010, the Dublin footballers in 2011 and the Limerick hurlers in 2018. By then, trust would have taken root.
In 2010, on a training camp with the Tipperary hurlers in Spain, she did a workshop that depended on complete trust. The players were asked to share their biggest fear, and something about their family that nobody in the room would know, first in pairs, and then in front of the group.
'When you went around the group, the amount of f**ked-up sh*t was incredible,' said one
Tipperary
player. 'But it actually made everyone care more for each other. That's where she was going with it.'
It is not a magic potion. Currid spent three years with the Dublin hurlers and a year with Munster rugby without any visible success, though individual testimonies might tell a different story.
O'Connell was convinced, though. Currid's role on this tour won't just be about the players.