The real curse that afflicted the Mayo football team was not one uttered by an outraged priest – who was, the story goes, supposedly incensed by the 1951 winning team’s failure to pay respect to a funeral – it was the curse of expectation of failure. This is what saw them lose repeated Croke Park All-Ireland finals over 75 years.
On Sunday morning, every pundit predicted doom for the team. It seemed that the only people in the country not paying heed to the curse were the Mayo team themselves.
During the prematch parade, Kobe McDonald’s broad grin let their secret out. What did that grin say? First, that there was no expectation monkey on their back. As 25-year-old player Jack Carney recounted the words of manager Andy Moran to the young team: “You’re not carrying that baggage ... this is your team ... you make your own history.”
The second thing that McDonald’s grin told us was: “We’re playing to enjoy as much as to win.”
Long-suffering Mayo fan explains his viral moment of unrestrained joy: ‘The emotions broke’
Mayo’s Kobe McDonald: ‘I’m sure there’ll be a time in the future where I’ll be home’
National Museum employee (44) remanded in custody after bomb charge
Revolut to give Irish users access to private market investment funds
After the match, RTÉ’s Marty Morrissey asked McDonald if he had been nervous: “Sure, every pitch is the same. It has two goals at the end of it,” the recent Leaving Cert student replied.
Seventeen minutes into the game, it was 1-5 for Kerry to 0-1 for Mayo. Across the nation, watchers sighed and levered themselves from their sofas to forage in the biscuit cupboard. Ah sure, the script is written, Kerry are all over them.
But there was no script shaping these young Mayo brains down in the emotional cauldron of Croke Park. They were free of the curse of expectation and liberated by playing for the sheer joy of it – and to win, of course.
Compare this with the England soccer team after they went 1-0 up against Argentina in the World Cup semi-final. Suddenly, their mindsets were reprogrammed to the very opposite of the Mayo mindset. The message they got was: “We’ve got to hold on.”
Thomas Tuchel didn’t just bring on three defenders – he inserted a single line of software code into his players’ brains: “We might lose this.” This is the equivalent of switching a vacuum cleaner to blow rather than suck. It creates a brain biased to scan the world for signs of threat and to skew the brain’s memory banks to recall past failure rather than success.
This doubtless happened in previous Mayo finals, and not just if they were six points down – it would have happened even if they were six points up. Why? Because a mindset anxiously oriented towards threat is a truffle-hound that sniffs out omens of disaster, no matter the objective facts.
And that state of the brain creates chaos in the exquisitely-sculpted neural circuits of elite performers. If Mayo had been in their old curse mode of thinking, after hitting their seventh wide on 53 minutes, they would have seen this as a sign that the old script was playing out. Instead, in this new mindset oriented towards enjoyment and challenge, that seventh wide was seen as a token of their zeal and commitment.
What constitutes success is largely a matter of perception. That seventh wide is a failure if you choose to see it as a missed kick but it is a success if you frame it as evidence of your effort and dominance.
When you define something as a success – and this is largely, if not entirely, under your control – then you slightly increase the chances of a subsequent success. This is called the winner effect.
The winner effect was predicted mathematically in 1951 – as it happens, the last year Mayo won the All-Ireland – but only empirically demonstrated, in the green sunfish of all creatures, in 1968. In an experiment, a sunfish that shared a tank with a smaller fish was more likely to win subsequent dominance contests against equal size fish. In 2017, the effect was replicated in humans: an experiment demonstrated that in tennis matches between two equally-ranked players, whoever won the first set was more likely to go on to win the whole match.
The winner effect works at several different levels in the brain – from the most primitive hormonal processes to the highest levels of cognition. It increases testosterone in both men and women, which in turn boosts the dopamine neurotransmitter. This in turn has a mild anti-anxiety effect that reduces the disruptive effects of too much of another neurotransmitter, noradrenaline.
At the cognitive level, the winner effect is the engine of confidence – that most precious commodity of human endeavour. Confidence – or self-belief that you can do something – has five effects mirroring those of the winner effect: it lifts mood, lowers anxiety, boosts motivation, improves mental sharpness and raises your status in others’ eyes. And if you raise your status in the eyes of the other team – then you begin to dominate them, psychologically and physically.
But there is something even more powerful than individual confidence – collective confidence. This is the belief that we can do something and this is the championship mental quality that Mayo team manager Andy Moran managed to instil in his team.
Collective confidence networks brains together and brain waves synchronise at around eight to 12 cycles per second, especially in the right half of the brain – teams are literally on the same wavelength. Networked brains even carve out a temporary “interaction workspace” in the frontal lobes – a special temporary back-office devoted entirely to the meeting of minds.
Judging by the tearful joy of my Mayo friends, which spilt over to much of the rest of the country, this brain networking extended far beyond the team and into the rest of us as well. Mayo, we owe you a lot.
Ian Robertson is a neuropsychologist and author of The Winner Effect
