THERE ARE SOME books I remember solely for a certain phrase or two, and last Friday night brought Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to mind.  

Wolfe folded himself into the background of the colour and wooze of 1960s California to shadow a group of road-tripping, acid-dropping hippies who called themselves the Merry Pranksters. 

The Pranksters lived in communes, drank LSD-laced Kool-Aid, listened to the Grateful Dead and generally tried to mould a template for the counterculture. In reality, they were followers rather than pioneers; disciples in thrall to their leader, Ken Kesey, best-known author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. 

The Pranksters, as Wolfe put it, “were held together by the magical cement of Kesey’s charisma”. 

So to last Friday night and Shelbourne, who have been bound together by the utterly unique character of Damien Duff. 

Shels’ title triumph is one of the best Irish sporting stories in a year overspilling with them, and it will be a travesty if Duff doesn’t win the Manager of the Year gong at RTÉ’s end of year awards. 

To state it plainly: the League of Ireland Premier Division is the most difficult trophy to win in Irish sport, and it is hostile to underdogs by design, given it’s a grinding, nine-month and 36-game season in a professional sport where team strength is determined by the capacity to pay wages. While the league may be geared to celebrating all sorts of virtues, romance is not one of them. 

And yet everyone at Shelbourne can now talk with authority about the art of writing fairytales. 

It would have not been possible without Duff, who over this season has fulfilled what Marcelo Bielsa sees as the three roles of a manager: to decide on the tactical approach, to pick the players, and to set the emotional tone. 

Duff’s tactical acuity and coaching chops have long been acknowledged. I wrote a profile of Duff when he joined Stephen Kenny’s Irish staff in 2020 and recall a senior figure in coach education telling me that he had never seen anyone “better with a laptop” than Duff. 

And in the hardscrabble world of the League of Ireland, the manager often doesn’t just pick the players, but signs them too: Duff himself has formed a large part of Shelbourne’s appeal to players.

But it is the third of Bielsa’s roles, setting the emotional tone, in which Duff has distinguished himself this year. 

Shels made a fast start to the season when those with bigger budgets were slow out of the blocks, and when the lousy reality of economics robbed them of Gavin Molloy and Will Jarvis in the summer, they wobbled with one win in 10 games but dug their fingernails into top spot as all those beneath them flailed about, staying just out of reach.

But they could feel the tugs on the hem of their trousers last month, when they lost the Monday night TV thriller against Pat’s and were then routinely beaten away to Shamrock Rovers. Shels then had a 12-day break to stew on the pressure and live with the gnawing discomfort that they were now not playing to win a league title, but not to lose one. Marry that with a dressing room in which some players knew they would never have this chance again, and the Shels squad would be forgiven that they had been caught in a cruelly slow kind of quicksand. 

Duff and his coaching staff have worked hard to cultivate an affinity in the dressing room. They used a ritual called “seven questions”, in which a member of the squad or staff would stand before the group and answer occasionally emotional questions about who they are and what matters to them: such open displays of vulnerability proved a powerful adhesive.  Duff has also drawn on an unparalleled contacts book to motivate his squad: hence why Jose Mourinho provided a few words of uplift ahead of Friday’s finale in Derry. 

But it was amid the stress of the run-in that Duff and his coaching staff distinguished themselves, as they knew when and how to pierce the weight of the atmosphere and relent on their hallmark intensity. 

A video review session of defensive errors against Pat’s was replaced with footage of Paddy Barrett’s face superimposed on Del Boy’s, falling through the bar; a member of the coaching staff rocked up to training dressed as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. 

There is so much bullet-point friendly colour in the background at Shels that The Athletic might open an office in Drumcondra. 

Duff’s decisions have been validated by his squad’s achievement: he provided the magical cement, and Shels triumph is a reminder to celebrate these characteristics in a sport increasingly casual to them. 

The combination of vastly curtailed access and an explosion in demand for content has led media coverage of football to zone in on the tactical side of the game, given this can be measured by stats and analysis and does not depend upon the co-operation of those involved at the game’s coal-face. 

And while that is not to ignore the very obvious importance of tactics and philosophies to the game, the eminence afforded to stats and data has diminished the appreciation of a manager’s softer skills. 

Jurgen Klopp was an obvious genius at this kind of thing, and when asked a few years ago for his definition of leadership, he gave the entirely useless reply that “it’s giving the right advice in the right moment”. 

What’s the right advice? And what’s the right moment? That, it seems, is knowledge accessible only to Jurgen Klopp. 

This is why a manager’s ability to set the emotional tone is such an undervalued thing in the media: it is innate, and is a skill that cannot be measured or forecast, but instead only becomes evident in the aftermath of success. 

Shelbourne’s title victory is a testament to an individual’s unique ability to change people around them for the better. And in times like these, there’s something to be gained from celebrating it.