Five minutes and 12 seconds into injury time on Sunday, Troy Parrott scored his incredible hat-trick goal to keep his country’s hopes of World Cup glory alive. In a moving postmatch interview, the player who scored all fives goals in Ireland’s wins against Portugal and Hungary was asked “How did you keep your cool, though? You must have been so nervous”.
Wiping away tears he answered: “Look, I don’t know ... I’d rather have that pressure on me ... and whatever happens will happen ... than to put it on someone else and leave it out of my hands ... I’d rather it be in my hands.”
The nobility of that response – its self-deprecating shouldering of the burden of leadership – nods towards a quality as valuable to this country as many millions of euro of foreign direct investment.
Why? Because it highlights and reinforces what is still a remarkable quality of Irish culture. That is the ability to come together and relate as equals, unburdened by too-tall poppies in our midst. Of course there’s a downside to this quality – factions, splits, tribalism and begrudgery are also features of Irish life, and problematic egos will spring up everywhere. But Ireland still has a way of prioritising human relationships that makes it a good place to live and has been a major contributor to the country’s economic success.
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On December 7th, 2019, then 17-year-old Parrott made his Premier League debut for Tottenham Hotspur under José Mourinho, in a 5-0 win over Burnley.
Six months later, the Dubliner was loaned out to a series of lower-status clubs – first to Millwall, then Ipswich Town, followed by Milton Keynes Dons and Preston North End.
This disorienting series of transfers, combined with a litany of injuries, could have sapped the confidence of many young players – the trajectory wasn’t promising. But Parrott had a stickability and grit that saw him eventually loaned to teams in the Netherlands, where his striking talents were gradually revealed.
And then came Armenia. His team was written off by pundits as an unmotivated and unskilled disaster squad. Then it was as if someone had placed a defibrillator on the team’s chest when Ireland rose up to defeat Portugal and send off the emperor Ronaldo.
Stung into action and motivated to win by a sense that “we” can prove them wrong. Because all at once it was about “we” – not “I”.
Here he was, after his decisive, stunning goal against Hungary, when asked about his individual brilliance in scoring: “this is why we love football ... because things like this can happen ... Look, I love where I’m from ... so this means the world to me ... my family’s here.”
Note the first pronoun is “we” not “I”.
Search for an ego anywhere in the words “because things like this can happen.” This is a person bound into his community, his family and his country with a passion that seems pure and contagious.
Confidence has many roots. Family is central: Parrott’s mother told RTÉ’s Oliver Callan that she had wanted her son to stay living with a family in digs in London until he was 30. As a child, she helped him navigate the challenges of inner-city life through encouraging his love of football.
Confidence also grows out of mastering adversity: the injuries and serial loans as a professional footballer could have demoralised someone with a less secure moral basis rooted in family life.
All these tough experiences would have contributed to him not giving up, as the clock in Budapest ticked beyond the five minutes allocated for injury time. If you get through adversity and failure, you come through mentally stronger. Why? Because you learn not to fear fear.
You find out that moods and anxieties that follow setbacks eventually pass. By keeping going through adversity, you build up mental antibodies that kindle a resistance to despair.
It’s a paradoxical idea: that setbacks can kindle confidence. But it only does so if you keep going through yet another injury, through yet another transfer. And it needs a secure ego – not a lonely, exposed “I” – but rather one embedded in “we”.
Confidence is nothing but a belief – a belief that you can and that the outcome can happen. But this belief has five very tangible effects on the brain.
First, it lifts your mood – it’s like a mini-antidepressant. Second, it lowers anxiety. Both of these improve performance and make you more likely to perform well: Parrott could not have scored that final goal without the self-fulfilling qualities of that belief.
Confidence has other effects. It makes you keep going – it is the very opposite of apathy. It is Hungary, not Armenia. And fourth, it makes you a little smarter because of the increased dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal cortex caused by the confidence. Again, this is a self-fulfilling effect that makes a score more likely because your thinking is sharper.
And finally, confidence gives you status and influence, especially when this confidence is collective – that sense that “we” can do it.
And that’s why Parrott has done his country such service.
I listen to kids from O’Connell Secondary School, near where he grew up, interviewed on radio: north inner-city accents mixed with African, east European and Asian cadences, soldered together in a sporting esprit de corps.
Our children and adolescents, many of them increasingly anxious and fearful of their anxiety, growing up in a polarised world, have in Parrott an inspiring role model we can all be proud of.
Ian Robertson is a neuropsychologist and the author of How Confidence Works and The Winner Effect
