TIPPING POINT:CLIVE WOODWARD never called them the "All Blacks", always New Zealand. He didn't want his England rugby players to be in awe of their opponents. They had enough on their plate, he reckoned, without pushing against an inferiority complex as well as a black pack. And you can't say it didn't work.

Presumably it was always South Africa too, not the “Springboks”, and Australia, not, “We’re the greatest country in the world, and I’m not bloody chippy about it, mate.”

Woodward’s point is that once you peel away all the mental baggage, and measure your team man-to-man, there is often little reason not to get stuck into these Southern Hemisphere rugby teams and fancy your chances of stuffing them.

Which makes one wonder what Declan Kidney called these All Black rugby gods before Saturday’s slaughter – the “tua” perhaps? It mightn’t be fashionable to say so but Woodward has a point.

Brad Thorn is a titan of the modern game and yet he hardly existed on some Olympic summit peering scornfully downwards at the rest of the Leinster pack. Christian Cullen hardly got Thomond rocking. And it’s not like Piri Weepu is the epitome of athleticism. Yet stick a black shirt on them and plenty of Northern Hemisphere stars react to their opponents like dazzled rabbits.

Hell, only for a myopic ref, an inability to locate a decent outhalf and a suspicion that they couldn’t quite believe what was happening, a stuttering French side unable to beat Tonga would have won last year’s World Cup final as the supposed All Black behemoths responded to the pressure of winning on home soil with all the manly sang-froid of Graham Norton meeting George Clooney at the Forty Foot, sans togs.

It’s a peculiar sporting phenomenon, this tradition and aura bit. For instance, you could stick the runners-up in the Porto Alegre pub soccer league into the Bernabéu – but tell the opposition they’re up against Brazilians, and watch those perceptions change.

This corner once had a pal who was working in Canada and decided to fulfil a long-held ambition by beating her fear and actually sit on a horse. She turned up at a riding school where the tutor immediately twigged the accent and sent her packing – “No, no, you’re Irish. And this is for beginners.”

Before that, your hero here found a long discarded hurley and wheezily appeared for a puck-around at a Dublin park only to be informed to go easy on everyone as I was the only one to have been bred by the banks of the Lee. They were only half-joking, too.

This, you understand, was in the days when Cork won at hurling, and even the sight of a lumbering, beerily unfit Rebel, who even in his prime wasn’t rated a second cousin of a hurler, could provoke feelings of hurling inadequacy even among those who could actually play.

This is a peculiarity in much of Gaelic Games. In fact it is remarkable how so many Irish people’s perceptions of themselves and others are defined by their county teams, an accident of geography largely the result of some arbitrary scrawls on a Whitehall civil servant’s map several centuries ago.

Kerry, for instance, will always be the home of football, the beautiful game played the way it should be played, despite the fact there are plenty down through the years who will tell you there is no hatchet man quite like a Kingdom hatchet man.

And Kilkenny is where hardy sons of the soil perfect their hurling on breaks from tillage farming, despite the reality that most Cats would look at a baler and conclude it must be some sort of 1980s mobile phone app.

The cartoon representations abound, some of them not particularly positive, either.

Mayo footballers are generally regarded as flakier than a Cadbury’s factory, albeit a portrayal aided by many of their players occasionally behaving like they could be stuck into a 99. And all the “nordys” are green Charles Laughtons, just waiting to be offended. Meath breeds ’em thick in the arm, and pretty thick in the head too, and every ref in Wicklow gets stuffed into a boot.

It’s all good fun, except for how deeply the stereotypes can sink in. Have you ever met a cocky GAA type from Longford? Or a similar beast from Carlow? Or someone from Roscommon who isn’t wheedling about 1944 and the “wesht” waking up? Or even a denizen of wee Louth not luxuriating in the anticipation of bitching about Joe Sheridan’s “goal” for the next 20 years.

People buy into the cartoons, like Cavan people being tight, and Tipperary fans being only slightly above piranhas in the food-chain of charm.

In coaching terms the result is often a lot of pseudo-psycho-babble, about belief, and focus, and worrying only about the things you can control and forgetting about stuff you can’t, and all the other micromanaged detail of trying to get players out on the pitch believing they can actually beat the other crowd from across the river despite their forefathers getting tanked by that other crowd 50 years previously.

In some ways the GAA is a perfect illustration of Joyce’s old line about being today what you established yesterday – only with more team psychologists, and exhortations to beelaaaave (sic) for f**k’s sake!

Trying to alter a mindset is damn near the biggest ask in sport, and surely the most maddening for a coach: how to get it into impressionable young minds that the past is irrelevant, while all the time knowing in your soul that it kinda isn’t.

The good news though is that it can happen. Niall Tóibín used to tell the yarn about a Donegal visitor to Paddy Bawn Brosnan’s Kerry pub being told the etiquette of lifting the Sam Maguire and how it was vital to lift the trophy with one hand so the other could be kept free to shake hands with the queen.

“But we don’t have a queen, Paddy,” pointed out the northern visitor. “By Jesus we will by the time ye ever win an All-Ireland!”

And what goes and happens? Donegal go and win the thing. It is 20 years now since they rolled over Dublin but that still stands out as a notable example of backing yourself. And if you want something more modern, then bear in mind the Spanish team which ran out in Gdansk yesterday.

If ever a country spent decades staring into its own complicated navel and foraging around for assurance that its football cojones weren’t a national embarrassment, then it was Spain. A history of underachievement was the polite phrase used to describe a history of choking like a campesino on a big hunk of Andalucian bullock.

But it turned around. It required a vintage crop of players, and steady management of a sort that might seem little more than common sense, but which in football qualifies as Socratic wisdom, but it turned around. In fact it might be treasonous to say so but watching Spain can be a football joy.

So on Thursday it mightn’t be any harm if Trap, with typical Italian football hard-headedness, doesn’t refer much to La Roja. Or if he does, just make it those boys in red. Olé!