It's how you get to lose a soccer match against the 103rd-ranked team in the world and still prattle on about "taking positives from the game" while keeping a straight face.

Not Harrington, though. To him, failure is to be embraced. Relished, almost. At least taken on board and learned from. It is failure that makes the competitor. If it breaks you, then chances are you weren't really a competitor to begin with.

"Rightly or wrongly, I've never found it easy to give praise to anyone who finds success easy, " he says. "They tend not to stay around too long anyway. I've always been a person who's drawn to the people who've earned their success. And by earning, I mean that unless you're prepared to make mistakes and put your head on the line, you're going to get nothing and it's going to be worth nothing. If you don't put your neck out there, there's no glory in winning.

This is just my own personal view on it.

"You will have many mistakes and failures and the higher up you get, the more magnified those failures will be. But they're all worth it in the end because when the good days come, they're made all the better by the memory of those mistakes and failures. I would constantly, when I'm talking to kids or whatever, say that the only way to become good is to make loads of mistakes. If you're looking for average, then try not to make mistakes but if you're looking to be great, you've got to make loads of mistakes."

Nobody needs telling that he speaks from experience. Was there anyone with a passing interest in him or his sport who didn't wear a wide smile last Sunday evening when they heard he'd become the first Irish winner of the Order of Merit for 17 years? The 30th secondplaced finish of his career had finally added up to something other than a statistic as dreary as the sea area forecast. Where some titles are a reward for the mercurial, the outlandish, the stroke of genius, Harrington's Order of Merit is more a testament to the art of keeping going.

"You can't be great at anything unless you explore it right to the edge and if you're going to go to the edge, then mistakes will definitely follow. That's the way it is. If you're looking for the comfort of not making mistakes and not failing, well, you'll finish up mediocre. And that's fine. Some people are happy with mediocre. But reaching greatness requires falling off the edge a load of times and having the courage to get back up and get on with it.

"Your focus has got to be insular in those instances. You can't be looking around you and wondering what everyone thinks of the mess you've just made of things. You've got to learn from it, know what you're doing and move on.

And as I say, once you do that, it makes the ultimate achievement all the better."

In that context, there's a fair chance last weekend would not have happened without the failure of 2002. That was the year he went to Valderrama trailing Retief Goosen by just over 23,000 but never made an impression through a week where he played badly, concentrated haphazardly and yet now remembers almost fondly for how well it stood to him this time around.

"Certainly in 2002 I was trying too hard around there. I was putting emphasis on every shot. Because you're doing that, when a bad shot comes along, your head goes down. Well, not necessarily down but you're certainly disproportionately disappointed in yourself and it only serves to make you try harder on the next one and maybe force it a bit. This time, I really concentrated very hard on getting the mental state right for the whole week in the knowledge that it was so important to get my focus right for the week.

"It's very easy to see with hindsight what your mistakes were and definitely in the last couples of weeks in the run-up to that tournament, I was trying so hard to get myself right.

And because I was trying so hard, I was losing patience and getting agitated on the golf course.

"This time round, last week was a perfect example of how to handle it when things weren't going for me. It was all about patience, about playing my golf, not going for shots that I didn't have to go for. I stuck to my guns the whole week and played the right shot when it was needed. And that really is because of the experience I gained the last time. There's no doubt that 2002 was ringing in my ears in the build-up to the week."

Harrington is obsessed with the mental side of his sport. It goes to make up, he reckons, at least 95 per cent of every professional golfer's game. When he admitted on the Friday night of the 2002 tournament that he'd been distracted at various stages throughout the 76 he shot that day, it was neither the first nor the last time he'd put a poor round down to a lack of concentration. For something so apparently basic to get in his way so often seems to suggest it's a side of the game he struggles with.

Turns out, it's quite the opposite.

"No, I wouldn't agree with that at all, " he says.

"In fact, I would say that my focus and concentration is what has got me where I am and would be well above everybody else's. The reason why I would often refer to a lack of concentration after a bad day is because I know that, for me, it's the single factor that separates a good day from a bad day. Whereas another person will come off the course and say they swung it badly, I will almost always say that I concentrated badly and therefore, I swung it badly. To me, at least 99 per cent of my results are based on my focus while I'm out on the golf course.

"It's my first port of call when I go to analyse a poor round. The first point of breakdown for me is always that I wasn't as sharp as I should have been mentally. That's what happened when I put it in the water on the 71st hole last week. My focus wasn't right and so I swung badly. Another guy will just say he made a bad swing and that's what happens sometimes. In my mind, there's always an explanation. That's what I concentrated on so much in the run-up to Valderrama. Going into it, I kept going on about getting my preparation right and by that I meant getting myself into a frame of mind where I could focus properly."

It's when Harrington gets on a roll about this side of it all that you're struck by why it is that the man you're talking to is the multi-millionaire European number one instead of the journeyman number 75 he thought he'd be happy with being when he set out on tour a decade ago. Where others have spun a career out of finest silk, he's had to find a way to chisel his out of granite. Bit by little bit. Chip by little chip.

"I think it's definitely because I would consider my concentration to be excellent that it seems I go on about it a lot. I study other players to see how they're focussing. Sometimes I can pick out a weakness in another player just by watching how he's focussing during a round and other times, I'd see amazing strength in someone I was playing against without them even knowing it. I've often watched a guy go down the stretch on a Sunday evening and win a tournament out of nowhere and just be blown away by how good he's being mentally.

"That fascinates me. The idea that you can get a guy who's just a normal player like loads of others for most of the year but for this one week, he's a world-beater. A lot of it is clearly down to his mental focus and his confidence. Why is that? That's what I try and find out. I'll watch him then and study him also in the weeks when it's not going so well for him. What's the difference?

"Is it confidence? If it is, then I'm not so sure it's a good thing. Confidence isn't something you can rely on, I don't think.

What I try to do is have the good week before the confidence comes, if you know what I mean. A lot of people wait for confidence in order to do well whereas I want to do well and pre-empt the confidence. If you sit there waiting on your confidence to fall on your head, I think it's wasting time. To me, you've got to work your way through it and find a way to play your shots until the confidence comes."

He knows what's next, of course. The Order of Merit was an end in itself and not the stepping stone to a major it might have been four years ago. But it's unquestionably the majors that matter now. He's missed out on two so far that he knows he had a real shot at . . . this year's US Open and the 2002 British Open.

And while he knows that the approach that won him the Harry Vardon Trophy won't necessarily carry him all the way to the ultimate, if he took anything in particular from last week it was that the handier he goes, the more likely he is to get the trip.

"It's true, there is a distinct difference between winning an Order of Merit and winning a major. It's quite possible to play good golf during the year and get yourself into a comfortable position to win an Order of Merit without coming under too much stress and winning a major is the opposite to that. You've got 72 holes and if you're in contention, there's pressure everywhere you turn. It's a much shorter-term thing.

"But in saying that, patience is still the number one quality you need to win a major. You will always have things go wrong in a major because of the standard of test that it is and the whole idea is being able to judge when to chase and when not to chase. There will be times when you're going to have to take some shots on but the patience involved in knowing when to back off and do the simple things is vital. Patience would definitely be right up there.

"It is possible to get on a roll and gain confidence from playing well that week and sort of win a major from out of the blue. But to be honest, I'm a bit long in the tooth to be winning one that way. It wouldn't really be my style, would it?"

Not really, Padraig, no. And there's probably no point worrying about being the hare when the tortoise thing has worked just fine so far.

RAFFERTY'S STEEP CLIMB TO THE TOP The world turns and what's most noticeable is that the stuff that makes it go round has piled up and piled up in eye-watering increments since Ronan Rafferty (right) put the last Irish hands on the Harry Vardon Trophy back in 1989. When his finalround 71 carried him to a one-shot victory over Nick Faldo in the Volvo Masters that year, it brought his season's earnings to £400,331 (/597,928 in today's money). The /99,472 he earned that day was the biggest first prize he played for all year apart from the /119,486 on offer at the British Open. Rafferty played 25 tournaments in 1989 and needed to win three of them and have seven other top-five finishes to do take the title. By contrast, Harrington played in 20 tournaments, won one and finished in the top five in six others. A sign of how times have changed is the fact that Harrington's one win in the Dunhill Links last month earned him more (/630,566) than Rafferty's whole 1989 season did.