Saturday, November 07, 2009
HE’S got a book out himself, so it seemed a natural starting point. Mickey Harte nods when you ask about the Tadhg Kennelly autobiography controversy.
As a man who’s stood in some highly-charged dressing rooms in his time, the Tyrone manager has some sympathy for the Kerryman.
"I suppose the language used around the incident made it take on the acute nature it did. You ask your players to make a stand for the team — within the rules of the game.
"This statement was outside the rules of the game and the language used to describe it made it even worse.
"It’s been much exaggerated, that’s what extracts from books are for, but it wasn’t well reported by the author in this instance. Nobody would have passed a comment on someone saying ‘we had to make a statement of intent’. If you do that within the rules of the game, nobody will fault you for it.
"But it just shows how words and language can lead you into dangerous places."
In his own book, Harte outlines how Sean Cavanagh came to him before the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork to say he couldn’t play. He’s happy to expand on that.
"That’s part of him I appreciate, that he’d come to me and tell me, and he has to trust me that I’ll deal with that in the right way.
"If we’d won people would probably say we dealt with that very well; we lost, so you could ask questions as to whether I’d dealt with it the right way.
"I have to accept that and examine my own conscience about that, and for the rest of my managerial career I’ll be able to draw on that experience.
"Then Sean has to recognise for himself what was going on with him all year, and was there anything going on that would, with a bit of adjustment, have been different.
"I’d ask myself whether I worked with him enough to identify those things. I’d hope that out of all of this, we’d learn a bit more about ourselves and about working together."
In other areas, Harte is as constant as he ever was.
Take the poaching of GAA players by Aussie Rules scouts...
"That’s a major issue for us. I don’t want to sound like a broken record but we need to focus on our own games, and on bringing those to a world stage.
"What’s the point in bringing Gaelic games to the stage they’ve reached when we haven’t done enough to bring them to the world? Look at the other sports there for the world to see and participate in — sports that are minority sports in the real sense of the word, when we have this brilliant product but we seem to be insular about it ‘because it won’t work anywhere else’.
"It won’t work anywhere else the way it works in Ireland but we must open our minds. What can we do with our organisation? The handballers are showing the way — there were 12 countries involved in the recent world championships, and that’s a game we could have kept in Ireland.
"Why can’t we bring football and hurling abroad? We have clubs all over the globe, but they feel isolated. They often feel they’re ploughing a lone furrow, that they’re isolated from headquarters.
"Why not put more work into them over the next 125 years and create a world series at club level to bring these sports forward? Then we could look back in a century’s time and say ‘that was a great move’."
Harte doesn’t see next year’s All-Ireland winners coming from outside the traditional powers.
"It’s always difficult at this time of year to make predictions, but I don’t think the All-Ireland winner will come out of nowhere next year, if you like.
"I think it’ll come out of the top five teams of the last decade.
"Teams may make a surge and make a statement about themselves, and get themselves to a better place than they’d been, but I don’t see the All-Ireland winners coming from outside the usual suspects."
However, Harte isn’t inclined to use a narrow definition of success. "Success in the real world is about people feeling better about themselves because of something they’ve achieved in a season. If it were just about the winners then there’d be very little success.
"Success takes many forms. Antrim were a huge success last year but they didn’t win anything. They got to a first Ulster final in 39 years and played well in two games against the two previous All-Ireland winners: that’s major success.
"The one thing is that we need to tweak the qualifiers — the two beaten provincial champions should pay the two top qualifiers. It’s not fair to Dublin that they’re the one team who haven’t got a second chance in the last five years. They’re being penalised for being successful. It’s not fair that four qualifiers who haven’t had good seasons end up with the same status as four provincial champions."
- Presence Is The Only Thing by Mickey Harte with Michael Foley (Poolbeg) in the shops now.
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