No lessons learned from the old school
With one game to go in the notoriously-competitive Division Two, Donegal remain unbeaten. Once the hardest-partying team in Ulster, they now pride themselves as the hardest-working one.
In Jim McGuinness, they have a progressive manager hungry for success and hungry to develop, not just his players but himself. He’s studied coaching and winning from his time attaining degrees in sports science and sport psychology.
He’s credible and cutting edge.
McGuinness has only one man by his side down on the touchline: his number two, Rory Gallagher. Of all the people he could have chosen, he went with a 33-year-old not even from the county, just one living in it and the owner of an exceptionally high football IQ.
Last season, Gallagher played for Fermanagh. He was not asked back by John O’Neill but if he had, do you doubt he wouldn’t have voted on the setup with his feet? Nor would there be any doubt about how he’d be described, considering the perception of him during his on-off inter-county career with Fermanagh: troublemaker, too big for his boots, “one of the players who got us into Division Four in the first place”.
There has been something honourable about the dissenting players’ reluctance to disseminate horror stories about O’Neill’s management but it has largely backfired. People don’t know what they found so objectionable about the setup, leaving the vacuum to be filled with innuendo, side issues and non-issues.
The dispute has been portrayed as one featuring a group of pampered players no longer indulged with the backup and medical support they enjoyed under Malachy O’Rourke.
Undoubtedly the county board, like most county boards, are financially-challenged now, but Club Eirne, the county’s supporters club, have money waiting to be called on, only to be sidelined by the current setup.
The crux of the dispute is over something that costs nothing — man management.
The dissenting players were not impressed by O’Neill’s tactical awareness or his addresses and found him unapproachable.
Think of all the recent best new managers — Liam Sheedy, Anthony Daly, Kevin Walsh, Jason Ryan, Kieran McGeeney, Pat Gilroy, James McCartan, Conor Counihan, Jim McGuinness...
All the boss, but all approachable, all new school.
O’Neill is unashamedly old school. Upon his appointment, he declared his scepticism towards sport psychology.
“I was discussing this once with Cormac McAdam and he told me that when he was captain and goalie with the county he didn’t need any psychologist to tell him we were losing on the scoreboard!”
A great line to draw a guffaw from your drinking buddies, but could you imagine Jason Ryan saying that?
I should declare that I’m a sport psychologist, and as it happens, the one that worked with Fermanagh, my father’s native county, when they reached the 2008 Ulster final.
Space prevents me from elaborating on how we looked at scoreboards or ‘losing’ during games that hadn’t yet been won or lost — though it’s quite revealing John and Cormac had Fermanagh losing on their scoreboard.
I believe John’s job is safe for this year and in many ways it’s only right it is, after the team’s win over Clare last Sunday. But he should be judged by the results of his team this summer, because it is ultimately the team that he left himself with. Probably O’Rourke’s biggest mistake was the wild turnover of players he oversaw after 2008. Too many panel players were discarded for 2009, and again in 2010. For Fermanagh to be competitive in 2011, the team needed to enter a period of transition married with some stability in the form of the Sherrys and McElroy.
Those departing players have been dismissed as being “the same players who landed Fermanagh in Division Four”. It’s unfair. For starters they still managed to win their first-round Ulster championship game each of the last three years, a trend unlikely to stretch under O’Neill. Niall Bogue was man of the match on the county’s greatest day, the 2004 win over Armagh. James Sherry remains the only Fermanagh man to score a goal in an All-Ireland senior semi-final and only last year was Fermanagh’s best player in their Division Three campaign.
In 2008 Tommy McElroy was a near All-Star and the best newcomer in Ulster. Three years on, he might be finished.
So could the GAA-GPA intervention model; it is too crude, idealistic and unwieldy to deliver a “compromise” in a “dispute” like this; no way in the real world were O’Neill and those players going to co-exist in the same setup.
O’Neill survives because he’s been backed by Barry Owens, who is desperate to play football after three long years away from the game and by a county board whose officers are the salt of the earth but have little idea as to how you coach and compete in the Facebook era, otherwise they’d have found or produced another Jason Ryan or Jim McGuinness last autumn. And until the clubs show some initiative, that’s the way it will stay.
* Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
