Canavan has skills to avoid Johnno’s fate
Only two months earlier Canavan had furiously pumped Sam Maguire above his head up in the Hogan Stand, and now he found himself watching Martin Johnson experience that similar marriage of pure elation and relief as he held the Webb Ellis up towards the Sydney sky.
Canavan was just after coming out of a meeting about the launch of a couple of books documenting Tyrone’s All-Ireland breakthrough, and while it would be wrong to say he was rooting for England, he did have a certain admiration for that England team and Johnson which compelled him to delay his return to Tyrone that day.
Just like Canavan himself, Johnson had endured one agonising high-profile defeat after another, only to win it all in 2003, as much due to his inspired captaincy as his inspired manager.
As recent developments would have it, Johnson and Canavan have been somewhat twinned again with their two names surfacing in the latest debate about whether great players can make great coaches.
The consensus is Johnson failed to make the transition. Our hunch is Canavan won’t join him. He certainly won’t be a failed manager anyhow. The difference is he has served an apprenticeship, as much as the Fermanagh job is probably another apprenticeship of sorts for the role he really covets.
In recent days Clive Woodward has revealed that he urged Johnson not to take the England job because he hadn’t coached anyone before. Canavan though, has already coached Errigal Ciaran to two of the last three Tyrone county league titles. In fact, when you look at it closely, he was coaching for over a decade before he ever retired in 2005.
In a book called Choke, Sian Beilock looked at why the best players rarely make the best coaches. In her research, she spoke to the former Canadian ice hockey player Therese Brisson, a member of the gold-winning 2002 Winter Olympics team. Brisson now runs a series of youth hockey camps and finds that given the choice between a skilled PE teacher and a recently retired star, she’ll always favour the teacher.
“The star players know what to do,” she points out, “but they can’t communicate how they do it. Being able to communicate comes from coaching experience, not playing experience.”
In Canavan, Fermanagh will have the best of both worlds — a star player and a teacher. Long before he broke onto the Tyrone senior team, Owen Mulligan was a pupil of Canavan’s in Holy Trinity. Back in the summer of 2005, Mulligan recalled the education he received from Canavan there. “He’d tell you what pass to hit and what run to make, then you’d try it his way and find it nearly always came off.”
That capacity to teach skills and greater game awareness will come in very useful for a team with Fermanagh’s skills base but, more than anything, his star appeal will lift the players’ morale.
Regardless of where they stood on John O’Neill, every player in the county will want to play for probably Ulster’s best footballer ever. Players will return, supporters will again dream, wounds will heal.
It would be wrong for Fermanagh to think one man is going to solve everything. The coaching culture within the county is virtually non-existent in comparison to the one Canavan is coming from and the county board will need to make a few more inspired coaching appointments at other levels to redeem themselves.
They need to think long term with Canavan too. The fact he has been appointed so late in the year means already his team’s preparations are behind their Division Four rivals.
Even the best coaches lose, even the best coaches make mistakes, especially starting out. Mickey Harte won only one Ulster title in his first seven years as Tyrone minor manager. Last week Mike Krzyzewski won his 903rd game as a college basketball coach, making him the ‘winningest’ coach in NCAA Division One history. Yet in his first three years at Duke University, he lost far more games than he won. Fans and alumni wanted rid off him. Duke by the way are known as the Blue Devils. The Blues and powers-that-be in Stamford Bridge could learn from that example before Andre Villas-Boas becomes another rolling head at that club.
Johnson could yet prove to be a top coach. A couple of years ago Matt Williams gave a great interview to Setanta Sports in which he cringed at how young he was taking some jobs. The problem, he said, was that by the time you’ve learned from all your mistakes, you’re stock has fallen. Mickey Harte was fortunate Tyrone saw the bigger picture.
If Canavan is similarly blessed in Fermanagh, Tyrone might be long-term beneficiaries again.
* kieranshannon@eircom.net
