Clare and Cratloe to the core
You would think being the county football manager is what you’d be best known for around the place but that’s not how it works for Colm Collins and it’s not how Colm Collins works.
On his phone the voice greeting has him down as simply “Colm from Acorn Hardware Floors”. No surname. In person there’s no pretension either. When we meet he wears the work clothes of someone who fits those floors himself.
Most inter-county managers are either self-employed or teachers. Collins, as it turns out, was formerly a teacher and is self-employed, having long given up the books to set up his own wood flooring business. But there’s an unassuming, likeable earthiness about him that is less Jim McGuinness and more Eamon Coleman, surely the last brickie that will ever manage a team to an All-Ireland.
Then there’s the nature of Clare as well as his own. The night the Clare hurlers were presented with their All-Ireland medals, Collins was enjoying a conversation with a player’s girlfriend when they were joined by a mother of one of the other players. The mother nodded, then pretty much straight away turned her back to him. It was as if Collins wasn’t there. A nobody. The player’s girlfriend copped it and reintroduced him. By the way, this is Podge Collins’ father. Suddenly that other parent was all about him. Oh, Podge’s dad! And Sean’s too, of course! Couldn’t get enough of him then, so she couldn’t, and he couldn’t get away.
Collins smiles recounting that little incident. The initial slight didn’t irk him in the slightest; it amused him even then. But it just went to show: in Clare, Podge and hurling is so big and football is so small.
He’s trying to change that. He’s making a good stab at changing that. After more than a decade rooted in the lowest division in Gaelic football, Clare emerged from it this spring in Collins’ first attempt.
As much as you’d have to put a lot of that down to him, he’d put a lot of it down to the hurlers.
“People were saying to me, ‘You’re coming into the job at a difficult time.’ I couldn’t have disagreed more. I felt it was a fantastic time because it showed what can be done when people dedicate themselves to something. I firmly believe that a rising tide lifts all boats because it jolts you out of your old presumptions and comfort zones.
“It worked that way back in the ‘90s: when the footballers won Munster, the hurlers started to think why shouldn’t they? Now our players are beginning to think, ‘Wait a minute, I know all these [hurling] lads. We can have some kind of success too.”
To get an idea of all the little things behind that hurling success, Collins only had to observe his own house, especially the kitchen.
“The first thing that would hit you between the eyes was their diet. If the pan went on in our house the lads would be throwing their eyes to heaven. A few years ago I’d never heard of risotto in my life. Now it’s something we’re having on a weekly basis. Kate [Collins’ wife] had to learn how to cook it, instructed very clearly by hurling team strength and conditioning coach Joe O’Connor, although Podge is well able to cook too. It’s all risotto, sweet potato, porridge with fruit. There hasn’t been sight of white bread in years. Everything Joe insists they do, they do.”
That’s the thing about Podge. The lad may be quite mischievous, as Shane O’Donnell learned last September when Podge got hold of his phone and twitter account to declare his willingness to avail of all the female attention that would be coming in the wake of his celebrated hat-trick, but he is very conscientious too, sober even.
Podge has always had bundles of energy — his father recalls bringing him to the Gaelic Grounds when he was four and “it was like trying to hold a rabbit in your hands” — but part of the reason he still has so much of it, enough to try and play both hurling and football with the county, is because the lad manages his diet and himself so well.
It’s become something of a delicate — even mildly controversial — issue in Clare, Sean and Podge trying to combine the two games this year. But the way their father sees it, if you understand the two boys and you understand the Cratloe experience it can be done.
Like quite a few people now living in the parish, Colm Collins originally hails from Kilmihil. Back there in west Clare, football is the game and it was certainly his. When he was a kid Tom Downes would bring him and his friends down to a farmer’s field and he’d learn so many of the basics that years later he’d impart to kids himself.
He was the youngest member of the team that in 1980 won their first and only county title. The following year he played for the county, though he wouldn’t play for it again (“I wasn’t a county footballer,” he says bluntly). By the time he was 30, he was no longer playing for the club either. He’d moved to America where he’d work for four years and after a few years back in Limerick he and Kate heard about a plot of land going in Cratloe.
It was close enough to where they were both working and some of the lads he’d won a county with were living in the locality too.
Within a year he was helping out in the local GAA field, taking the U12s in football. There must have been 45 of them on that pitch and then in the picture after the county B final that year. Sean, his eldest, would have been one of them. Podge would also have been there even though he would have been only about eight. There would be some other faces too that last September would make another team portrait: Liam Markham, Conor McGrath, Conor Ryan, Cathal McInerney.
“The golden generation of Cratloe” as Collins puts it, would work out to be a big part of the golden generation of Clare hurling too.
Collins would coach them all the way through in football. “I was the typical coach that they give out about in the GAA,” he smiles, “where your child is with the same coach and if he doesn’t like you, you’re goosed. I’d like to apologise profusely if there was any child I damaged along the way.”
If he had his favourites, Podge and Sean and later Dave weren’t among them. He had a couple of rules when agreeing to coach his own: they could never be captain of one of his teams and they’d never be nominated by him for a club Player of the Year award either.
But as for making the team that was never an issue. They were just too good not to be picked and as it would work out, the team itself was too good not to win either.
“It was great fun, never a chore. It was my game of golf, my bit of fishing. I played a small bit of golf, though I was terrible at it. I’d often leave on the 15th hole and the lads would be saying, ‘Jesus, isn’t it desperate you have to take those young fellas now?’ But I was looking forward to the pitch more than the three last holes.”
Like him, the kids lived for that field. They lived down there, either pucking or kicking a ball. Collins would take them for football, Joe McGrath — Conor’s dad — would take them for hurling. It still worked that way up to last year, both of them over the respective senior teams.
nd, the record would suggest, that arrangement has worked very well too. In football they would contest five straight U16 county finals, winning three; win at minor, then U21, and then last November, win the county senior title too, just like they had in hurling four years earlier.
It’s a formula that has its critics as well all those trophies. Even though the club has won a senior county title in both codes over the last five years, Cratloe keep hearing that they’re going to get caught between the two stools and that their hurling in particular will suffer. Collins doesn’t buy it.
“There seems to be an obsession in the county about us playing both, especially among clubs where there’s absolute acrimony and the football and the hurling can’t get on with each other. But in Cratloe that is not an issue.”
The secret to such success and harmony lies not so much in the relationship between two sports as two fathers. Collins maintains that in all his time in Cratloe he has yet to have a row with Joe McGrath.
They’re not competing coaches: they’re friends, neighbours, fathers. The way they see it, their own kids want to play both. Their kids’ friends want to play both. Why rob them of that opportunity, that distinction, that identity of being the best dual club in the county?
“We have a mutual interest: what’s best for the lads? That’s why it works. When you put the players first then egos go out the window, You think about what’s best for the players. And the players we have love playing. A happy player is the most productive player you can have.”
It helps to be flexible. Collins realises it’s not a case of 50-50. He’s more than willing to literally give the other crowd more than half their share. Podge started only three of the footballers’ eight league games this spring and didn’t play at all in three of them. Sean didn’t feature in the Division Four league final in Croke Park either. In Cratloe the hurlers are similarly given more leeway.
“To hurl you need to be keeping your touch in. So the lads would train more with the hurlers. And if it was a football week a lot of the lads would be down banging balls against the ball wall for half an hour before our training session. The four or five lads that don’t play football, we’ll have Joe [McGrath] working with them down at the other end of the pitch.
“When I lived and taught in Cork for a few years I used to train out in St Finbarr’s. At the time Cork hurling was absolutely blessed with brilliant players yet the Barr’s were winning counties and All-Irelands in both. I’d see them train for an hour in hurling, then come over in front of the club pitch, throw away their hurleys onto the bank and then play football for three quarters of an hour or so.
“There was no problem for them and no problem for us. Other teams might drink after a championship game in their preferred code. Our lads will stay in, rest and recover and get ready to play in the next code the following week. When you have dedicated players it’s not much of an issue.”
It’s Cratloe’s critics he thinks who aren’t taking the longer view. If other clubs don’t come round to the Cratloe way, then football will be extinct in Clare, west and east.
“I sincerely believe because of the neglect of the western seaboard in Clare and Ireland in general that if we don’t have dual players in the clubs then over a period of time we as a county are finished when it comes to football.
“Outside of tourism there is no employment in west Clare. Even proud traditional clubs like Kilrush are now struggling. So people from west Clare, they come to work in Limerick or Shannon and live in Shannon or Ennis or the hinterlands. So if their kids don’t play football, who in Clare will be playing it?”
More immediately there’s a sense that Davy Fitzgerald isn’t entirely comfortable with the Collins brothers playing football, that what he and their father have in place is merely a temporary arrangement. But for now, it appears to be working.
The footballers finally made that breakthrough to Division Three. Sean’s bustling style from wing forward helped make a difference. So did Podge’s vision and playmaking, most notably in the decisive away win up in Antrim.
Their father though, has obviously made the biggest impact of all, especially to their mindset. You can see why he brought Cratloe within a kick of a ball of beating Dr Crokes and winning last year’s Munster SFC club title. Instead of being obsessed with getting out of the quagmire Division Four had become, Collins found that goal too stifling.
He wanted Clare players to think bigger and higher.
“I felt we should have been promoted the last three or four years. We had the players to get promoted; it just didn’t happen for whatever reason. The big thing was to get the players dreaming about playing in the higher divisions and not just about getting out of Division Four. The aspiration has to be to play at the highest possible level you can.
“So we’ve set the goal to get the county back to being a top-16 team like we were throughout the [19]90s, which means playing in Division Two at the least, with an emphasis all the time on constant improvement.”
That’s why he wanted Paudie Kissane as his coach. Kissane hadn’t even announced his retirement from playing with Cork when Collins first approached him but Collins had heard Kissane was contemplating finishing up and wanted to snap him up before he committed to anything else.
Kissane was 29 when he made his championship debut. At 31 he was an All Star and All-Ireland winner. It just shows you what persistence and hard work can do and every night in Clare Kissane’s coaching underlines that.
Other members of the backroom uplift Collins. His liaison manager is one Tom Downes, the same man who coached him as a young fella in Kilmihil all those years ago.
Last year Collins himself was coaching U10s, only in Cratloe, along with the seniors. He can see himself returning to both setups in a few years time — “I’d be quite as happy, it’s just as enjoyable as inter-county” — but by then he’ll have hoped and expected Clare would have made serious strides.
This evening in Ennis they’re all about trying to beat Waterford. The Déise cannot be taken for granted. No one can be, he insists, but adds, especially not Clare.
“I think Waterford have some fantastic players that a lot of teams in the country would love to have. They probably should have beaten Galway last year — in Pearse Stadium. So we’ve prepared for Waterford exactly the same way as if we were playing Dublin. We treat everyone with the same respect. You’ve to prepare, do your business and earn the right to win.
“But I would feel if there was a transfer market in the morning quite a few of our players would be in demand too. You don’t need 15 exceptional players. If you have seven or eight real quality players and then back them up with fellas that are buying into what you are doing and prepared to work their ass off, you have a recipe for success.
“And I think at the moment we have that. Now, time will tell how far we can go but I have tremendous faith in the players we’ve got. We’ve no excuses.”
He’s seeing to that.
