Red tape still divides Ireland’s high performance leaders
Long before he assumed his current job of technical director of the Irish Institute of the Sport, he was performance director of Irish boxing, and a watershed was when in one of his first few days in that job he took a strip of red tape and ran it across the floor of the gym in the National Stadium. On one side of the line lay high performance; on the other side, where all the boxers stood, wasn’t.
He challenged and invited them to take the step. A decade on from Kenny Egan and company crossing that line, Keegan believes the choice remains as simple and as stark for all national governing bodies he deals with. “We’re high performing or not. You’re not going to compete at the top end unless you’re fully in. You can’t be half pregnant on this.”
More and more, that message is getting through to those national governing bodies that the Institute work with. But the thought struck us, what about those sports that don’t fall within his remit? What about the Big Three? You’d have to think Irish rugby crossed that line some time ago. They’ve upped their game this last year or two. As Keegan put it in a part of the interview that wasn’t published last Saturday: “If you’re not going forward, you’re going backwards, so to provide that growth you need a stimulus.”
Joe Schmidt has proven to be that stimulus for a player like Paul O’Connell, a man you would have thought had learned all he could. The great thing for rugby is Schmidt himself is ravenous to find further growth to further stimulate the stimulus that he is.
As for the FAI? For all the honesty and — yes, Joe Brolly — the moral fibre of our international professional players the last two or three decades, as well as the high-profile management that’s been put in place to overlook them, underneath the structures are faulty, the “critical mass” of talent, as Keegan puts it, isn’t of the quantity or quality required.
You would have to doubt too that the way the FAI Council and board of directors as currently constituted is conducive to guarding against group-think and facilitating high performance.
As for the GAA? Well, it all depends on your county.
First of all, it is less a matter of resources or size as of attitude. Take the Irish boxers. In 2004, when they received only a fifth of the grant they applied for, they didn’t have enough money to put their country-based fighters up in B&Bs, let alone hotels. They could easily have scrapped their high performance unit, plans and mindset. What did they do?
The boxers slept in sleeping bags in the gym’s ring. They found a way. And as Keegan points out, the fact Ireland is smaller than most countries means it can get its coaches and service providers to meet up much more frequently and rapidly than bigger, more unwieldy competitors.
When Offaly hurling was in rude health, Brian Whelahan would point out that it was an advantage that they knew just about every senior hurler in the county, that they were less prone to discard him and instead develop him.
It was something similar with Fermanagh football when it was so competitive in the noughties. Counties like that may never be again the Cubans and Russians of the GAA world but by realising and exploiting how their weakness can be a strength, they can be highly competitive again.
It is a popular and common myth in the GAA that every county team is training as hard or as smart as each other. The footballers of Donegal and Mayo will now accept that they didn’t truly know what it was like to really prepare hard and smart until Jim McGuinness and James Horan came along with their red tape in the autumn of 2010.
But what will be interesting in the months and years that follow is whether the high performance culture that they established will continue to grow. Both those managers had uneasy relationships with their county boards, less over club fixtures as to a shared vision as to what high performance is. The reality is a lot of county boards have little understanding or appreciation of what it is. Most board officers just don’t get it; at best, are half pregnant on it.
That is one of the paradoxes of the GAA world. The amateurs in not just pay cheque but mindset get to judge who the high performers should be. That instead of drafting in a Gary Keegan or a Liam Sheedy or a Billy Walsh onto an interview panel, a county board could decide that a high performer like a Kevin McStay wasn’t even fit for interview, as was the case in Mayo a few months ago.
In Kerry and Kilkenny, they get it. In last Saturday’s Big Interview, Keegan observed that the programmes performing best are those where the chief executives and the performance directors cooperate best. When Eamonn Fitzmaurice walked towards the steps of the Hogan Stand last September, he had his arm around the waist of county chairman Patrick ‘Tatler’ O’Sullivan. Ned Quinn has been constantly by Brian Cody’s side, figuratively and literally (On that count Mayo folk may be encouraged that Mike Connelly, brother of Noel, won the chairmanship last weekend at county convention, along with the fact in this column’s time as a service provider to the Mayo senior team, he was one officer who got what Horan’s management were bringing to the county).
In Dublin, full-time county secretary John Costello not only gets and facilitates high performance but is a high performer himself. That the Dublin hurlers will be operating out of DCU’s St Clare’s pitches from here on — cutting out the rows Anthony Daly used to have over a suitable training surface in winter —– is less a reflection of the county’s cheque-wielding capacity as mindset and ambition.
To use the parlance of Billy Beane of Moneyball fame, Dublin are now that worst evil — not only are they big, but they’re smart.
To even compete, you’ve got to get out the red tape — and the sleeping bags if necessary.
