Familiar shape to selection panel suits new coach Allen
Allen, a selector this year, stressed he would not have accepted the role without the continued presence of trainers Gerry Wallace and Sean McGrath.
Though Sean O'Leary won't be involved, Allen has received a commitment from outgoing selector Fred Sheedy and is confident that Patsy Morrissey - the representative of champions Newtownshandrum - will also be available.
"Patsy is a very good organiser and I'm hoping he will stay on board,'' he added. This would mean that Allen would have to name only one selector - with Blackrock's Donal Collins a strong possibility.
Allen favours a change of policy at board level where the manager would be able to name all of the selectors.
"Donal Collins and Patsy are very easy to work with, but when someone from outside is foisted on you, you mightn't get on with him and he mightn't get on with you. I would hope that will change in the future.''
Allen is adamant that he wants the back room staff which delivered All-Ireland glory to remain in place. Indeed he said it was a key factor in his acceptance of the role as manager.
"Certainly I wouldn't have taken the job, if I didn't have a fairly cast-iron guarantee from Gerry Wallace that he is going to be on board.
"Sean McGrath will be on board to a lesser degree, but will still design the training sessions and the whole programme for the year.
"The two of them were hugely important. I spent a lot of time talking to them, from the time I was asked myself.''
Allen emphasised that the fitness and well-being of the team had been paramount to their success over the last two seasons and would continue to be so. Training methods were very much 'up-to-the-minute' and were largely responsible for players avoiding simple muscle strains and tears. He compared their work to that at the highest level of professional sport cross channel.
"If you go to a Premiership match in England, the players are out on the field for about half an hour before a game, they'll go back in and they are out again within two minutes and the game is on. They try to get up to the pace they need to be at, before the game. It's the same with rugby teams,''
Allen also admitted that his decision was aided by his career as a school teacher.
"I find it very hard to see how, outside of anybody who has an up-and-running business and doesn't need to give time to it, who is retired, or who is a teacher, could take on the managership of a county senior team,'' he commented. "If you're coming from a job in the morning, you're finishing at five or six, going straight to training, getting back home around 10.30 and getting up the following morning and doing the same thing. "I don't know how it can be done and I don't know how the players do it. It's nearly a full-time job.''
He admitted to a belief that the entire selection team would be replaced following Donal O'Grady's decision to step down as manager.
"I didn't think that I was in the running and I wasn't interested in being in the running.
"I had more or less decided with Donal earlier on that when he was gone, we were gone as well."
His only previous experience of management was with the St. Finbarrs senior footballers, for a two-year period in the early nineties.
More recently, he was involved in the tutoring of coaches when a coaching structure for clubs was being pioneered in Cork.
It would be over-simplistic to suggest that it will be just a matter of stepping into O'Grady's shoes, he says. "You still have to go down every night and have a training session that is beneficial to players, that's stimulating and well-organised. There will be a whole lot of time that I will spend on the field that I didn't spend this year and that every coach does.''
As a teacher, he believes that the development of 'people skills' will be of great assistance to him, explaining: "I know the players, I know what kind of people they are. I would hope that I can get the best out of them - that I can manage them properly.
"To a large degree that is what you are doing, you are managing people. Players have private lives and you try to make sure that everything is okay there.
"That's a side to management that goes on outside of the work that you do on the field.''
While he won't plan his approach until the full management is in place, Allen says that he will want to continue the policy in place in regard to dual players.
"That day is gone. We agreed on that last year with the football management," he said. "I don't think that playing the two games at inter-county level works anymore.''
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
