Leaving it all behind

Donal O’Grady speaks to Tony Leen about his decision to walk away from inter-county management.

HE WILL miss it, but not much. No tearful farewells, as the grizzled old coach takes his stopwatch and memories home one last time.

When Donal O’Grady took his leave last Monday after two years in charge of the county’s hurlers, his departure was the essence of timing and simplicity. And without ambivalence.

Thank you, it’s been fun. Good night.

Cork GAA chairman Jim Forbes believes Cork hurling owes O’Grady an enormous debt of gratitude. He shrugs that a pat on the back is better than a kick in the ass, but O’Grady’s real kicks are different.

“The satisfaction is looking back and seeing what we achieved as a group. Some fellas have loads of All-Irelands, but doing it together, proving to themselves they were the best around, that they operated at the top level, is the real satisfaction. The Cork hurlers can say, yes, we got to the top, we were kings of Ireland.”

And their coach?

“Getting them to play a particular way and watching it come together. This isn’t a vindication thing, because that suggests you are trying to prove a point. But it’s nice when something is professionally applied, and it works.”

Such is his relief to be out of armour, it’s a wonder Forbes ever managed to coerce the 50-year-old school principal into a thankless job in the first place.

“I never sought the position,” he re-affirms.

“Had it gone to an interview process, I would never have applied. When Jim Forbes rang me I said was I being offered the job or being asked to apply? When it was offered, I knew I’d look back in 20 years’ time with regrets if I didn’t give it a go.”

He agreed to one year, but stuck it for two, and finished an All-Ireland champion. Anyone who believed he might be giddied by success and hang on for another spin on the carousel doesn’t know O’Grady.

“Everybody associated with the team and the County Board knew that when my term was finished, I was finished. I wanted to announce it now to give the Board an opportunity to do their business in terms of putting a team together for 2005.

“If you allow emotion to cloud your judgement, you won’t make the right decision. And the right decision was to step down after two years. It’s right for everybody. I have my stint done. There may be a moment if we’re picking up the Cup again next September where you’ll miss it, but that’s five minutes. And that five minutes takes many, many hours.”

He hopes his wife might vaguely recognise him after a two-year hiatus - Mary urged him into the second season because she knew he’d regret not sticking with it after the All-Ireland defeat to Kilkenny last year. But there was no need to revisit the debate this time. They haven’t had summer holidays or weekends away for over two years.

“Sometimes when you win, the temptation is to hang in there, but that’s the wrong reason. If you can’t give the job your full focus and enthusiasm, you’re doing yourself and the team an injustice.”

The caricature of a cold, calculating and humourless automaton is something that ... well, humours him. I arrive untypically early for our meeting because he allegedly sent a player home from training for being five minutes late. Being tardy doesn’t seem a good foot to lead off on.

“There’s perception and fact. I’m as passionate and emotional as anybody. I don’t know how I get this cold and clinical image. I’m up for a laugh, but if people think we should be falling around the place at training when there’s work to be done, then they’re wrong. We only have the players for a set amount of time every week and we’ve got to use it properly.”

The evidence of his compulsive (and legendary) attention to detail is altogether more substantial. Cork training ordinarily lasted for two hours, but O’Grady is tailoring sessions from the moment he leaves school. Like matches, no two are the same. When he turns for home at 10 o’clock, only the multi-tasked Jim McEvoy remains.

This season, he enlisted the help of Munster rugby manager Gerry Holland to bring the laptop into the dressing room.

Players found themselves poring over images of themselves and opponents before, during and after training. Anything for an edge.

“You look at all aspects, whether a player would turn onto his left or right. ‘Look, he always does this, let’s work on that’. You are tuning people into what they need to be focusing on.”

He recounts two moments from the final last month against Kilkenny - Niall McCarthy’s levelling point, and Tom Kenny galloping through the middle for the coup de grace. Both were products of the training ground.

“Niall worked a lot on his shooting this season. He went down the wing, picked the ball without catching it and stuck it over. The media were in raptures with DJ Carey’s effort against Clare a few years ago, when the match was over and there was no great pressure. When Niall went for it, the All-Ireland final was on the line.

“One of the most satisfying points was Tom Kenny’s near the end - he came from nowhere onto Joe Deane’s pass. Kilkenny’s defence had been pulled out, and he ran onto it and stroked it over. That put us seven ahead and I knew we had it.

“It’s a thrill to work with players at the highest level because you can do things with them that you can’t with others, because their skill level is so high.”

Cork have come a long way - from the chilling strike action to the thrilling 29th title - in two years.

Mr Forbes recognised that O’Grady would bring an iron fist on board but he was also wowed by his eye for the small thing.

“I wouldn’t see myself as a disciplinarian, but discipline is important on and off the field,” O’Grady insists. (He says the poor time-keeper sent home was not a Cork hurler, but adds these things have to be done “to lay down a marker”).

By the time Cork steam-rolled Wexford in this year’s semi-final, O’Grady had not only learned a lot about his team, but about himself.

“In 2003 I thought we’d win, but I was even more confident this season because we improved our composure under pressure - we were taking the extra split second with the ball, fellas were not diving in and conceding frees. The journey had provided different situations that we were comfortable dealing with.”

This year’s September Road began without their talisman, Setanta, but he was never mentioned.

“Alan Browne went too, he was a huge player for us last year and didn’t get the credit he deserved. Pat Mulcahy’s accident was another blow. But if you are looking back, you are never going to move forward. You play with the hand you are dealt. Christy Ring retired as well. Life goes on.”

As it did after Cork relinquished their Munster title in June. O’Grady, the selectors and the players took a “hammering” in the media for the manner of the defeat. The manager says now it was all about keeping the one-point defeat in perspective, but the sight of people queuing for Tipperary qualifier tickets outside Páirc Uí Rinn was the real tonic for the troops. O’Grady told the players: ‘the real Championship starts now’.

“What we looked at (after the Waterford defeat) was why we only got one score in the last 12 minutes. We got an awful lot of flak about this and that - switches, the extra man etc - after that but the crucial thing was not scoring. We had a chat about the lack of composure with the ball, the fact that we didn’t use it well. We couldn’t get the ball into Brian Corcoran in the second-half.

“There were theories about not using the extra man well, but my belief is that you always hang onto the extra defender, you never make it five v five. Their forwards were all over the place, high on adrenalin and difficult to pin down - but we didn’t use possession well, we hit it for the sake of hitting it at times. It wasn’t panic, but we reverted to ‘get it down the field’ to areas where we weren’t winning the ball.”

O’Grady doesn’t excuse himself for any blame that was attached to the defeat - and blame wasn’t in short supply around Cork.

“The most difficult part is having no control during the game. You prepare everything meticulously, then the whistle goes and it’s impossible. The noise, the speed. Some games go with you, some against you. The change may be made, but could prove more detrimental to the situation.

“When I woke up the following morning, you say, ‘maybe we should have made that change earlier or introduced such a player’. But the game is gone. Hurling can turn on one play - and you’ll miss it some days, you won’t miss it others. It’s the quickest 75 minutes in sport.”

O’Grady points again to the “perception” that he was not receptive to the media, but insists he did his share of “scrums” outside the dressing room in Croke Park. It’s a match day system he has serious issues with.

“It’s an undignified situation. Imagine a reporter turning up at the Man Utd dressing room at Old Trafford and asking for Roy Keane or John O’Shea? You’ll be politely shown back to the media area. Cork’s hurlers are as elite as these players, so we want a bit of space. I made a decision that nobody entered our dressing room. That’s our haven for the day, where the players can be themselves and focus, have time to themselves. You go into these big games as entities - this is us, you drive on or fall together - a sense of togetherness.

“The press has huge power and should be lobbying Croke Park for proper interview facilities. You’d have thought in the planning that something should be set aside for press conferences in the dressing room area.

“We got a letter from the president last year asking us for as much co-operation as possible when dealing with the media, but the GAA itself has never addressed the issue of after-match interviews.”

Undoubtedly, the Waterford defeat and the media pot-shots in Cork galvanised the squad.

There was a ‘closed-hole’ sense about O’Grady’s Cork that he articulates through literature.

“There’s a book I read about the Korean War and this guy who was confined to barracks after being seriously injured by shrapnel. In the dead of night, he sneaked out of hospital to get back to the front line, because his colleagues needed the extra body. He wasn’t thinking about America or the Stars and Stripes. This was for the 12 other guys in the unit.

“I was never really conscious I was representing the county over the past two years. I’m a proud Cork man, but I was only doing my best for this bunch of hurlers.

When the whistle goes in the Championship, you are playing for the fellas left and right of you.”

BEFORE a ball was pucked this season, O’Grady set out to reach a consensus on the club v county issue.

He met with the clubs regarding the senior hurling league and traded April for some breathing space later in the year. It effectively wiped the month out for the county’s hurlers, who only met for a puck-around on the Thursday prior to National League matches. It wasn’t ideal (O’Grady feels Cork can forget about winning the League for some time to come) but it did mean that once they were beaten by Waterford, they had their squad intact, save one local championship weekend, all the way to the All-Ireland final.

“After the semi-final against Wexford, we had a month with the whole panel. That didn’t happen last year. That’s something the County Board must recognise - we had four weeks before the final this year (Kilkenny had five) which allowed us to tailor training and control players.

“But what would have happened if we won the Munster final and had a six-week break before the semi? When would the club games have stopped - probably two weeks before the semi-final - which would not have been enough.”

Tipperary in Killarney was a huge psychological challenge. The old enemy had even ensured their name appeared first on the scoreboard, that they got the preferred dressing room.