The sunshine set

JOE KERNAN will tell you Armagh were the first GAA team to spend a few days training on foreign soil.

Actually, Sean Boylan beat him to the punch by a full 11 years.

Back in 1991, Dublin and Meath wrote one of the Association’s epic chapters in a four-game saga that spilled beyond the boundaries of the GAA community and entranced the entire nation. Intoxicating as it all was, Boylan decided his players needed a break from the madness by the time Meath and Dublin had drawn the third game.

Recalls Colm O’Rourke: “We relaxed with a weekend in Scotland before the last match, drinking the poor hotel dry of beer the first night and doing the same with the water the morning after, after a hard training session. Many of the squad had … gotten stupid drunk. So bad were some of them that they even got up to sing, which was not a pretty sight or sound.”

Unorthodox as their preparation was, Meath went on to win the third replay but the Scottish venture was seen as just another quirk from the Dunboyne man who liked to dip his players in the Irish Sea and deal with herbal potions.

It was only when Armagh missed out on a month’s training thanks to inclement spring weather in 2002 that Big Joe decided to follow Boylan’s trail and stretch his horizons to other shores.

“That left us behind schedule,” Kernan explains. “We thought of training camps in Ireland and we still weren’t guaranteed the conditions so I got onto a company in England and they organised La Manga [in Spain] for us. We’ve been going there ever since.”

When Tipperary won their last hurling All-Ireland in 2001, teams weren’t long in aping Jim Kilty’s SAQ (speed, agility, quickness) fitness regime and the same happened when Armagh won their first Sam Maguire four months after their stint in La Manga.

Five years on and the travel bug has exploded. Armagh were back on Murcia’s Costa Calida for the fifth time in six years earlier this week. Kerry are just back from five days in Brown’s sports club in Vilamoura, while the Waterford hurlers are beating the same track to Portugal later this month.

Cork’s footballers will play their first round Munster SFC match against Limerick later this month before heading back to La Manga.

These are by no means the exceptions. Such trips are becoming the rule.

The Iberian sports and leisure clubs are the most popular destinations of choice, partly because they have realised the potential of the Gaelic games scene. Browns have launched a concerted, marketing campaign to attract more GAA teams while the La Manga club have added specialist Gaelic football facilities to their state-of-the-art complex.

They aren’t alone in their preferences. Kerry picked up some training tips from the Leeds Rhinos rugby league team in La Santa in Lanzarote in 2004, Leicester City have sojourned in La Manga while Vilamoura has hosted the Swedish and Russian national football teams, Fulham, Bolton and Saracens. Monaghan have spent time there too.

Not that the GAA community isn’t spreading the wealth. Meath have been to Prague and a handful of other European destinations, Kildare spent a few days in Sunderland on Niall Quinn’s invitation last week and John Maughan has taken Mayo and Roscommon to the Catskill Mountains in the US in the past few years.

While Meath’s jaunt in ‘91 was spur of the moment, preparations for trips these days begin months in advance. Players need time off college or off work but flexibility is key. When Mayo went to the States in 2004, their college contingent trained in the morning, studied in the afternoons and did another workout at night.

Another potential stumbling block is the cost. Taking 30 athletes and back-up staff abroad isn’t cheap. Roscommon went into financial meltdown not so long ago, Kildare secretary Con Ronan warned that the county’s board’s income has all but dried up apart from its sponsorship revenues and administrators up and down the country are wringing their hands as the costs of running inter-county teams continues to rise.

John Maughan has come in for some criticism in Roscommon recently for even suggesting a trip this year but he claims the figures aren’t all that daunting when the calculators are put to work. “This is where you require prudence in other ways, sound economic management during the year,” he says. “You decide maybe that you won’t go away on other weekends in Ireland so, because guys aren’t claiming expenses for things like that, the cost of the week away is covered. It’s a quid pro quo situation. It doesn’t work out to be that expensive.”

Like any trend though, the trip abroad isn’t necessarily for everyone. Kildare manager John Crofton compared the trip to Sunderland to spending money on advertising — you never quite know what you got out of it.

“I’ll tell you how valuable it was after the Meath match,” he smiles.

Jack O’Connor has no doubt about the benefits. He took Kerry to La Santa in 2004 and Vilamoura last year and, coincidence or not, they ended up winning the All-Ireland both years. Either way he claims their second trip, during a hiatus in the NFL last year, was directly responsible for bring them to a level of fitness where they ended up taking the league title.

Though they trained three times a day while abroad, O’Connor points out the quantity of the work isn’t necessarily the key. After all, teams can and do have seven or eight sessions in a long weekend here in Ireland, he says.

“It depends on what use you make of it,” says O’Connor. “Some people go to these places because they think it’s trendy but you have to go out with a sense of purpose and have specific things to work on.

“We went out with specific football drills as well as fitness drills that we said we needed to work on and you can do that in warm weather. You don’t have the wind and the rain we usually have back here.”

Conventional wisdom seems to be that a week away is ‘as good as a month at home’ but John Maughan describes that as a load of tosh. As the Romans used to say, ‘mens sana in corpore sano’ — a healthy mind in a healthy body, and a change of location after a winter spent pounding the same mucky field can be just as crucial to a summer’s prospects.

A team’s esprit de corps can’t be measured in the way a player’s body-fat ratio or ten-yard sprint time can be, but it is just as important. The opportunity to eat, train and socialise together day after day is an integral part of the foreign camp’s package.

“The nature of an inter-county panel is that you have guys commuting to Dublin or wherever,” says Maughan. “We have Cathal Cregg, Brian Mullin, Karol Mannion in Dublin between college and work. We have six in Sligo IT, others in Galway and Mayo IT, NUIG, another down in Limerick.

“Those guys are invariably arriving into training on the button and are away again that night. You don’t get the opportunity to sit down and say hello. The time away allows you develop that bond. That’s significant.”

While beer is less of a bonding agent than it used to be, letting off steam as a group is just as important and O’Connor, for example, let the Kerry lads cut loose for a night in Portugal last year.

Meath selector Dudley Farrell described their Portuguese trip as “a sort of a holiday-cum-training venture,” where they would “train twice a day and enjoy the nights” but the days of excess like their predecessors enjoyed in Scotland are in the past.

After all, Meath fell short to Down by two points in that year’s All-Ireland final. Times have moved on.