Micko looks to legends to inspire Wicklow

ANOTHER season, another statistic.

When Mick O’Dwyer hunches his way out onto Croke Park tomorrow afternoon, it will be his 54th consecutive year of Championship involvement.

He’s only 34 years a coach though, so when he looks into the eyes of Wicklow players, it’s not his own experience he calls on — it’s those of the legends he’s coached.

“The great players are the ones that had it all — the commitment and the will to succeed. The former ingredients I couldn’t even separate in terms of importance. Even the most willing player has to have the basic ability to fetch and kick,’’ he said.

“I think of (Pat) Spillane. Yeah, I’d still mention him a lot; Maurice Fitzgerald too, Bomber, Mikey and Egan — and in terms of unequivocal commitment, Páidí Ó Sé is the best example I can give to young players.

“Sé would train three times a day. He was totally driven. Where else would you get it?”

One thing’s for sure. With money no object in Wicklow, if Paidi’s desire came in bottles, they’d be wheeling pallets of it into the Garden County.

“We’re reasonably settled,” O’Dwyer explains with that slightly pained expression of his. “It’s taken us along time to weed out a settled squad from the 121 players we brought in for trial. There were several fellas I earmarked early on as certainties, and not one of them made the final cut. So where am I going?” he laughs.

The snide nudges and winks haven’t floated above O’Dwyer either. He knows ridicule awaits if Louth give his Wicklow players a grassing tomorrow at Croke Park. But the maestro is looking at this as a long-term project — or at least as long term as you can get with a manager in his seventies.

“I’ll be here next season as well — it will probably take that long to get us where we should be. It’s only in the last two weeks that we’ve got a real sense of what our strongest 15 or 20 players are. Thomas Walsh will start tomorrow, but he’s obviously missed out on a pile of football that would have been beneficial to him. He has potential though. Real potential.”

nIn the two weeks leading up to tomorrow’s clash with Louth, a whopping €260,000 has been raised to train the county teams from two golf classics.

Most of that money came from a corporate golf classic held at Druid’s Glen last week and organised by the friends of Wicklow footballers, a committee headed by Mr Sean Fitzpatrick, the head of Anglo Irish Bank who is taking over as chief executive of Smurfits from Dr Michael Smurfit.