The Ryan line on how to become an overnight success!

JASON RYAN insists there won’t be any celebrations in Wexford until they achieve their goal of winning the Leinster football championship.

Nevertheless, their great escape act against Meath in Dr Cullen Park at the weekend represents as much a massive achievement for Ryan and his management team as it speaks volumes for the character and ability of the players.

Remarkably, not just Ryan — Cork-born and an adopted Waterford man — but selectors Ger Fox, Pat Barden and Seamus Kennelly have no previous experience of selecting or managing at inter-county level. “I hadn’t been manager of a team before. I helped train different teams at stages,” he explains. “Being a PE teacher you are constantly running teams and taking care of teams.”

Deflecting credit from himself, he says that he is working with ‘some exceptional people’ and with a group of players he feels haven’t been given the respect nationally they have earned.

The input from his selectors has been ‘invaluable,’ he stresses, in terms of tactics, team selection and making changes and he singles out Waterford man Mick Casey for his part in the training of the squad. “At the end of Sunday’s game our players were still going very, very hard and strong. Mick has been wonderful with the players. That was the first phone call I made before I kind of agreed to do the job. I rang him to find out if I was to get involved with an inter-county team would he be willing to come on board with me and he said ‘yes’.

“I then felt more confident about it. It was a case that if I didn’t have him with me, I certainly wouldn’t have approached this job with the same degree of confidence.”

While they share the training of the team, he says it’s doubtful if they would have won the League (Division 3) without Casey’s contribution.

His own view is that ‘a lot of management’ revolves around an ability to deal with people, acknowledging that he would have developed his skills over the course of his teaching career.

“In one of the schools I taught in England, we would have had a huge number of teams right across the board, from cricket and athletics in the summer, to rugby and soccer in the autumn and basketball and your various indoor sports during the main parts of the winter. So, in all of those sports you are looking at different days of dealing with people and trying to get the best out of them,” he added.

Essentially, his message to the players at half-time on Sunday was that they ‘could achieve something’ by playing up to their potential. And, what impressed them most was the way they responded to two very good points from Peadar Byrne early in the second half.

“I thought, this is it now. If they allow Meath to come back into it again we don’t have a hope in hell. Luckily we drove on from there.”