Bas Man

Questions and Answers. Paudie Butler, the GAA’s National Hurling Co-ordinator.

Michael Moynihan: Most important player qualities? Skill, enthusiasm, intelligence, mobility?

Paudie Butler: “With top-level players there’s another level of awareness that’s not generally in the average player. They’re older than their years when it comes to the game – take a county minor, he’s operating a level beyond club players. He has to, otherwise he wouldn’t progress.”

MM: What do people find out about themselves first as coaches?

Paudie Butler: “When people come into coaching first they have an idea they’ll fix all the players, but they soon find that management is a far bigger challenge – how will they cope with leaving people off the team and so on.

A lot of people aren’t able for that and walk away, and they may blame circumstances or say a team is unmanageable, but often it’s the fact that they’re not willing to stay at it.

I meet people all over the country, however, brilliant people, who have accepted that challenge and say to themselves ‘this is what it’s about, I can’t please everybody but I’ll work away for the good of the game’.

It’s never easy. There are always people who’ll put in a huge effort and won’t make the team, and there’s no easy way to tell them they won’t make it. Players have to be taken off in games, and there’s no easy way to prepare for that as a coach.

Someone might be very good at drills and organisation, but the crunch comes when he has to take off or drop people he really likes and respects. That’s a savage thing to have to do.”

MM: So you can’t be friends with the players you coach?

Paudie Butler: “We’re in a new age. The old way of control-and-command lasted a certain amount of time, but it’s gone now. The majority of people have third-level education and won’t accept control-and-command coaching. You must be very organised now as a coach, with a good backroom team to provide what players need.

Your communications skills must be of a very high order as well. Players may have to travel for an hour to training, putting family and work life on hold, and if you can’t communicate with them the bottom falls out of the whole thing quickly.

A player’s own motivation won’t be enough to keep him going; you’ll have to help him, and that’s a job in itself.”

MM: How do you handle a temperamental but gifted player?

Paudie Butler: “Everyone handles that in their own way. Some people can’t do it. When I look at great coaches, the likes of Mickey Harte and Mick O’Dwyer, Brian Cody and John Allen, they always seem able to fit star players into the system.

Other people want to dominate the situation, though, and that doesn’t work out. It happens in professional sport as well, by the way, so obviously money can’t solve that problem – it’s a matter of human relationships.

My view is that the star player with special gifts has to be fitted in. The trouble is in trying to control and command those players – they’re beyond that approach. They can’t be controlled because of those gifts, so they must be integrated differently, and if that makes another demand on the coach, he needs to meet that challenge.

Remember, the other players need to be brought along with that also, and it may be necessary for the coach to say ‘it’s all about getting the best team out, and if the star gets the limelight, what about it?’”

MM: How do you give constructive criticism to a free-taker who’s had a bad day?

Paudie Butler: “All good backroom teams have a statistician or someone who compiles match stats. Once those stats are used impersonally the player gets to like them; top players crave information, and facts in particular because they’re not a matter of personal judgement.

If a player is shown that he’s had only 50% success from frees you can move on to address the reasons why, whether those are temperament or technical – is he outside his range, for instance? That would become a management issue and the coach could say ‘you’re good up to a certain range but don’t come beyond a certain distance with frees’.

If he has a bad habit technically then it’ll come out on the big days, though for top players they wouldn’t have made it to the big days in the first place with bad habits, generally speaking.

In hurling, generally, I think distance is a big issue – trying for points from distance is a major error, because going for scores from a hundred yards will only come off maybe once in four attempts and hands the initiative back to the opposition.

But that can be a management issue too – if the player isn’t clear about what the manager wants in those situations, then he might just have a pot-shot from one of those frees. That’s why coaching is all about communication.”

MM: What about maintaining discipline when tired or angry with ref?

Paudie Butler: “There’s a psychological element now in hurling that didn’t exist a few years ago, and players must be psychologically aware if they’re going to be successful. In a big game you’re in a circle of focus, but if you’re talking to the referee you’re outside your circle of focus and you’ll make mistakes.

Players could train for five or six years but it can all come down to one day, which demands massive focus. Players need to be intensely calm in themselves while also being physically and mentally on fire, which is an apparent contradiction.”

MM: Is wearing the county jersey as important as ever?

Paudie Butler: “It is, and wearing the jersey in the 32 counties was never as appreciated. The different championships and tiers we have now mean every county can aim to win a cup; they have something to aim for. For individuals and for clubs, wearing a county jersey is massively important – for the Dublin footballers, the Cork hurlers, the Tipperary hurlers. How many Kilkenny lads would kill to wear the number 30 jersey, even if it meant never getting to play for the county?”

MM: Would you join the GPA?

Paudie Butler: “Maybe a big organisation like the GAA showed a small bit of slowness in seeing that player welfare was an important issue and didn’t move as quickly, maybe, as a small organisation.

But the GAA is a massive organisation and change comes slowly. Nickey Brennan tried to work the thing and I suppose under Christy Cooney it’ll happen, the GPA and GAA will come together. Player welfare is crucial, particularly with unemployment rising, because we can’t afford to lose key players.”

MM: Why do hurling teams love Thurles so much?

Paudie Butler: “Two things are crucial in hurling, two things which are an apparent contradiction. One is to be faithful to the traditions of the game and the other is to be innovative and bring nuance to the game. You can see successful counties have embraced that paradox. Kilkenny are faithful to the game but their training methods are fresh and new.

You see it in Thurles. The big thing is that hurling takes over Thurles on Munster final day, the ambience in the Square . . . people who dedicate their lives to hurling love that atmosphere.

When the All-Ireland hurling final is on most people in Dublin aren’t aware the game is on, and in Limerick and Cork you don’t have a total hurling atmosphere in the cities on the day of a game. That exists in Thurles.”

MM: Why do corner-backs get such a bad name?

Paudie Butler: “It’s obvious enough! Their principal job is to be destructive and stop the flow of the game, so they’re everything the supporter of the opposition don’t want. Great corner-backs are subtle and unseen, destructive without being obtrusive. They live by their own motivation, they won’t get great scores or their own recognition, but it’s a hard place to play – the fittest man on a team now is the corner-back.”

MM: Anything you’d change with hurling?

Paudie Butler: “I’d make the penalty one-on-one, with the ball struck before the 20-metre line, with the taker able to put the ball anywhere in that semi-circle.

It’d be great to see, for instance, Ben O’Connor take on Brendan Cummins in that way: both players would fancy their chances. Hurling needs goals. We’ve had a shortage of goals in the last 10 years.

The reason for that is the improvement in fitness and defensive systems. Modern coaches are so astute that they can read their opponents’ systems straightaway.

Also, not enough hurling is being played. Nobody should be gone out of the club championships before the middle of August, that’s key to developing hurling within a county. Having senior teams out of the championship by June is a disaster, there’s no other way of saying it. Those players won’t play nondescript league games, and that can’t help when the whole ethos of a club is having its top adult team playing as long as possible in the championship.”