O’Shea: game needs ‘hurling directors’
O’Shea, regarded as one of the top hurling coaches in the country, said that such directors would have more of an overview than intercounty managers, who were sometimes under too much pressure to achieve success.
“Something we need to ensure is that the game is healthy, we need to examine what skills are going out of the game and so on. That’s too important to ignore for the health of the game.
“When you manage or coach Tipperary you want to win, but you must also be conscious of what’s gone before you and what comes after you.
“I accept a manager is always under pressure but there’s a bigger picture to be considered by someone, whether you call that person a director of hurling or whatever.
“If you’re the manager of a county minor team and I’m that county director of hurling, I could say ‘you’re doing great but we need to consider this skill or that skill’. There’s a need for some overview.”
O’Shea pointed to ground hurling as a skill that was in decline as the game has changed.
“It’s impossible to get fellas to do ground hurling now because if you do it well you’re still giving the ball away, and when you give the ball away it’s hard to get it back.
“That was a great feature of the game, and the crowd loved it, but if it went to someone thirty yards away who snapped it over the bar you had a problem. So you have to bring in new skills, such as bringing the ball down out of the air with the hurley, which all teams do now.”
O’Shea revealed that Tipperary had used other sports such as tennis to help perfect their hurling skills.
“What we did with the (Tipp) players was a lot of striking the ball. Getting them to hit the ball from any distance to any other player – a long, accurate game rather than a short game.
” One thing we tried, for example, was that I read some books on tennis, about the sound of the ball being struck, so we tried to get them to think about the sound of the strike.”
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