Mullally has De La Salle in shape for final charge
WHEN De La Salle ran aground in the Waterford county championship during the summer, they didn’t have far to look for a new voice for training sessions.
Leon Mullally had started with the club as a kid but drifted away when he went off to the University of Limerick.
He had worked with the Waikato Chiefs Super 14 side in New Zealand and having come back to Waterford to set up Elite Training Solutions, he was helping his old club out occasionally.
With confidence down after a group stage defeat by Ballygunner, he approached the De La Salle senior team management and said he felt he had something to offer.
“They gave me a couple of weeks with the team and the lads responded well,” says Mullally. “They were motivated to improve after the Ballygunner loss, we did well in the next round, they asked me to stay on – and here we are, still going.”
De La Salle’s physical strength and conditioning has been notable, particularly in their county final win – revenge over Ballygunner – and narrow provincial victories over Sarsfields of Cork and Thurles Sars.
“We’re limited in that we don’t have a gym in the club so our work is confined to the pitch. When I came in it was clear that the lads were fit after years of training, but I felt they could improve their speed a little.
“The first few weeks we did speed work, and that’s carried into every session. The De La Salle players are big, most of them are over six feet, so they’re strong already. My aim was to try to get them to use that muscle for speed, so a lot of the exercises we do would be used in sprint training – explosive work, not traditional hurling training.
“I’ve borrowed exercises from Olympic weightlifting as well, the ultimate power sport.”
Mullally introduced new exercises gradually and the players’ response was visible: when they beat Ballygunner in the Waterford county final they watched the game on video and remarked on their speed compared to the first championship outing against the same opposition.
“We tend to look at keeping the ball in play, playing at a higher intensity – if an opponent doesn’t gather the ball with his first touch you’ll see two or three De La Salle men on him” said Mullally. “That’s probably a bit of a gamble but we work on it because it came through the lads’ hunger, so we built it into the training.”
Mullally’s experience abroad gives him a wide perspective.
“I don’t think trainers are doing the wrong thing, you couldn’t deny the GAA is behind professional sport, that’s only natural. Inter-county hurlers are phenomenal athletes but professional sportspeople are at a different level. Some of the things they can achieve physically and so on are things that even a top club hurler couldn’t dream of doing.
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just the way things are. But even club hurlers could benefit from gym work in terms of preventing injuries if they’re managed properly.”
There are other lessons Mullally uses from his rugby experiences. “I use that in getting players out of the comfort zone and getting them to see they can do more — we might train harder on the week of a game than teams did in the past, for instance. But at the same time, we work with what we have – we have strong players so we use that in training and in matches. You play to your strengths.”
Playing to your strengths for De La Salle involves John Mullane, but it’s not just about Mullane, says the trainer.
“John’s a superstar, the best the club has ever produced and he takes a lot of watching. That helps the likes of Paidi Nevin and Dean Twomey, the other forwards, who can chip in with their scores – and apply pressure when we don’t have the ball.”
As a trainer the pressure for Mullally is in maintaining the team’s fitness in the gap between games.
“Do you give lads a break or keep them going, run the risk of stagnation? You also have a spectrum of ages, so you individualise it as much as you can. We’re lucky that there’s a huge will to win, to get the hurleys in their hand – they’ll grit their teeth and get through the physical stuff because they know if they work that hard that it’ll pay off for us. We said to them in January, ‘trust what we’re doing, buy in to what we’re doing and we’ll get ye as fit as possible for Clarinbridge’. The fact that we beat Sars after extra-time supported that view.”
In the middle of the pitch before extra-time that day Mullally told the players to trust their fitness again. They did. “It was tight at the end, but we got there.”
Today’s All-Ireland semi-final is another step in the journey.
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