Still Cian to improve

THE memory still triggers a surge of electricity through Cian O’Neill.

His first meeting with Liam Sheedy face-to-face in the Abbey Court Hotel in Nenagh was only minutes old and it was already apparent he wasn’t so much being offered the job of training the Tipperary hurlers as being interviewed for it and that Sheedy was seeking not just expertise but something more elemental.

“Are you ambitious?” said Sheedy, looking O’Neill straight in the eye.

O’Neill, as someone with a first-class honours degree in PE and a lectureship in that discipline, could only respond in the affirmative: extremely so.

“Well, that’s good,” said Sheedy, “because I don’t want anyone around this team that hasn’t got the ambition to win All-Irelands.”

“That blew me away,” says O’Neill, recalling that meeting in the autumn of 2007, “and it set the tone for the Liam I’d know for the next three years.”

O’Neill would make just as fine an impression in his first meeting with the players. Declan Fanning trooped down that day to O’Neill’s workplace in the University of Limerick, and would naturally have had some reservations about how much a former Kildare footballer would be able to adapt to inter-county hurling.

Those doubts were immediately dispelled.

“From day one, Cian brought a total professional outlook. I’d say 90% of the drills and tests he did we had a hurley in our hand. And every day for the next three years he’d have something different lined up for us. That amazed me. It was no way repetitive. Everything he does is with a purpose.”

Fanning was 28, in his supposed prime, when he first encountered O’Neill, yet when he retired three years later with a freshly-minted All-Ireland medal in his pocket, he was so much fitter and stronger than his BC (Before Cian) incarnation.

“Cian made sure you were getting progressively fitter year by year, rather than doing the same old slog and starting from scratch every year. It was so important he stayed on after the management stepped down. Most of the players are now into their third or fourth year with Cian so they’ll reach another level this year, I’m convinced. He wouldn’t be out of place working at Anfield or Old Trafford. He’s that good.”

For O’Neill, it has also been a continuous progression. He looks back on how he was when he first met Fanning and the others, and for all the respect he instantly commanded, he was green in other ways as well.

“The most important thing I learned that first season was the human factor,” he says in that candid, convivial manner of his. “When I’m teaching my students here in UL, whether it’s Sports Science or PE, I say, ‘We don’t teach PE, we don’t coach basketball, we don’t coach soccer — we coach and teach people.’ You need to be able to connect with them to coach them. I came in knowing an awful lot about fitness but I didn’t know what made Conor O’Mahony click, I didn’t know what got the bit between the teeth for Eoin Kelly.

“When we came in, we had a lot of hard work to do because they [the whole panel] weren’t in any way conditioned and in those first few nights I would have looked at Conor and said, ‘Well, he’s going to need a kick up the backside.’ But the other lads told me, ‘Don’t worry; come championship, that’s when he really steps it up.’ And it was so true. Once he got his baseline fitness in and the ground hardened, Conor was a man against boys out there and he ended up an All Star that year.

“That was a valuable lesson. I’d actually said, ‘Are the two of us going to be able to work together? Why isn’t everyone up there at the same pace with Shane McGrath?’ Very naïve on my part. Because everyone has different shapes and sizes. Conor is built differently. Eoin only starts to motor come championship because his body shape and history is different to everyone else’s. It took me that first season to realise all that.”

O’Neill’s own body has had its history. He grew up in Newbridge, one of the country’s great secular sporting towns at the time, and would play soccer with the thriving Newbridge Town in the hugely-competitive Dublin leagues; basketball in National Schools Cup finals with Patrician College alongside his good friend Dermot Earley; as well as football with Moorefield and a host of Kildare underage teams. He played and loved all those sports, too much so as it turned out. At 16 he had to sit out six months of school with a knee stress fracture. By the time he was 18, he had knee surgery for a third time.

“If I was a child again I’d probably do the exact same thing all over again, but if I was a parent of a child and knowing what I know now, I would have specialised in one sport from 16 on. The research conclusively shows that — play as many sports as you can in your formative years because they’ve complementary skills, though don’t necessarily play them all at a high level, but then if you want to excel in any of them, you need to be specialising around 16.

“I’m not saying drop the other sports but minimise them to maybe the one team and reduce the number of teams you play for in your chosen sport as well. At 16, I was playing for three or four different soccer and basketball teams and the Moorefield seniors as well. Recovery is often the key performance indicator that people leave out. They do their strength work, their conditioning, their technical and tactical; they don’t drink, they don’t smoke — but do they rest? I didn’t. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We just didn’t know any better.”

After leaving school, football would become O’Neill’s first-choice sport but even then it was compromised. He would play for UL and the Kildare U21s in the spring, then spend his summers working in a games camp in Mallorca and by the time he’d return Moorefield were invariably already out of the championship. In 2000 alright he was called up by Mick O’Dwyer to the Kildare senior panel only to tear his shoulder ligaments, and then when he was recalled in the winter of 2002 after helping Moorefield win their second county title in three years, he was involved in a six-car collision. For a few weeks it seemed he was fine, lifting weights as normal, but then one day doing the groceries, he and his basket collapsed to the aisle floor. His back would need to have two discs removed and he would never play competitive sport again.

“It’s a regret. In college, I’d go to Spain for the summer because I thought, ‘Ah, you’ll have eight or nine years yet playing senior football, you’ll get back playing for Kildare’, but when the second opportunity came, I had that accident.”

As his muscular physique suggests, he still works out, but only in certain windows. Two years ago he was in another crash, this time the driver of the other car ploughing right into his passenger side, which thankfully was vacant. O’Neill’s first instinct was to move his car to free up the traffic he was blocking but as soon as he did, the other driver sped off. That driver would be later identified but O’Neill would need another two discs removed and every two months or so, his back is seriously put out. Last Sunday was the latest shock of it and when we meet in midweek on the UL campus, he’s still carrying a slight limp. In a few days he’ll be ready to work out again, before the back and the programme will shut down again.

O’Neill knows what his body can and can’t do. It’s his job to know what the body can and can’t do, but if anything, O’Neill sees himself more as a coach than a trainer. In college he took over the UL men’s basketball team before managing the Sigerson team and in 2005 he helped Kilmihil to a Clare intermediate final. A year later at just 27 he was brought in by Mickey Ned O’Sullivan to coach and train the Limerick footballers. Pretty soon, O’Sullivan was publicly proclaiming that O’Neill was the best trainer in the country but for O’Neill it was another steep learning curve.

“You were working with lads who were coming off some great years with Liam [Kearns] and if you weren’t on your game, you could tell from their reaction. There would have been sessions that should have been more challenging and when I should have given the lads more credit but it forced me to become better by working harder.”

Inadvertently, he also learned from Pat Spillane. In 2006 Limerick played a Munster semi-final against Cork best remembered for its sheer awfulness from which only James Masters, by virtue of scoring eight of the day’s measly 14 points, emerged with any credit. The following week, Spillane’s newspaper column ridiculed Limerick’s use of tackle bags in their warm-up.

“I thought at the time it was a good idea to get that physical contact in,” O’Neill says, “but the more I reflected on it after [Spillane’s piece], I said, ‘Well, why are we running into tackle bags when we’ll be running into tackles?’ I never used them again in a warm-up after that.”

So, Spillane was right? O’Neill ponders. “Yes. I don’t think he knows why he was right, because for warming up the body, it was totally legitimate, but from a game perspective, I had lost sight of the wood from the trees. With Tipp now I’d use tackle bags every sixth session or so, for metabolic conditioning — getting tired, getting up, getting tired, getting back up. We’d even emphasise that before a training session. I’ll ask, the teacher coming out in me, ‘Why are the bags out here tonight?’ ‘For specific conditioning.’ Whereas when we’re tackling there is no tackle bag out and I ask, ‘What do we do when we tackle? We tackle.’ We make that distinction. Even the term ‘tackle bag’ is a silly one in hurling because it has nothing to do with the tackle. We just use it so they can hit it, get tired, then move on to a ball and strike, because if you went into a man 10 times in a session, you’re going to flatten his shoulder.”

At the end of 2007, O’Neill stepped down as Limerick’s coach to dedicate his energy to revitalising UL football which was ‘dead’ at the time, but within a week, Liam Sheedy was on to him. O’Neill had trained hurlers before, in UL and Toomevara, and though the optics didn’t look great, it wasn’t a case of abandoning the Limerick footballers for the more glamorous stage Tipp hurling afforded.

“People have often said that I shouldn’t have left Limerick but I had already called Mickey Ned before Liam called me. And the thing about Tipp was it would be just fitness. Planning a physical session is something I can do with my eyes closed, just driving to it, whereas coaching involves so much more preparation and mental energy.”

A lot of thought still goes into his sessions though. Losing to Waterford in the 2008 All-Ireland semi-final in particular prompted serious deliberation.

“That day it felt as if we had been hit by a bus,” says O’Neill, hardly flippantly, considering he’s been involved in two car accidents. “My personal goal after that was to up our contact level — being able to initiate contact and deal with contact — because we were physically bullied that day. It wasn’t that they were bigger or stronger; they were just far more aggressive. So what we said was that the following year we’d make sure that my parts of the session were more ferocious than any opponent could impose on us.”

Now Tipp are top of the pile and Declan Ryan recognises how vital O’Neill had been in climbing that ascent. Selling O’Neill on staying was always going to be relatively easily because of his allegiance to the players but it was all the more impressive when Ryan said in their first phone conversation that as a Tipp supporter who had been in the stand all last year, he wanted to thank O’Neill personally. That humility resonated with O’Neill and he was also touched when Ryan, in the dressing room after the victory over Cork last month, thanked O’Neill and the rest of the backroom staff for their role in helping the team produce such a performance. Ryan’s not as animated as Sheedy but there’s a sincerity and native intelligence about him that O’Neill finds endearing, while only Tommy Dunne’s methodology, not his overriding philosophy, differs from Eamon O’Shea’s.

“There’s a brilliant atmosphere in the camp now,” says O’Neill. “We had a slow start which was inevitable. It was tough to get that balance right between the lads bringing in their own new ideas and then continuing what we’d had before. Since April it’s really taken off. I’d say in the last two months we’ve gone up at least two or three levels.”

O’Neill has looked to raise his own game too. His research in UL demands that he’s constantly reading the latest findings in the sports science journals. This winter he’ll observe and even take a few Collingwood AFL sessions Down Under. Warm-ups in particular intrigue him. Half an hour before football games when his friends still want to be in the pub, he has to be in the ground. Last year before his friends had warmed their seats for Kildare’s opening championship game, he could tell them Louth were going to win. Kildare had only given themselves eight minutes back out on the field before throw-in and those eight had been largely unstructured. Since then he’s observed that Kildare’s warm-ups are among the most purposeful in all of football. He aspires that Tipp’s is the same in hurling.

“My preamble for every warm-up is ‘Why do we do this?’ And the players say, ‘To win.’ It doesn’t matter who we’re playing, what level of competition is, where the ground is, what the conditions are, we’re trying to win, so they’re mindful the warm-up is part of the routine and process of winning. Then I ask, ‘And what invariably happens when we warm-up?’ ‘We win.’”

Since O’Neill’s been on board, that’s invariably just what they do.

Picture: Kieran Clancy