Players at ‘tipping point’

Andriú Mac Lochlainn says the demands on inter-county players has reached a “tipping point”.

Mac Lochlainn was forced to withdraw from the Kildare senior football panel this year as he could no longer compromise a personal life that centres around his wife and three children under five years of age.

The Ellistown clubman has been a member of the panel for ten seasons and at 29, remains hungry for success. He has not had permanent employment for some time though and may be forced to spend three months on an Canadian oil rig later this year if that remains the case.

A cabinet-maker and carpenter, who also has a degree in business and recreation/leisure, Mac Lochlainn has been hit hard by the recession. Football had to drop down his list of priorities as the demands of being an inter-county player became too much.

“Football and family life don’t mix and there comes a point in your life when you realise there are more important things than football and in my case, that’s my family,” Mac Lochlainn told The Kildare Nationalist.

“At the start of this year, I had a chat with Kieran (McGeeney) – we’d several conversations on the phone – and I couldn’t commit to the pre-season training. It’s all or nothing with Kieran, not because he’s a b******s or anything, but because it needs to be.

“I haven’t announced my retirement because it’s still in the back of my mind, hoping against hope that I can get back.”

Mac Lochlainn said that between treatment on a pubis problem that has troubled him in recent years and meetings, a training session might require him to be away from home for five hours.

With the actual workload that is involved nowadays, one of the game’s premier man-markers at his peak believes that there will be a reaction.

“Joe Brolly was saying he watched Donegal doing savage training and he’d never seen that in his life. But we’re doing that.

“We’ve been doing it for the last five years and for the first two years it was a shock to the system. It’s been upped every year but we have the base now.

“We’re doing it, but it’s going to reach a point where it can’t go anymore. Lads are compromising work, and you’re totally compromising your social and family life. And there’s no place for rest.

“Managers have no choice in the matter. They’re trying to raise the levels and bring in something different.

“It’s demanding more and more and players will buy into it because they’re brainwashed and want to be brainwashed. You follow it willingly because you want to win.

“But something is going to happen. There are more cruciate problems, knee problems, groins, pubis… there’ll be a tipping point.”

Mac Lochlainn is a huge fan of McGeeney’s and praises his role in turning Kildare into a top eight team.

“It wasn’t so much our level of fitness was a problem but our level of intensity maybe wasn’t where it needed to be. We started doing more weights. Programmes were tailored for us. We were doing strongman stuff, track stuff; we were just getting stronger and faster.

“We did more with the football. We had a very specific game plan. It was black and white. This is what we do, this is how we do it. In this situation, this is what we do. We practised and we just got better and better at it. Geezer also told us what the other teams thought of us. We would have tried to get better temperamentally, be harder to break down and we were a lot more physical.

“That’s the way Gaelic should be played. Maybe to him, that was just the norm but he brought that to us. He worked on the mental side of it that we believed we could beat teams and not worry about this, that and the other. We weren’t going to surrender. He does a lot for players that people wouldn’t see. He would have helped me out a lot too but he would want that to stay unseen. That’s how he is.”