McDonnell: Croker familiarity aids Kildare

The debate rages every year about whether or not Dublin have an unfair advantage when playing at Croke Park but Emmet McDonnell maintains it’s not just the Blues that benefit in this regard.

The Offaly manager must bring his side to HQ on Saturday evening to take on a Kildare team that knows the place pretty well, having been regular visitors to Jones’ Road since Kieran McGeeney took over for the 2008 season.

“I was talking to (former Kildare selector) Niall Carew the day of the league semi-finals and he was saying to me that while Offaly had massively improved from last year, he reckons in terms of fitness, he reckons Kildare had improved massively as well.

“If you add to that the Croke Park factor, Kildare have played here numerous times over the last few years — we’ve played here once in seven years — it certainly doesn’t help the game being here.

“But at the same time, we’re in a good place, we’re training well and we’ll come and have a go.”

McGeeney might point to the fact that he has a number of inexperienced players as well, with the vast majority of the county’s Leinster championship-winning U21 team now part of the senior panel. The league has yielded three Croke Park visits alone this year, however.

Ironically, McDonnell has played a significant role in the development of three of those youngsters and two more of the Kildare panel from their days at St Mary’s, Edenderry.

“Paul Cribbin, Daniel Flynn, the two O’Flahertys (Morgan and Eoghan), Seán Hurley — I’ve worked with those lads very closely. While I know their strengths, it doesn’t make it any easier to stop them. They’re very good footballers.

“We would have spent five years with each of those players; we would have brought them from U14 right through to senior colleges. Seán Hurley, Paul Cribbin, Daniel Flynn all played in All-Ireland ‘A’ colleges’ for us so I’d be very friendly with those guys.

“You could see the way those guys prepared, they were always going to succeed at the highest level.”

McDonnell is hopeful that the experience of playing in the Division 4 league final — which Offaly lost to Limerick to two late points — will stand to his charges but warns that they are a long way behind Kildare in terms of strength and conditioning.

“A few of the lads suffered with nerves (in the final). You could see from the performance levels... we had distances covered that they should have been able to reach and most of them came up 1.5 or 2 kilometres much less than they normally would run. That came down to nervous energy.

“It’s early days yet in terms of how we’re developing. We aspire to the level of professionalism that Kieran has brought to Kildare. We’re looking at them the whole time, trying to learn and trying to improve… we are very early days in our programme.

“We’ve improved but six years versus six months, it’s hard to close that gap straight away but I think we are making headway.

“We’re in a good place.”