Kildare all about the marginal gain

The championship clash with Louth is the immediate, mind-focusing goal for Kildare’s footballers but crucially, raising standards of preparation for more sustained, longer-term competitiveness continues.

Kieran McGeeney was moved on after a six-year tenure that brought the Lilywhites from never-rans to serious contenders and there were fears his removal as manager would lead to a less professional approach at senior level.

The underage structures had been solid for some time since the establishment of the development squads, and the results in the quality of player stepping up have been largely positive.

The good news is Jason Ryan has followed in the footsteps of McGeeney in terms of actively raising funds so that the seniors can try to stay in touch as the bar continues to be lifted.

Last week, the Brady Family Kildare GAA Gym was launched in Newbridge. A high-performance centre for the Kildare teams in both hurling and football, it comes as a direct result of discussions aimed at identifying key requirements. A facility for strength and conditioning for all teams from U14 upwards was just one of the things that emerged. It is notable for the fact it is not wall-to-wall weights. Indeed downstairs, there are none at all. What is wall-to-wall is a synthetic grass surface.

“Barry Solan is the head of strength and conditioning and the point he made is that Gaelic football and hurling are played on your feet,” explains Ryan.

“You need a place with space. You need to learn to move. You need to be able to move properly. You need to do as much as we can to prevent injury. And that’s why this place is the way it is.”

A change in emphasis is very evident, with most of the Kildare players having shed muscle in that quest for speed. Ryan shakes his head and smiles when he thinks how much the game has changed since he brought Wexford to an All-Ireland semi-final in 2008.

“There are players that played on the Wexford team and their athletic ability would now stop them from being able to get on a Wexford team. The middle eight now has just gone mental. The middle eight are just machines. But machines that are able to use the ball as well. We want to be able to get around the pitch and we want to be able to move faster for longer. And to do that, some guys have had to lose some bodyweight. And they’ve worked really hard on that. They deserve great credit for it. We have five or six strength and conditioning fellas under Barry and they’re brilliant people.”

Ryan maintains managers have come to the point where they decide in advance to substitute wing-forwards at a certain time in a game, rather than making that call during a match. Unless they have access to GPS during games, when live information tells them if a player has slowed down or covered less ground in the past three or four minutes.

That is the way it is headed but Kildare just don’t have that type of budget at the moment. And certainly nothing like Dublin’s. You get on with what you have.

So now, they possess a Strength and Conditioning centre. They have also had some access to GPS during the year and have improved their match analysis, using the Sportscode software provided by Avenir.

That was the second facet of the pre-season discussions. The third surrounded fundraising and the success in that area has enabled Ryan to aim high in terms of sophisticated performance analysis.

“It will be an improvement from what we were doing compared to the National League from a sports science side of things. You don’t get the benefits necessarily in year one. It takes time to gather all the data and put all the information together to analyse how the game is played, how we need to do things, how we need to adapt.

It won’t mean much to supporters if they don’t win on Sunday but regardless of the result, the overall picture for the future appears positive.