Players sole amateurs in the game, says Micko
The All-Ireland winning Kerry footballer and manager says the money pocketed by inter-county managers is undermining the principles of the organisation, claiming “professionals” now dictate the GAA.
“It is still an amateur sport, well the players are still amateurs anyway,” he noted.
“You have a lot of professionals running the game but it is still an amateur sport. I can’t understand how you can call it an amateur sport when you have a certain amount of people being paid and have full-time jobs and then the players are about the only amateurs left in the game.
“Everywhere I went, to be very honest, the first thing I said to my backroom team put in place is have all these players got jobs. The most important thing is that any player has a job to go to on the Monday morning after a game. The first thing I would do is try and find jobs for the lads on the panel who didn’t have one. That is most important. If a player has a job they will be more content and give you 100%.
“The aim for every young fella growing up in Kerry when I was in charge was to play for the Kerry football team. There is no such thing as someone going out looking for a job for you. You had to go and get the job yourself. There was collective training in Kerry that time when I came on board. We went into Killarney three weeks before a Munster final. We were paid while we were in there training and we were paid the wages we would have been getting as if we had been in the workforce. That was professionalism in its own right.”
O’Dwyer, who led Kerry to eight All-Ireland titles as manager, says Sam Maguire is now taken for granted in the Kingdom. Moreover, he is adamant football’s holy grail won’t be venturing south this September, predicting back-to-back glory for Jim Gavin’s Dublin.
“Each year the Kerry footballers are expected to win the All-Ireland and if they don’t they are deemed a failure. You rarely see a Kerry flag about the place these days.
“When I left Kerry there were seven players who had won eight All-Ireland medals each under me. I said I must leave this because I can’t drop these fellas. It was either I went or they went and they had no intention of going so I decided I would go and leave Kerry. My stint in Kildare trumped everything, the county was awash with white, everywhere you went there was flags, they were even cutting up sheets out of beds.”
He added: “Dublin are there to be beaten this year but they will take some beating. They remind me of the Kerry team of 1975. They are a young team, they are coming, they will be around for the next 10 years and they will take some beating.”
On this issue of player welfare, he commented: “Players are really being hauled and pulled here, there and everywhere. Every manager wants to get a bit of them so they can do training with them. There is a lot of pressure on young players at the present time. In my time, you played senior inter-county football and that was the limit...in South Kerry that would be about four games in a year.”
Mick O'Dwyer was speaking for PWC's website www.playerpulse.ie in association with their sponsorship of the GAA and GPA.
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