CORK DOUBLE 1990: Conor Counihan and the generation game

The link is obvious. The man who anchored Cork’s defence in the 1990 All-Ireland was on the sideline counselling Daniel Goulding as he took the last kick in the 2010 decider.

Conor Counihan can compare the two eras, but the differences aren’t as obvious as you think. Take training, which we see now as a daily commitment for the inter-county player.

“Even then, organised training was probably two nights a week with the entire team,” says Counihan.

“But you had a lot of players on that team in 1990 who were very self-motivated, fellas who were doing the world of stuff on their own.

“Certainly the likes of Larry Tompkins, Niall Cahalane; these guys would have fit into any era in terms of the work they’d do away from the group sessions.

“What was probably a bigger issue that time was a general lack of knowledge: players now work a lot smarter because that information is available to you now.”

For all the developments since, Counihan believes Cork were ahead of the curve in terms of preparation. They had a qualified man in their corner, after all, in Billy Morgan.

“Billy had come in from a PE teaching background, he’d studied the subject overseas, he was immersed in what was current at the time. If anything I’d say that at that time we were probably slightly ahead of many other teams.

“In terms of general fitness we were always good. You wouldn’t be sure of what others were doing but Billy was very good that way. One point I’d make was that when we were going well it was ourselves, Dublin and Meath, really, and before that for years it had been Dublin and Kerry, so generally the quality has spread out a lot. That makes it far more entertaining, but it also puts an onus on teams to be fitter earlier in the season, and for longer.

“I know when Larry (Tompkins) went to Old Trafford to get a hamstring injury looked at, he’d have brought back stories about what they were doing. You could get information, but you didn’t have, obviously, what you have available now to you on the internet.”

Having the freedom to look up athletes in other disciplines on Youtube was one development. The change in a sport on the GAA’s doorstep was another.

“What made a big difference, I think, in the intervening period, was the professionalisation of rugby,” says Counihan. “All of a sudden you had a full-time, professional sports franchise on your doorstep — not just here, but all over the country, in every province.

“Because of that a lot of Gaelic football trainers, or strength and conditioning coaches if you like, came in from rugby. It was a natural move, but there wouldn’t have been any sense of that back in the late eighties, early nineties.”

This professionalism brought other changes. Take diet: changes in nutrition have been “dramatic”, says Counihan.

“Very dramatic — to be honest, I can hardly face chicken now because I’ve such a disgust of it after being involved for so long. Chicken night, noon and morning, and I mean that. It was like prison, the diet that modern intercounty players face.

“There was common sense when we played, in fairness. Fellas knew what they shouldn’t be eating, certainly, whatever about what they should have been eating. The scales were produced in October and you were weighed — then you’d be weighed again in March or April. I remember one player was half a stone heavier in April than he’d been in October, and that half a stone wasn’t needed in October, let alone April.” Wider changes in the last quarter of a century have also had an impact. Counihan points to the amount of support for players, and how that can be a double-edged sword.

“There’s a lot more structure now compared to then. Time management is a big deal now — in all walks of life — in a way it wasn’t then. There’s support there for players, though, good support; the one point I’d make is whether all of that support affects players’ independence a bit.

“Preparation is a lot more professional, obviously, but the question you’d have is whether players need guidance for everything. The psychological input is huge now whereas in our time it wasn’t; there was motivation, and Billy was very good at that, but there’s more involved now than motivation.

“For instance, in our time you went away down to training whether there was anyone sick at home or anything. That didn’t come into it. Nowadays you’d have to be aware of that, you must know what the circumstances are, whether there’s something you can do to support a player if he’s having a bad day. In our time you got on with it, so you could say the player was more independent. More grown-up? Maybe.

“It’s a wider issue today, whether our kids now are more dependent now than we were at the same age. Where it comes into sport is that you’re trying to develop players who can go out on to the field and operate independently of you; on the field they’re the ones making the decisions, not the manager.

“You can over-coach as well, remember. You need to have a system. Of course you do. No team operates without that. But you must also have players who can take a particular situation and do what’s necessary — to play instinctively as well.”

Empowering players is the holy grail for all coaches, of course. Counihan adds that the hands-on information players can share about opponents is part of that.

“That has all changed. The amount of time that’s put into opposing teams now, the research, is massive. Every opponent is researched. That’s totally different to when we played.

“But that research now involves empowering players, because who better to analyse an opponent than one of your players who’s played against him already? If you get your six backs together, for instance, they’ll know the six Dublin forwards inside out; they’ve played against them, so there’s a wealth of knowledge that’s available and which you’d be crazy not to use.

“That collective approach didn’t really exist in times past — that sense of working in a group. By the same token it didn’t mean everyone was going off doing his own thing, but it was largely a case of individual battles. You beat your opponent, and if you won enough of those battles as a team you’d win. That was a simple enough philosophy, but at the time it was pretty effective. It won a fair few All-Irelands.”

Celebrating wins was different in the double era (“That time if you won a national league game in Roscommon you’d stop on the way home and maybe not get back onto the bus before closing time; that wouldn’t happen now, but at the time it built great camaraderie, great spirit,”) and that brings Counihan to a significant comparison. Is the intercounty experience more or less enjoyable experience now compared to 1990?

“I’d worry about that, genuinely. Do they come in smiling? They probably don’t. Players made significant sacrifices when we played too, but there’s more goes into it now. A lot more, and there’s no point in saying otherwise. If you put in all that time and it goes wrong, then you’re seriously annoyed.

“Life is different in every way now compared to then, obviously. Even your job is very different now to what it was 20 years ago, I’m sure.

“One point worth making is that a lot of players at that time — not just with Cork, but everywhere — were doing physically demanding jobs. They were on building sites, on farms — nowadays a lot of players are in their mid-twenties and they’re still students, which would have been unheard of in our time. But in our time there wasn’t the same need for strength and conditioning because the players were more physically active, and if you went back another 20 years it would be true also.

“Nowadays there’s strength and conditioning even at club level, but ironically enough there was probably never as many people going to the gym, even if it’s just for the sake of looking in the mirror when they’re done.”