Age remains no barrier for Louth manager Pete McGrath

Pete McGrath has a cold. It’s kept the 63-year-old out of his thrice-weekly runs, with a weekly visit to the big stone at the top of Kilbroney Mountain outside his village of Rostrevor.

It’s kept him from the gym where he goes to pump iron.

But it hasn’t kept him out of the Darver GAA Centre of Excellence as he prepares Louth for life in Division Two of the National Leagues. The first game, by amusing coincidence, is the visit of Down to Drogheda.

It’s hard to know if this is a fourth, fifth or six coming of Pete McGrath. The body and breadth of his work in Gaelic football is unparalleled with success inevitably following through tours of duty with school, club, county underage, county senior, International Rules and his province.

Last July it was felt that he would take a deserved break after a messy and public break-up with a Fermanagh team that declared themselves tired of his message.

From reaching an All-Ireland quarter-final and a credible defeat to Dublin in 2015, 21 of that panel remained for 2017, but context seldom has a place in player heaves.

And yet, McGrath popped up again in late September, named as the new Louth manager as county chairman Des Halpenny wouldn’t take no as an answer in his pursuit of the two-time All-Ireland winner.

McGrath is not married. No children. Retired from teaching, his choice has been to put football at the centre of his life. He belongs to a select band of men including Brian Cody and Mickey Harte that have chosen to go all the way through middle age doing something similar.

They buck the trend of thinking that favours young coaches in tune with the scientific game, heavy on data and technology.

“Everybody is always on the lookout for something new and bright, something that is going to catch the eye and I suppose football management is no different from any walk of life,” McGrath eases into it.

“But it’s the old attitude that you are as old or as young as you feel. If you are doing something that gets the best out of you, doing something that energises you, something that enthuses you, that’s the thing you should be doing.”

By way of a counter-argument, he uses the example of soccer. Martin O’Neill is 65, Arsène Wenger 68, Alex Ferguson continued until he was 72.

The crucial difference is Wenger had his salary reported by Forbes magazine in the region of £8 million per annum.

While at Fermanagh, county board officials would remark how difficult it was to get McGrath to sit down and fill out a form for legitimate mileage expenses. Often, they were left blank despite the regular 150-mile round trips.

And yet his leaving has not soured his relationship with sport.

“I am not going to apportion blame, not at all. But you move on. Yeah, you can’t be in a place and commit so much of your life for four years and expect just to cut it out completely, because no matter where you go you leave a part of yourself in that place,” McGrath reminisces.

For a time, he thought he might step away completely from the game. He has been a newspaper columnist in the past and acquitted himself exceptionally well in his rare television appearances on The Sunday Game.

His refusal to mouth empty platitudes when shown a replay of Aidan O’Shea hitting the deck in an incident that cost Fermanagh a penalty in a tight qualifier game against Mayo in 2016 also showed that he has no fear of telling the truth to camera.

But ultimately, he’s a sideline animal.

“The game is the game at the end of the day. And for me, the enjoyment, the challenge and the satisfaction of being involved is dealing with players, young players who are intelligent about wanting to play, they have the ability, the ambition and they are committed to investing the necessary time and energy themselves in something they feel and I feel is very worthwhile.

“That kind of enthusiasm, that kick I get from that, that’s still undiminished. Thankfully it is still there and as long as it is there I would like to be involved with Gaelic football at whatever level.”

How long he stays in this latest challenge is anyone’s guess. Fermanagh was four years after having been out for 12 years, during which time he turned down advances from Louth, Meath, Monaghan and also a third-party approach from Dublin.

There’s always been the sense of unfinished business with Down. He doesn’t rule out another spin there either.

Sometimes he looks around his village of Rostrevor, admires the people who are working their way through a wish list of things to achieve in life. Bucket lists completed. And maybe he thinks some day he will do something like that, but he wouldn’t know where to start. In any case, it’s something he’s observed, studied and formalised.

“In a lot of cases, the individual manager, when they do reach a certain stage in their life they feel that there are other things to do. Certainly, if you were playing then managing right through to middle age into your fifties, people might think there are things in their life that they haven’t done very much of because of football commitments.

“And some people maybe decide to realign and go in a different direction and that’s great. I might do that myself yet, you wouldn’t know.”

For him, Gaelic football has always been the life-force and the central plank of his world.

“I suppose you could look at anyone’s life and say they have done so much in a certain direction that you could argue they led maybe a narrow existence,” he says.

“Other people have done a whole kaleidoscope of things in their lives in terms of travelling. And that gives them a feel-good factor and that gives them satisfaction.”

He continues: “We are all different but for me, Gaelic football has always been something that gets me out of myself. You are training different nights of the week, you are at matches, you have to give talks here and there and you look at your diary and see it is quite full. All football related but nevertheless you are meeting different people, going to different places.

“So that’s where I have got my fulfilment and how the days of my life have been ticked off. If they are continued to be ticked off like that over the next couple of years then I would be happy with that.”

It’s interesting to hear his take on the differences in the role now, and when he won his first All-Ireland title in 1991.

By way of beginning the explanation, he crystallizes the issue by saying the role now, and the role he had in 1991 are, “two different job descriptions completely.”

He adds, “All managers in the ‘90s would have been hands-on, every training session, controlling everything, basically doing everything.

“We all know now in the modern landscape you have different experts in different fields that are part of a management team.

“The manager is still hands-on, as part of a management team in Fermanagh we talked about what had to be done individually and collectively. But there are more boxes to be ticked.”

The army that it takes to manage a county team has been compiled in Louth. McGrath felt he could only promise Halpenny he would take the job if a top-class backroom was assembled.

Declan Mussen, who trained the county in Peter Fitzpatrick’s term as manager, is back.

A neat bit of symmetry comes with the fact he is a nephew of Kevin, the first man to bring Sam across the border for Down in 1960.

Former player Aaron Hoey is joined by last year’s minor manager Wayne Kierans. Graham Byrne of DCU and Dundalk FC is charged with taking care of strength and conditioning.

“In the ‘90s, that wasn’t the case. You were appointed team manager, you organised training, took training and it was demanding, and we trained every bit as hard as far as I am concerned as teams currently do.

“There’s a lot that’s still the same, but there’s a lot that’s different.”

Ever-changing and adapting. That’s Pete McGrath.