The big interview: Cork football’s tsar, Conor Counihan
The Cork County Board project co-ordinator for football sits down in Mallow GAA club and looks around.
“Didn’t we meet here before?” says Conor Counihan.
We did.
When Counihan was appointed Cork senior football manager back in 2008, this reporter headed to Mallow on a cold winter’s evening for a chat about his new post. Here we are on a sunny afternoon and he’s in another new post.
What exactly does a project co-ordinator do?
“A day like today, I’m out and around and meeting the people who are involved and finding out how things are going, what works well and what doesn’t work as well, what we can do better.
“I’m also out meeting people and asking them if they’d be interested in getting involved at various levels, with development squads and so forth.
“I take an interest in the quality of coaching, and how we can improve that, whether we can get good people in to facilitate sessions for other coaches who would be interested in upskilling themselves and improving.”
His arrival as coordinator couldn’t have been timed any better, surely. After a rough spring, Cork’s senior footballers might have won a Munster title and went toe to toe with Dublin and Tyrone in the Super 8s. The minors take on Mayo in the All-Ireland semi-final the weekend after next, while today the U20s look to back up two winning displays over Kerry and Tyrone with an All-Ireland final clash with Dublin.
“The fact that the seniors are still involved in the championship, I’ve been going to a few of their training sessions, and the same with the minors and U20s. You’re trying to establish relationships, really - with the management teams and also with the players, with the various other people in the backroom teams.
“In that scenario, you’re asking questions but you’re also asking what you can do - ‘what can we do to improve things’. I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t pretend I do, if the people I speak to come with suggestions I take those on board and we work on those.
“It’s evolving. Next month the colleges will start off again, so we’ll need to see what supports we need to put in place there, because we’re not as successful as we’d like to be at that level.
“It’s very much on the ground. The big key is getting the coaching right, getting the right people interested. Fortunately, in the last while there’s been an upturn in the performances of the county teams, which has certainly helped. No doubt about that.
“But it’s a slow process. At the end of the day you have to have good, strong structures in place but, like any structures, they’ll be subject to continuous assessment.”
The upside is that rising tide of the footballers doing well across the levels, surely?
It is, but let’s be honest, people are very fickle. The performances of the footballers are very positive in recent months, senior, minor and U20 because you need role models for young people to look up to, and in order to sell the game.
“It’s very positive, but it can be short term unless you build on it.”
Counihan’s careful to underline the autonomy of managers, though; it’s not about imposing a style of play he favours. Having worn the bib himself, he points out that only one person can be in charge on the sideline when the whistle goes: “The role’s far more to do with facilitating the coaching. Talking about styles of play, down the line you’d hope to bring groups together cohesively, but I don’t think you can go and tell a manager, ‘here, this is what we’re doing’.
“A manager manages. He controls things. You’re given the job to manage, drive on with it unless there’s something totally off the wall that you’d ask about.”
When he was managing Cork, the Aghada man often acknowledged his interest in other sports and in finding nuggets in those sports which might be transferable to Gaelic football. He still keeps an open mind with other codes.
“You’d be open to everything, but even if, typically, you’re zoned in on what’s happening in your own sport I think most fellas would keep an eye out. Look at the hurling semi-finals last week — the absolute intensity that the teams brought to those games. If you bring that to any sport you’ve a fair guarantee of success.
“Looking at other sports, rugby, soccer defeat something like Liverpool’s pressing and pushing up on the opposition, you’d break that down and look at it. And that applies to diet, nutrition, strength and conditioning as well, areas where I wouldn’t have the required skill set.
“That’s where the new high-performance manager coming in to Cork will help, because that’s someone you’d hope would have that skill set.
“But having said that, everyone needs to be challenged, myself included. I talk to managers and ask how things are going, I’ll sit down and have discussions with them, and I’d hope that I’m of assistance to them rather than being a pain in the backside.
“Those managers are busy people and they need support. If they need that we’ll give it, but if they don’t need it, that’s fine too.”
So much for the general. What about the particular? What are the specific challenges for Gaelic football in Cork?
“Well, one obvious challenge is the geography of the county. I was talking to Ruairí Deane, he has a two and a half hour drive up from west Cork, and then back, for training. That’s a challenge.
“People mention the hurling and football, being a dual county, but the reality is we have enough players. Look at the minor hurling team. Three or four schools provide the majority of the team. Look at the minor footballers and there are over 20 schools represented.
“You have to look at that and acknowledge that geography is a massive challenge. Can we do it differently? You’d hope so, given we’ve done it the other way for so long. Everything is so intense in terms of training that you have to examine things and ask, ‘lads, is someone sitting in a car for four hours four times a week for training the best way?’
“We hear about the Mayo lads — and players from other counties as well — having to drive home to training, but in many of those cases there might be three or four in the car to share the load.
“A lot of the Cork lads are doing nearly the same amount of driving on their own, which is a disaster. Now, if you’re being driven to training it’s a small bit less of a disaster, even though neither is conducive to top performance.”
Fair enough. What are the challenges within the game, though? Counihan won a senior All-Ireland as a centre-back in 1989 and ‘90 and as a manager in 2010, and when you point out the game changed hugely in that time, he points out the changes since 2010: “The kick-out, obviously enough. That has become massive in a way that it wasn’t even 10 years ago. A whole lot of the game hinges on the kick-out now and that certainly wasn’t the case before.
“It’s still evolving. The blanket defences seem to be dying out, and the fitness levels are moving up significantly.
“I think you also see a big change now in the use of the panel, and in managers saying to particular players, ‘look, go out there and go absolutely flat out for 50 minutes, non-stop, because we’ll bang on another fella for the last quarter’. Even in 2010, you wouldn’t have thought of that.
There’s also the influence of so many people in the backroom. You’ve to be mindful of too many cooks spoiling the broth, obviously, but Dublin in particular have brought that to a new bar, a bar everyone has to try to reach.
Dublin. The shadow from the east falls over every Gaelic football discussion, and has done for some time. Counihan’s Cork beat Dublin on their way to the All-Ireland title nine years ago. Did he see their dominance coming?
“No, I didn’t, to be honest. Looking back now, the numbers were always there if they could get the system and structures right, so logically there was a chance they could dominate.
“But no, I didn’t see it coming when we were playing them that time. There’s an invincibility about them now, and while in all sports that comes to an end, you’d still have to fancy them for this year’s All-Ireland.
“They (Dublin) seem to have stolen a march in terms of conditioning in particular. They have a talented group of players and an astute manager, and they’ve gone ahead. The question is not so much when another county will catch up as everyone waiting for them to drop back a level or two, which tells you something.
“That said, we all thought Limerick were bankers for the All-Ireland in hurling until last weekend. There’s always a game that can turn against you - someone is sent off early on, or a refereeing decision turns something.
“In Dublin, they might point to their U20s coming through, that they’ll fill a gap there, but it doesn’t always work out like that. There can be a lag of a couple of years before lads bed in.
“Their conditioning is incredible, though. I remember talking to (Larry) Tompkins when we were playing, and he was a savage to train. He’d say, ‘they might stick with me for 55 minutes or whatever but I’ll catch them in the last 10’. And he was right.
“It’s so regimented, so professional now, that you’d think it will have to come back the other way. Look at Shane Lowry in the golf, in terms of his approach, it’s refreshing to see that there’s another way, another approach.
“But the level Dublin are at . . . it’s a bit of a mystery how they’ve been able to win so many close games, All-Ireland finals by a point or two. And by that, I don’t mean they were lucky to win those games, because you can’t be lucky all the time.”
Diarmuid Connolly and Dublin this summer: asset or liability?
“My understanding was that a couple of weeks ago Diarmuid Connolly was going to be in Boston and Dublin were rolling away nicely, so is it a distraction for the team, or a distraction from the pressure of going for five in a row?
“A couple of things - unless you’re inside the tent and you know the personalities it’s very hard to call. But Jim Gavin is a very astute manager who has probably weighed this out himself - he’s done an exceptional job in bringing Dublin to where they are at the moment, obviously.”
The flip side is the team that have suffered at Dublin’s hands. Mention Mayo and Counihan shakes his head.
“I’d nearly get sick at those defeats and I’m not from Mayo. But I can put myself in their boots and recognise how devastating it is. I’ve been through it, but not as often as they have. I mean, it’s like a knife in the heart getting up the Monday after losing an All-Ireland anyway, but that way, for instance, conceding two own goals in a game?
You’d love to see them win one, to take away the pain. . They may still be the best equipped to handle Dublin, if they have everyone back.
Time to head back out onto the Mallow pitches. Before he goes out, a final question.
“Do I miss it? I don’t miss it now because I’m engaged in this. Did I miss it for a while? I don’t miss the defeats.
“They were hard to take. I’d nearly have to watch the video of a defeat the same night to see what went wrong and to start the process of working out the reasons. It becomes that addictive.
“People around you get to know those stages, but what’s great then is you might meet someone who doesn’t know who you are and they say, ‘Cork were terrible yesterday, why didn’t they make changes?’
“You have to see the funny side of it. If you didn’t, you’d be in trouble.”
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