Cork U20 boss Keith Ricken's simple approach: 'It’s about the three Gs — gear, grub and games'
Keith Ricken was at an U7 football blitz a while back, chatting to a pal on the sideline, when he heard one of the coaches roar out an order.
“It was a mentor from the other team shouting, ‘Break the tackle, burst out, find a man’,” recalled Cork’s All-Ireland winning U20 manager. “And I was saying to myself, I might say that to my 20-year-olds but these are fellas who believe in fairies, who wet the bed, do all these things, leave the landing light on until they are 12 or 13.”
There is a cutting simplicity to Ricken and it comes across time and again in a 40-minute chat at the launch of the Eirgrid U20 football championship. Like the yarn he tells about getting the job in the first place, this time last year, an 11th-hour appointment.
“I took over a bit last minute dot com,” said Ricken. “It was a bit helter-skelter and you get to my age and you say to yourself, ‘Jaysus, am I able for this?’ You also wonder, ‘Am I the right man for this job?’ and then you get all these phone calls, about nutritionists, strength and conditioning, there was a list of stuff. I didn’t know what some of the words meant.
“It was overwhelming and even I was like, ‘Christ, I’m overwhelmed by all this, I’m not able for this at all’. And then I just sat back and I wrote it all down, ‘What is it all about?’ And I came back and took a very simple operation and we happened to win the thing out.
“And one of the things I got great pleasure from after we won it was I rang all the f***ing people that had rang me in the first place, ‘What was that stuff about again?’
In other words, making a point that we had a very simple operation and we had very good people and very educated people involved.
Ricken has a wider concern about the GAA generally, not that it’s all taken too seriously but that money is too often thrown at problems that could be solved in other ways.
“It’s about the three Gs — gear, grub, and games, they’re the three Gs and they’re what every young fella wants. In my day, it was G for girls as well but now they’re so focused on football so we’ll leave the girls away for a sec but if you have gear, grub, and games, once you deliver those three things, lads are happy.
“It’s a very simple operation but I can see in parts of the association and with some of the counties, maybe some of the bigger counties and the smaller counties where they’re trying to progress, it’s, ‘more money, throw more money at it’.
It’s costing people a fortune and then at intercounty level that’s going up and up and up and there’s no end to it. It’s like a juggernaut, where’s it going to go? I think as an Association we need to come back to reality.
The ongoing alienation of inter-county players from their clubs around the country is a worry for Ricken too.
“I remember playing as a young lad growing up with Vincent’s and we played Division 1 or 2 sometimes when we got up the ranks, you’d be playing inter-county lads,” he said.
“You’d be playing against Tony Davis, O’Donovan Rossa like, and he’s playing in a league match and next Sunday he’s down in the Páirc. We need to get something like that back, that we’re able to touch it, that it’s tangible, that they’re not outside our reach.”
Ricken reckons he’s been coaching since 1987, ‘with smallies, biggies, useless f***ers, great players, I’ve seen them all’.
It’s why he wasn’t about to buy into the theory around the time of his appointment last year that Cork football was broken.
“I was kind of smirking at Donal Óg (Cusack) the other night on the telly saying it’s a hurling county,” said Ricken.
I travel the county and it is a real good football county too, they love their football. You always have goodwill down there and good will towards it.
"But there was negative talk, it was doom and gloom. For me, there’s always gold in the river, all you have to do is sieve it, it’s just a matter of getting to the right spot.”
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