The Big Interview with Pat Donnelly: How Limerick hurling warmed up and shaped up

Then Limerick U21 manager Pat Donnelly encourages his players during the 2017 Bord Gáis Energy GAA Hurling All-Ireland U21 Championship final win over Kilkenny. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

Before he became a key part of the solution to Limerick hurling, you could nearly say Pat Donnelly was part of the problem — or at least a passive witness to it.

Long before he took up his current role as manager of the Limerick hurling academy, or managed Kyle Hayes and the crew to an U21 All-Ireland title in 2017, he was involved with another Limerick team in that grade.

It would have been back in 2009, the same year the senior team was embarrassed by Tipperary above in Croke Park and which prompted his South Liberties clubmates Joe McKenna and the McManus brothers, Jerry and JP, to support the fledgling development squads scheme that Shane Fitzgibbon had initiated and transform it into a full-blown, market-leading academy.

The U21s had also been unceremoniously dumped out of the championship, 4-22 to 2-13 by Clare in the first round, and as a selector to Leo O’Connor, Donnelly could see the writing had been on the wall.

“I remember we played a challenge match in Newtownshandrum and Cork gave us a hiding. After the match Leo said to the players, ‘Okay, go warm down’ and an official within earshot remarked, ‘Sure ye haven’t warmed up yet!’ And it got a big giggle.

“That wouldn’t happen now. There would nearly be an inquiry as to how you could be so bad. But back then it was the kind of thing that was accepted and you’d nearly have a laugh about it. The culture was different. Players were different, management was different, everything was different.

At the time if you gave out a set of jerseys you’d nearly have to check back and count them that lads didn’t go away with them. But that all changed with the academy.

O’Connor and Donnelly would turn it around with the U21s, winning an epic Munster final in 2011 when not even eight points from play from Cork’s Aidan Walsh was enough to deny a side powered by Graeme Mulcahy, Shane Dowling and Declan Hannon. When O’Connor and Donnelly stepped down at the end of that season McKenna persuaded the pair of them to go straight back down to the academy and take the U14s.

Right away Donnelly could see there was a different ethos that would produce a different breed of Limerick player: McKenna’s stamp was all over it. Donnelly had grown up idolising his clubmate: in 1981 he’d stood in the terrace behind the same goal that McKenna would strike for a second-half hat-trick to wipe out a nine-point Tipperary half-time lead. In 1985 then McKenna had been player-coach to a Liberties team that would contest a county final with Donnelly fresh from being a member of the county minor panel that had won the centenary All-Ireland final.

“Even back then he was fierce organised. He was always wanted things to be a step above everyone else. And the academy was the same thing.

“A lot of setups can find it a struggle to get pitches. Joe had the north campus in UL block-booked from October right through to the end of August, half-eight to lunchtime every Saturday, hail, sleet or snow. When the minors would be finishing up, you might have the 16s ready to go on and they’d share the pitch for 15 minutes. And that went all the way down to the 14s, so you were creating that bit of unity and connection.

“It had to look organised when the players came along. If they’d seen a group of selectors talking and standing up and waiting to the last minute to set up their cones, it would have sent a very bad message. Everything had to be ready because the players would see it.

If they knew someone was going to be there half an hour before training, then they’d come along early as well to puck around.

Kyle Hayes would have been there at that first U14 session. Tall, strapping young fella; even then they had a fair idea that he’d go all the way through with them. But others weren’t obvious prospects: youngsters rarely are. Donnelly distinctly remembers a workshop all the academy’s coaches had with Dr Áine MacNamara, a leading researcher on talent development.

“At the time we had a couple of small lads on our panel who were lovely hurlers but the tradition and mentality in Limerick would have been to favour bigger, stronger individuals. And I asked her, ‘What would you do? Would you let these smaller lads go or would you hold on to them?’

“And I’ll never forget her saying, ‘If they’re good enough, hold on to them. They won’t be small forever.’ And I think that resonated with a lot of us in the room. Peter Casey would be small in stature. He started off on B teams. But the important thing was we held on to him.”

By minor they’d kept a crop together good enough to reach All-Ireland finals in 2014 and 2016, if not enough to win. Donnelly was manager to the 2016 crew coached by Anthony Daly, and the following year then was entrusted to manage the U21s.

“With the minors, Joe’s mantra always was to try to get to Croke Park. Didn’t matter how you got there or even how you did there: it was to get there so the lads could get used to the place. And in hindsight those couple of minor defeats were nearly the best thing that ever happened to those lads. Because the hunger was there to drive on and win at U21 and beyond.”

Everyone’s expectations increased after minor, including McKenna’s. “When Joe asked me if I’d be U21 manager and I said I would, he said, ‘Well, you have the best team in the country — off you go!” 

But while someone else could have viewed that as pressure, Donnelly embraced the expectation and being favourites for every game.

If that was a departure in the Limerick psyche, so was the way they came to manage underage success. After his side swept aside Eddie Brennan’s Kilkenny by six points in that 2017 All-Ireland final, Donnelly referenced the early noughties when Limerick won three consecutive U21 All Irelands and expressed his hope and his belief that the county would “learn the lessons”.

What were they? “Well those U21 days, they were fantastic teams, fantastic occasions, I was at them all,” says Donnelly now. “But it was obvious what was going on, the celebrating. Even at the time everyone knew it was madness. But the noughties was complete madness anyway with the Celtic Tiger and everything that else was going on, so people didn’t even think to stop.”

He lights up thinking of how players blossomed on his beat and how they’ve prospered even further in the senior setup. Lads like Aaron Gillane and Tom Morrissey.

“At the start of 2017 they were left off the senior panel but they came straight into the 21s for a challenge game against Dublin and they were outstanding for us. Aaron would only have been on B teams all the way up along but when I saw him that day, I couldn’t get over how good he was. I think Mary I[mmaculate College] was a big help to him, it allowed him to play with freedom, and I just thought, ‘This fella is unreal.’

Early on that same year we had a meeting in UL and asked if anyone had anything to say. Well, Tom Morrissey stood up and the way he spoke with such clarity and ambition, we made up our minds he’d be the man to captain us that year.

“Now he didn’t hurl out of his skin for us, we took him off in a few matches, but you could just see the drive in him to get better and better.

“I always maintained after we won that U21 All-Ireland in 2017 that Limerick would win a senior All-Ireland before 2020 was out. I didn’t think it would happen as soon as 2018 but I could see with the work we were doing we were getting up to a level that was better than the other counties.

“All those young lads were ready to go and hurl with Limerick. But I believe with the coaching and setup they’ve been exposed to in the likes of John [Kiely], Paul [Kinnerk] and Joe O’Connor has transformed them to a completely other level.”

After Donnelly finished up with the 21s in 2018, his old friend McKenna was on the phone again, asking if he’d become the voluntary manager of the academy, knowing he was just the sort of reliable and meticulous person to do whatever job you give him.

His day job is an inspector with Bus Eireann. In Liberties he’s helped establish their own academy but on a Friday night can be seen with a bib simply helping with the traffic flow in the car park. This summer at 53 he even gave the club’s junior Bs a dig out by coming on at full-forward when they were a man short.

Naturally he said yes to McKenna. And so he continues to co-ordinate the work of the academy, designating different coaches to each team. On January 16 hopefully the county underage panels will be hitting the fields again with them and their parents also exposed to the best practical advice, like the workshop Joe O’Connor gave on lifestyle and nutrition in the Castletroy Park Hotel last year.

They constantly have an eye to and on the future. A day doesn’t go by without McKenna checking in on the phone. Jerry McManus was in Rathkeale only the other night looking at the minor’s preparations ahead of their key Munster Championship semi-final against Cork today, in Thurles, at 1pm. The 21s also face Cork today, at 4.30pm, in the Gaelic Grounds. And then there’s the small matter of a match in Croke Park tomorrow.

“When I was going to matches as a young fella, you’d be looking at the programme and seeing the pen pics of the likes of Tom Cashman and Dermot McCurtain of Cork and all the medals they were coming down with: All-Ireland seniors, U21s, minors, club, Harty Cups. Now the Cian Lynchs and Declan Hannons have that.

“We never had that before. But it happened because we got organised. If we hadn’t got our act together we might have laboured on and got lucky with a good team that might come along and get to an All Ireland but it wouldn’t have been sustained. But now we’ve been in six of the last seven Munster finals at minor.”

They’re warmed up now.