GPA founder Donal O’Neill: Gaelic football is all very Steve Davis right now
Stephen Cluxton leads out the Dublin players ahead of the All-Ireland final at Croke Park in 2019. Donal O’Neill says the Dublin management now works like a machine. ‘They’re not putting dummies in there but the reality is I could manage Dublin.’
How do you solve a problem like Dublin?
Depends if you think they’re a problem in the first place. Donal O’Neill, who predicted 13 years ago that one team “will possess the power to change the face of the association completely”, looks on them with admiration and as a symptom of the issue.
“If you’re going to migrate professional principles onto an amateur sport, this is what happens,” he says.
Going back to the maverick years of the GPA in the 2000s when he and Dessie Farrell shared an office close to Fagan’s pub in Drumcondra, he heard enough from the current Dublin manager to know the county were beginning to go about their business in the right way.
“It was clear even at that point that they had people at county board level who were thinking strategically,” recalls O’Neill, who stepped away from the GPA in 2007.
“That’s all it was. They put the structures in place and of course, population growth has worked in their favour but I think people forget how bad it was for Dublin 20 years ago. The GAA thought they would lose Dublin to rugby and soccer and did something about it.
“Dessie has had some of those players since they were U12. The Aussies’ 2000 national development plan for the Olympics started 20 years before because they knew how long it would take to identify young girls and boys and then channel them, train them up and put them through the structures. They saw the benefits.
“Dessie getting the Dublin job was a given. It’s like the Singaporean political system - you know who’s coming next. It works. They’re not putting dummies in there but the reality is I could manage Dublin. But Dessie's probably going to go for the next five years and do what Jim (Gavin) did.
“A lot of county boards think year to year but that’s the problem. What county boards have consistently got wrong is different conditioning programmes whereas Dublin’s have been consistent with DCU and Bryan Cullen and one of the very best, Niall Moyna.
“I suppose it’s now the law of unintended consequences. That job was done brilliantly but Dublin had very good people at county board level. They mightn’t have liked me too much but I respected them. They’ve done their business and they’ve built a castle.”
O’Neill looks on Dublin now not as a team but “an army”.
“I remember sitting down with Dr Liam Hennessy who got into Irish rugby in the late 1990s and he said the training age of the average Irish international back then was zero. They had no weight training or specific training done so he knew it would take him three years to bring a lad from being an outstanding teenage player to a matured, full metal jacket international.
“The Dubs are there now physically and they have the players coming through who are that ready. They’re not a team; they’re an army. They’re way beyond Kerry of the 1980s in my opinion. They’re just an astonishing example of a, let’s call it what it is, professional approach.”
Around five or six years ago, O’Neill's cousin James McCartan was doing some punditry work on a Dublin game and declared they would dominate for the next five years. “He said to me the day after, ‘I f**king lied. I meant 10 but I didn’t want to say it out loud in public because it’s frightening’.”
At the same time, O’Neill knows with such dominance comes monotony. As he coins it, “It’s all very Steve Davis at the moment,” and he has found himself turning off Dublin matches at half-time even against their closest rivals.
The GAA have two choices, he believes: level the playing field or totally embrace the commercial direction they’re going so that everyone benefits. Behind Door No 1? “What do you do to make it more true to what it was? I would strip it of all commercial activity. I would take away all sponsors, almost take the Masters or Wimbledon approach so it’s a very clean slate and you strip away the commercial advantage any one team like Dublin might have. You halt growth and excellence of performance but if you don’t stop that the chisms will grow.”
O’Neill recalls spending time in Australia studying the AFL players union there where they looked to speed up the game as a form of equalisation. “Because the players were so well-conditioned, so powerful, they were seeing a lot of injuries they hadn’t seen before. So they used the rules to tire the players out.
“In the same way, if you want to protect the GAA, you have to make it much less commercial, make it much more social and with that it will inevitably become less appealing and see players drift off to other sports. It’s not my personal opinion but if I was asked to halt it that’s what I would do because it would seem it’s gone too fast for too long.
“It’s never been done - it’s only ever gone the other way but this is the GAA and they do a lot of things that have never been done. The great world reset is going on and for this to happen everybody would need to be happy with where they are at. If this is the level that Gaelic games gets to, I don’t think that anybody would have any great complaints. How much better can it get? It’s very difficult to see.
“But as a spectacle the rivalries are no longer there and how do you get it back? Taxing Dublin is one way of doing it but you need to be very strategic about it and put in rules and regulations but who is going to be the one to put the foot on the break? Nobody.”
And what’s behind O’Neill’s Door 2? Transfers for a start. “Why not let those players migrate further across the country? Okay, you will weaken Dublin temporarily but then in the years ahead half of Dublin is going to be as good as Dublin now. Open it up for the players who may have been on the wrong side of a manager’s decision. There are some phenomenal players coming through some very limited county systems and you would at least be able to seed some fresh talent in teams that let’s be honest have no hope and you might ignite something.”
O’Neill is not sure giving counties more money will work. With his marketing and financial background, he tried to advise the GAA about packaging weaker counties with stronger ones to assist them but his ideas were rejected. Looking back, he wonders if the smaller counties would have known how to use the extra cash.
“I worked directly with some of those counties but God forgive me some of them were clueless. How could they be anything but because they didn’t have anyone in there who knew to go about these things.
“You’ll always get a team who will rocket for a year and shine brightly but you’ll never catch an outfit like the Dubs more than once. The system favours them and to beat them you’d have to take them on the road on a bad pitch and hope they have the worst of days while your team has the best and your team has to be a good one.”
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