Jim Gavin offered to step down as Dublin boss every year

Each season the former Dublin manager asked if his players still believed in him

Former Dublin manager Jim Gavin
©INPHO/Oisin Keniry

Six-time All-Ireland winning manager Jim Gavin has revealed he asked his players every year if they had faith in him.

Each season the former Dublin boss put it to the panel that if they did not have belief in him to let him know and he would step down.

“When I started when I had Deego (Mick Deegan) and Mick Bohan there to Jay (Sherlock) coming in 2015 and Deccy (Darcy) was with me the whole way, every year we’d stand up and say, ‘If we’re not serving your needs fellas, just say, “Jim, you’ve lost your touch, you’ve just lost your energy. Get rid of me" as such,'" he told the JC/DC podcast, presented by Jonathan Courtney and Diarmuid Connolly.

“But it worked both ways. I’d say to the players, ‘It’s just not for you this year,’ or ‘you’ve lost a bit of focus on what’s required at this level. Go back to the club and try and hit the reset button’. 

"Because your life is defined by those choices that you make. If you want to choose something else, fine - choose something else.” 

Gavin reiterated his fear that Gaelic football is “one rule away from becoming like Australian Rules”. His opposition to a number of recent rule changes is well known. He believes problems in the game stem from the failure to properly define the tackle and insists the advanced mark has not improved the game.

“Some of the rules they have introduced, the more recent one with the forward mark, I think was the wrong step and we’re only one rule away from becoming Australian Rules on a rectangle pitch. If we introduce tackling as in rugby tackling the ball carrier what difference is there from Aussie Rules because you can call a mark from a kick-out, call a mark both offensively and defensively once it’s kicked into the scoring zone in an attacking play.

“There is a fine line and of course we want to promote skills and the kick-out mark has been good but the reason they introduced that was because they weren’t enforcing the tackle and the tackle isn’t really well defined in football. That’s the root cause of it. 

"So why are guys when they win a kick-out being mauled? It’s because they can get away with it, it’s because the tackle is so ill-defined so there is a little bit of work to be done on that.” 

Gavin acknowledges the amount of research done by the standing playing rules committee in recommending such rule changes but suggests they are basing their proposals on symptoms, not the whole picture.

"Rules will change and I understand that will always be an evolution but what I don’t understand is the logic behind them,” says the assistant director of the Irish Aviation Authority. “So when I see some of the rules committees and even the current one giving statistics behind games, it’s like me doing an air accident investigation and just looking at the flight data recorder and the flight data recorder is going to tell me everything that went on in the flight.

“You need the cockpit voice recorder, I need to know the training the pilot has been under, I need to know the organisation culture, the environment, the value set and that will inform me what the root cause of the accident was.

“I don’t think we have gone in deep enough to see what the root cause is of a particular style of play. Why do Dublin play that position game and stretch teams and probe them? Because six forwards are marked, six of their (opposition) players have blended into zone defence and probably a couple more as well.” 

The 49-year-old admits disappointment he was not able to help some Dublin players become as good as they might have been. 

“There is a whole heap of players, we already mentioned Gary Sweeney, even for me Emmet Ó Conghaile, that I didn’t make them realise their potential and that’s the real disappointment bit.” 

The JC/DC Am Seó podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes and Google podcasts.