Richard Thornton on the role of ‘guided discovery’ in Kilcoo's success

Richard Thornton. Photo by Oliver McVeigh/Sportsfile

Of all the storylines drawn from the well of Tyrone’s All-Ireland breakthrough in 2003, there is an interesting subplot still left to be told; those left behind.

That band includes Richard Thornton. When Mickey Harte was gobbling up underage All-Irelands with Tyrone, Thornton was another diamond shining bright among the Brian McGuigans, Stephen O’Neills, and Owen Mulligans.

But in an Ulster minor game against Down he felt a twinge grow into a dull ache that wouldn’t quit around his pelvis. He struggled on for years and managed to land underage All-Irelands, but he was only managing the condition that would eventually be diagnosed as Osteitis Pubis.

He even made it onto the senior team, playing in Ulster Championship games.

The joint-management team of Art McRory and Eugene McKenna was concerned enough to send him to consultants in the Santry Clinic, where they diagnosed what was then a virtually unheard-of injury in Gaelic Games.

Thornton recalls the conversation in the clinic in vivid terms.

“They said, ‘look, we have good news and bad news. You are not going to play anymore. But the good news is that if you were a horse, you would be dead.’” 

He had travelled down with former county board Chairman Paul Doris. The return leg was virtually silent.

McRory dug in for him. He sourced some help from a physio at Fulham FC. Thornton went there for a fortnight of rehab that went some way to squeezing a decade of interrupted service in his playing career.

“When Mickey (Harte) came in,” he recalls, “I was away at that stage travelling. We went all over the world and stayed for a bit in Australia.

“You could look back and say, ‘I wish I had this, I wish I had that.’ But football takes many dips and turns and many footballers don’t get what they thought they might.

“But I am happy out. I enjoyed my time playing football.” 

This Sunday, he is right there in the thick of the biggest game in Ulster as a coach and selector with Kilcoo, who face Derry champions Glen. It’s a meeting of the defending champions of 2019 when it was last played, against the pre-tournament favourites, yet Ulster club first-timers Glen with their Deluxe management package of Malachy O’Rourke and Ryan Porter.

Just up the line from them, Kilcoo have a wealth of coaching acumen.

Managed by Mickey Moran, he brought them from being the side that couldn’t get the hand up high enough to smash the glass ceiling, to being Ulster champions. There’s not so much a hint of spice, but a 40-foot lorry of Bird’s Eye Chilli in that Moran is a former Glen player and had in recent years turned down a request to manage his club.

Alongside him is Conleith Gilligan, there from the start of the project in late 2018. When Paul Devlin left the management set-up at the end of last season, a call was put through to Thornton.

He and Moran had come up against each other in 2016. Thornton was helping Johnny McBride at the Loup and together they got a bounce that carried them into a Derry final against Moran’s Slaughtneil.

The year after, he linked up with Rory Gallagher in the Donegal set-up. Once that ended, he headed to St Eunan’s in Letterkenny for the last three years.

As wide as his experience has been, the maturity and composure of the Kilcoo playing squad has amazed him nonetheless.

“Leadership sometimes gets talked about very flippantly. If you have the likes of Aidan Branagan there, Conor (Laverty), all the Branagans really you have a tight unit that self-regulates and sorts things out,” he explains.

“It’s the same as any club in any county. The same issues pop up in relation to players’ outside life and things going on inside the squad. But Kilcoo are very well looked about in terms of boys getting things resolved and making sure it doesn’t affect performance.” 

With an Ulster U20 winning manager in Laverty in your team, there are a lot of big brains fitting into the Kilcoo ethos. He’s been in intense camps before, the likes of Donegal with Michael Murphy hungrily devouring all the information going.

The workload is spread out among the coaches, but it’s definitely not reaching for the play-book of drills.

“Guided discovery is a good way to learn from the situation and what you do next time. We would not be drill-based. I don’t like to be drill-based and there is only so much you can do in that.

“You really have got to take that closed skill and put it into a game. But the days of drill-drill-drill are over.” 

They will come up against a similar set up in the form of Glen in Armagh this Sunday, the biggest club game in the last two years by far.

Two heavyweight coaching set-ups, matching each other’s ploys, play by play.