Trading places: how Mayo's Paddy Tally and Kerry's Cian O'Neill can read behind enemy lines
ROARING SUCCESS: Kerry coach Cian O'Neill celebrates their Munster SFC final win over old rivals Cork at Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
At least once in their respective careers, Paddy Tally and Cian O’Neill have held the post the other occupies now. The current Mayo coach was previously Kerry’s; the current Kerry coach previously Mayo’s.
In the lead-up to the first All-Ireland either of them was involved in, Mickey Harte ingeniously tasked another member of his backroom to imagine he was Joe Kernan for a few days to help pre-empt what curveballs Armagh might throw at a Tally-coached Tyrone in that 2003 decider.
Such a roleplay is a more obvious exercise heading into this one. Tally knows how Jack O’Connor thinks from having been his right-hand man, just as O’Connor knows how Tally thinks. And O’Neill and Andy Moran are also well familiar with how the other rocks and appreciative of the legacy they left the other; O’Neill’s first campaign coaching a football team to an All-Ireland final, Moran was his captain.
“[O’Neill] came into us in 2012 and was a key driver for us attaining the levels we needed to get to, or even us knowing what levels we needed to get to,” Moran once remarked five years ago. “A brilliant guy and a very confident man.”
Enda Varley had already known from playing with the UL Sigerson team that O’Neill coached while also training the Tipperary hurlers. But with Mayo he’d see both team and coach make a quantum leap, chest out.
“No disrespect to the lads James [Horan] had involved in 2011 but Cian brought it to another level in 2012,” says Varley. “Just even with that presence and aura he radiated in the middle of the training ground, pushing and challenging lads more.
“I always say about James’s time, any day we had training you had to prepare for it like you would the day of a game. There was no difference. Your sleep, your nutrition, your hydration, you had to nail it so you could nail it that evening in MacHale Park. James’s mantra was that if we were training on a Tuesday night, then we had to strive for that session to be the best in the whole country that particular night. Cian helped deliver that.”
As a football coach, he improved them considerably in implementing Horan’s vision. His successor Donie Buckley is rightly lauded for his expertise at coaching the tackle and Mayo are considered the greatest exponents of his work, yet arguably the biggest in-season improvement the team made in that aspect of the game was on O’Neill’s beat before going on to Buckley’s finishing school; in both league and championship in 2012 Mayo only once lost the tackle count.
He’d also help expand their offensive prowess and range of options. In 2011 Mayo only got a contribution of 0-5 from their backs over the course of five championship games. In 2012 that jumped to 0-13 over six games, the platform for their halfback line becoming one of the finest and highest-scoring in football history. “[O’Neill] identified I was an attacking wing back so he adapted our gameplan to bring that out,” Lee Keegan would later reflect about his first season as a Mayo starter which would end with him being an All-Star.
But his role and influence went well beyond just that of a field coach. Like Tally he came from a PE background, lecturing in UL at the time just as Tally was in The Ranch that’s St Mary’s, Belfast, and that appreciation and knowledge of various sports sciences permeated into all aspects of team preparation: the physical, medical and mental, not just the tactical and technical.
“He was very big into the importance of being a cohesive unit,” says Varley who’ll still be warmly greeted by a ‘Hey fella!’ salutation from O’Neill whenever their paths cross. “He was almost American in the idea of being a brotherhood and collective.”
Example. In 2012 Mayo lost a league final to Cork in Croke Park where afterwards catering was provided for both teams. O’Neill disappointedly noted that some of his team’s Dublin-based players made their own way from the premises; while hardly being as empty a team bus as the notorious bank holiday one that was meant to take Donegal back home from the 2002 drawn All-Ireland quarter-final, Mayo’s that day wasn’t as full exiting Croke Park as it had been entering it. Ever since O’Neill’s observation and intervention, Mayo always leave Croke Park as a unit, even if they might soon thereafter drop off their Dublin-based contingent at St Patrick’s training college or some other nearby spot. Win together or lose together, you stay together.
Just as O’Neill left his mark on Mayo though, they left his mark on him. A cornerstone of James Horan’s management was a dedication to skill development, in the knowledge the county’s wasn’t as proficient as Kerry’s. So struck was O’Neill by how that rampaging halfback line of Keegan, Boyle and Vaughan sought to improve their kicking off either foot, it reinforced his own belief that everyone’s skills could improve. Even Kerry’s.
“When Cian joined us in 2013,” says Diarmuid Murphy, a selector to Éamonn Fitzmaurice at the time, “he went into a lot of detail to everything. Like kickouts and the breaking ball and what your body positioning should be. But something he really went after was skills. Working on your weaker hand or weaker foot, or as he’d call it, your non-dominant hand or foot. With his sports science and psychology background, he preferred that term than ‘weak’.”
It would pay off. In his autobiography, Kieran Donaghy would credit O’Neill for his first point in the 2014 All-Ireland final against Donegal. “Before 2013 I hardly ever kicked with my left foot.” Tomás Ó Sé was another veteran who was won over after being initially sceptical of O’Neill’s new-school ways. “[At first] I’d have questioned what he was at,” Ó Sé would admit in his own book. “‘How does a guy coming from Kildare know what’s best for us?’ Páidí thinking, if you like.”
He was all the more cynical about the new man’s methods when at their first session O’Neill, again in emphasising unity, sent Ó Sé back to the dressing room for deviating from wearing the same training gear as everyone else. “I was like a spoiled brat going back in. ‘What’s all this about?!’
“But looking back, I’d see that it was good to be togged out in the same gear. Before we were every colour in the rainbow… When I got to know him, I realised how wrong I had been about him. He was terrific and flexible too. If I came to him and said, ‘Look, Cian, I’m struggling with this weights programme’, he’d work around that and come up with an alternative. There was no point me lifting the same weights as Anthony Maher.”
If anything though he knew too much, or at least was prone to doing too much. Paul Geaney prefers the current model of O’Neill than the previous one, or at least the model he now works from. “The first time around he was doing everything. He was S&C, coach forwards and backs, kickouts and breaking ball, everything. He still does a lot on the field but we have a lot more coaches now. Everyone on the management ticket can coach so we’ve gone towards a rugby model where people are in charge of different sections of the game and it’s great.”
WHEN Jack O’Connor called upon the services of Tally shortly after Tyrone had ransacked Kerry for three goals in the 2021 All-Ireland semi-final, there was no doubting what section of the game he was over.
“Paddy looked at all aspects of the team and game through the prism of defending,” says Mike Quirke, another coach with inter-county managerial experience that O’Connor enlisted into his backroom that time. “That was totally new to Kerry. So when we had the ball, instead of looking at how we might transfer the ball up the field and create a scoring opportunity, Paddy was looking at how were we set up defensively if we turned over the ball.”
Murphy, another member of that backroom, still recalls some of the sessions out on the training ground in Currans drilling his new charges in the art and science of defending. “It wasn’t just working with six backs and our goalies. It was the whole team. And I remember there would have been times early on when he wouldn’t have been overly-happy with what he was seeing. But lads stuck at it and bought into what he was doing.” It showed. In 2021 Kerry gave up 12 goals over eight league and championship games. In 2022 they gave up just three goals over 13 games on their way to the league, Munster and All-Ireland treble.
By the end of 2024 though O’Connor sensed it was time for something new, even if it was in the form of a familiar face. Murphy for one endorsed the return of O’Neill to Kerry just as he and Tally and Quirke were stepping out. “Cian is very much an on-the-ball coach. And so with the new rules and Jack’s own approach to the game, I thought it was a great move for us.”
The results were there for all to see 12 months ago, the way O’Neill, a fine underage basketballer himself, broke down Jim McGuinness’s zone defence with his belief that certain invasion sport principles are pervasive. Just as both Quirke and Murphy can see traces of Tally’s work with Mayo in their press and how they’ve now married the intensity of the Horan-O’Neill-Buckley years with the smarts and subtleties that go with shadowing and trapping opponents out by the touchline.
“I have no doubt though that this past week Paddy Tally and Andy Moran will have had lively conversations about what’s the best way to go and defend Kerry,” says Quirke. “Paddy knows better than anyone it’s one thing to push high up the pitch against Louth who don’t have the athletes and footballers to beat that press and then another to go up against the Gavin Whites and Jason Foleys and Paul Murphys. Beat that line are suddenly you’re looking at David Clifford in 40 yards of space one-on-one with his marker. It’s a real highwire act.”
Tally’s old mentor Harte as well as O’Neill himself through the years has cited Sun Tzu’s Art of War. “If you know the enemy and know yourself,” the old Chinese general wrote, “you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Except maybe when the enemy and their coach knows you just as well.
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