O’Sullivan gets helping hand
Belatedly, the union is prepared to appoint a manager to help O’Sullivan in a number of areas, thereby releasing him to concentrate on preparing the national team for each and every engagement.
They are also set to impose a backs coach and psychological expert while several other changes are being recommended, some of which are aspirational and self evident to even the most casual observer.
O’Sullivan’s failure to find a replacement for Brian O’Brien when the hugely-popular Limerick man stood down as manager of the national side a few years ago is widely regarded as one of the biggest mistakes of his six-year reign as Ireland’s head coach.
Primarily, O’Brien provided the ideal buffer between Eddie and an ever-changing media scenario.
There was a natural niceness and sincerity about Briano that tended to wrong-foot those who sought the ‘inside story’ on bad days while he was also adept at cooling things when expectation threatened to run out of control.
When he decided to quit, O’Brien was replaced by Gerard Carmody, a backroom boy at IRFU headquarters at 62 Lansdowne Road and a man who to my knowledge never attended or spoke at press conferences and who generally played a very peripheral role throughout his tenure of office.
Accordingly, O’Sullivan left himself wide open to abuse from any quarter that didn’t like how he carried out his business.
Although highly articulate and prepared to answer hard-hitting questions as long as there was a genuine reason for them, Eddie seemed to have a tendency to rub people up the wrong way. And while we may never know whether this disposition affected his relationship with at least some of his players during the World Cup, there are strong suggestions that this, in fact, was the case and that his man-management skills were well short of what they might have been.
O’Sullivan should have little difficulty in working with “a person with international rugby experience to play a support role.”
He will assuredly have a say in the appointment of that particular individual and once he is in situ, Eddie would be well advised to take his views and advice on board as well as allowing him to attend and play a role on important public relations occasions.
Rumours have been flying around for some time that former Ulster and Ireland three-quarter Joey Myles is among the front runners for the manager’s job. Were Myles to get the nod, it would help to appease the northern rump who are feeling more than a little isolated at present, disillusioned as they are at having a tiny representation on the Irish team and the poor form of the provincial side in the Magners League and Heineken Cup along with a widespread and ongoing resentment that God Save The Queen was not played prior to the World Cup warm-up game against Italy at Ravenhill.
However, Myles’s name wouldn’t mean a whole lot to the vast majority of people throughout the remainder of the island.
And that’s certainly something that could not be said about Mick Galwey, a genial but battle-hardened individual on and off the pitch and a man synonymous with success as player and coach.
The appointment of a dedicated backs coach and of a professional to provide ongoing psychological support for the team and management are a couple of interesting findings in the Genesis report.
In his playing days, O’Sullivan was a useful wing three-quarter deemed good enough to represent Munster on a number of occasions while he also filled the out-half berth for Garryowen in a Munster Cup final.
His experience as a coach over the intervening years would also, quite understandably, have led him to believe that he would be well able to fulfil that role himself as he did when he first linked up with the Irish team in 2001.
It was difficult to escape the feeling during the World Cup that too many cooks were already spoiling the broth. Is there really the need for yet another specialist coach? Personally, I doubt it.
Provided O’Sullivan believes he can strike a good working relationship with the appointee, the appointment of a psychologist sounds like a good idea.
Sports psychologists are part and parcel of numerous sports these days. Golf is a notable case in point and Padraig Harrington has many times spoken of the massive contribution made to his Open Championship success by American Dr Bob Rotella. Numerous other golfers, tennis players, footballers etc spend considerable sums in acquiring the best psychological advice possible and there seems no good reason why the Irish rugby team shouldn’t go down that road as well.
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