358 DAYS AND COUNTING...
Kildare confidence is on floor as losing run continues
THERE are quite a few football managers feeling the heat as they head into this weekend’s first round of qualifiers, but nobody is under as much pressure as Cian O’Neill.
The performance of their senior footballers was at the root of heated exchanges as sparks flew during Tuesday’s Kildare county board meeting.
Anger is gradually replacing bewilderment as the Lilywhites try to find a way out of their tailspin.
When the players wander onto the field in Owenbeg tomorrow, it will be precisely 358 days since they last tasted victory in competitive football. If they were to be thankful for small mercies, at least the GAA opening the back door earlier this summer has afforded them the opportunity to ensure they don’t go a full year without a win.
Not that there is much confibelief dence within the county that O’Neill’s side can beat Derry. Since they impressively brushed Meath aside in last year’s Leinster SFC semi-final, things have fallen asunder for Kildare. Nobody is quite sure why. Twelve months ago, a glance at talented ball-players such as Kevin Feely, Paddy Brophy, Daniel Flynn and Eoin Doyle suggested that Kildare were finally placing themselves in a position to offer some sort of challenge to Dublin in Leinster.
They got plenty of slaps on the back for getting within nine points of Jim Gavin’s side in last year’s provincial decider – scoring 1-17 against them. It was viewed as a base to build on. Instead, those foundations are turning to dust.
The Lilywhites have lost 12 straight games since that Leinster final. That list does include two O’Byrne Cup fixtures but as the January competition is useful only to repair fragile confidence within a team, those defeats were significant.
Observers who have watched Kildare over the year claim that there is a genuine confidence issue. That it is noticeable how saps from their players if things go against them. Incidents such as skipper Doyle receiving a second yellow card for not wearing his mouth-guard against Donegal in Ballyshannon, or when Mayo hit them for 1-2 in first-half injury-time, leads to their heads dropping rather than players putting their chest out.
In their seismic Leinster quarter-final defeat to Carlow, it was when a 15th minute penalty was missed that the confidence visibly drained from the players. That Eanna O’Connor, son of former Kerry manager Jack, was selected to take the spot-kick only a few minutes into his first championship match was questionable but ordinarily, teams put an early setback like that out of their minds and focus on the rest of the game. Kildare players don’t seem to be able to do that, at present.
There’s a school of thought that, in the desperate need to find a rival for Dublin inside of Leinster, Kildare were viewed as being better than they were.
Maybe that’s true. After all, they dropped back to Division 2 like a stone this spring, not winning a single game.
However, in the likes of Feely and Flynn, Kildare have gifted footballers that any county would like.
And they lost three of their first four league games by a point, which indicates that the issue does lie with belief and confidence, which may still be suffering from the damage done by heavy beatings in recent years, particularly in Croke Park where Kerry hit them for 7-16.
At the start of this, his third year at the helm, O’Neill did tell local journalists that it was time for his team to deliver. The age profile of the team was in the mid-20s. There were no more excuses.
And in fairness to O’Neill, he hid behind no excuses when reflecting on one of the worst defeats in recent Kildare history in Tullamore. ‘Catastrophic is the word I would use,’ O’Neill said after the Carlow match where his players hit more wides than scores.
‘Out-worked, out-fought and out-played – that’s a travesty. It’s something I need to look at from my performance, it’s something the management do as a whole. We all need to look at ourselves now.’
Kildare had been hit by unfounded rumours of indiscipline following the league defeat to Kerry. Players had let their hair down after a game that confirmed their relegation and stories grew from that. Most of those close to the camp say that there’s fairly positive vibes coming from it. There have been no walk-outsBen McCormack did leave the panel but that was because of college commitments and he texted good luck to the squad and management prior to the Carlow game.
Having made such progress in O’Neill’s second year – knitting together some impressive football against both Meath and Dublin, everyone is at a loss as to why it has fallen asunder so badly.
Lilywhite supporters are now reflecting wistfully on the Kieran McGeeney era. At this juncture, it seems that the Armagh man worked wonders with Kildare, getting them to All-Ireland quarter-finals as a matter of course and were within a whisker of the All-Ireland final in 2010, denied perhaps by a poor umpiring decision.
As one delegate pointed out amid the bubbling anger of last Tuesday’s county board meeting, there hasn’t been a discussion on the performance of our senior team in 10 years.
Even if they manage to escape from Derry tomorrow evening, that has to be the starting point for Kildare.
They need to review why the team are under-performing or else it is going to be a long time before Dublin get a genuine rival in their own province.