Galway boss opens up on his hate mail
Dubs ace still has a lot to offer champs
GALWAY hurling boss Micheál Donoghue has become the latest inter-county boss to open up about abusive letters he has received since taking the job. Éamon Fitzmaurice departed as Kerry football manager last weekend, outlining the hate mail he received. Limerick hurling boss John Kiely and Mayo’s Stephen Rochford have also spoken this week about toxic letters they have found in their post box. And it seems that even ending his county’s All-Ireland famine was no guard against it for Galway manager Donoghue. ‘Every manager experiences it. He [Fitzmaurice] seems to have gotten a fair doing down there,’ he said. ‘We’re in a society now where certain things are seen as acceptable and people just go with it. People think they can just knock whenever they want. That’s just society. ‘I have [got some letters] but I am not going to dwell on it,’ Donoghue explained. ‘You can recognise some of the handwriting because it is
FOR what was supposed to be the most uninteresting match of last weekend, plenty of talking points emerged from Dublin and Roscommon’s dead rubber in Croker.
Bernard Brogan’s miraculous return from his cruciate ligament injury, less than eight months after his county future was shrouded in doubt. Cormac Costello gave Jim Gavin a bit of a selection headache by nailing nine points in an impressive display of leading the line, Paul Flynn proved that he is still around — and has something to contribute.
And then, there was Eoghan O’Gara’s performance. The combative full-forward had not been spotted in a Dublin shirt since coming off the bench against Galway in the League encounter in Salthill. O’Gara lasted less than 15 minutes as he was sent off before the end after an altercation with Sean Andy Ó Ceallaigh.
Three times over the course of this summer, Gavin has named O’Gara as part of his matchday panel but kept him on the bench on each occasion. Of all the footballers to be given an opportunity against the Rossies, nobody had more to prove to his manager than O’Gara.
As Dublin have become an allconquering juggernaut under Gavin, O’Gara has had to accept that his primary role is that of his manager’s Plan B. If the attack is not functioning as smoothly as it should, Gavin has tended to call for the powerful full-forward to come on and throw his weight around at the edge of the square.
Last year, though, he got promoted from that role of battering ram off the bench in the most unexpected way. A few minutes before the All-Ireland final was due to throw-in, word came through that O’Gara, wearing No.26 on his back, would replace Niall Scully in the starting team. It was one of Gavin’s more left-field selections.
Early on, O’Gara’s power and presence did unnerve the Mayo fullback line. He kicked an important point after just 15 minutes of the final before drifting out of the game completely. His only significant contribution after that was being involved in an incident with Colm Boyle. By half-time, Gavin had concluded the experiment hadn’t worked and Kevin McManamon replaced him for the second half.
That’s almost been a microcosm of O’Gara’s Dublin career. In the past few years, under Gavin, he has been an impact player. Before that, under Pat Gilroy, he often started matches but rarely finished them. Indeed, in his 35 Championship appearances for Dublin, O’Gara has only started and finished games on four occasions — and three of those were in the summer of 2010. He’s an impact player, but as Gavin seamlessly knits fresh talent into his All-Ireland winning squad, there’s a danger that the power of his impact will lose its value as the conveyor belt churns out talent like Con O’Callaghan, Costello and Brian Howard. But if Gavin wants to throw a curve-ball — as he has been known to — there is no more certain way of taking Galway defenders out of their comfort zone than by firing O’Gara in amongst them. Even though he turns 33 in September, O’Gara only made his Championship debut for Dublin eight years ago. In this era, when all the talk is of the net that captures all available talent in the capital, O’Gara is a rarity in that he never played any under-age football for his county.
He was called in for minor trials when he was 17 but he happened to be playing soccer with Shelbourne at the time so declined the invitation. He was no longer at Shelbourne by the time his final year as an Under 21 player but he had injury problems that season — a consistent theme in a career that has been spent bulldozing around the square.
Paul Caffrey did draft him into the squad for a couple of League games in 2008 but felt there were too many rough edges to O’Gara. It was only under Gilroy that he was given a proper opportunity to show what he can do. And he grasped it.
Under Gavin, he has become Plan B, something that O’Gara himself addressed before the 2016 All-Ireland final replay with Mayo.
‘I always want to start. That’s the target,’ he explained.. ‘If that
doesn’t happen, you are disappointed for an hour or two but you get your head around it and make the best of being a sub. You have to be ready from the first minute. And it’s important to channel your disappointment at not starting into preparation to enter the fray.’
O’Gara has been one of the great survivors in this Dublin squad. He had to recover after rupturing his cruciate ligament during the 2015 League, forcing his way back into the reckoning for the final three Championship games the following summer, even scoring a point against Kerry in the semi-final win that year.
And even with Costello, Flynn and Brogan all giving the manager reminders of what they can do last Sunday, O’Gara also found a way to make himself relevant. Don’t be surprised if Gavin finds a role for him this weekend.