David makes Earley Coll to withdraw FORMER GALWAY STAR NOT INTERESTED IN TOP JOB WITH GAELIC PLAYERS BODY..YET

GAELIC Players Association president David Collins has ruled himself out of the running for the chief executive role following Dermot Earley’s resignation.

However, the former Galway hurler, currently preparing for his club Liam Mellows’ AIB All-ireland club semi-final on Saturday against champions Cuala, said that he may consider the role in the future.

Earley stepped down last month after less than a year in order to resume his position with the Defence Forces (inset).

When asked if he would consider applying, Collins said: “If Dermot went for another couple of years, maybe [I would have put my name forward then].

“Right now it’s a position, you’d want to be based in Dublin, obviously playing with the club and I have my own full-time career in Galway in software so, no, not yet, no.”

Collins sits on the players’ body’s national executive committee which will set about finding Earley’s replacement and he admitted surprise at the former Kildare footballer’s departure.

“I was more so going,

‘Damn it Dermot!’ because if he had another two or three years there… he had started a great road map.

“I think he had started a great plan in action and the one thing I love about what he did when he came in is he went out and met players and went around to every squad and took exactly what was coming back from them and put it all into a plan, a strategic plan that he worked for three years to get.

“So yeah, I was surprised to see him go after the year. I understand why he went in terms of the job that he has in the army.

“That’s his life, that always was his life and he always said that eventually he would go back there.”

Collins stated that appointing a chief operations officer, a position which has been vacant for some months, with “business acumen” is a more pressing priority, while he added that the new chief executive would need to be a former county player.

With the training and playing demands a hot topic of late, Collins described the schedule placed on some county players who are also playing for third level institutions as “crazy”.

“Less is more, because of the way players’ approaches have changed. Players are fit throughout the whole year.”

However, players challenging a manager to lighten the load isn’t likely to happen, as Collins knows only too well.

“Here lies the problem because when you’re asked to go, you’ll go and when you’re asked to train, you’ll train and that was one of my biggest problems, that I never said, ‘Right, I need to train smarter and less’.

“If I trained less I probably would have lasted a whole lot longer and not got injured as much.

“I’d agree that less is more in this situation. Less pressure too.”