How the once mighty have fallen isn’t as baffling as it first appears

MANY REASONS FOR DOWNTURN

ON RTE’S League Sunday highlights show, Donal Og Cusack presented three issues with Offaly hurling’s current plight.

Firstly, the former Cork keeper (inset) questioned just what their tradition is and produced a table detailing their successes at various grades which, outside of the 1980s and 90s, are sparse.

“You could argue that Offaly have gone back to their mean and what has been their tradition over the last 100 years,” he said.

Indeed you could.

But why didn’t Offaly regress to that mean on the back of their breakthrough in the early

1980s?

Because those successes were built on with a series of outstanding underage teams emerging before the end of that decade, which sustained them through the 1990s.

There is no reason why that shouldn’t have been maintained into the 2000s and 2010s.

Instead, Offaly fell off the face of the earth and did not react as their underage teams became increasingly uncompetitive. Whatever Offaly’s tradition in the first 90 years or so of the GAA, reverting to it needn’t have been inevitable.

They built a winning tradition that counties of similar demographics didn’t dream of. Now, they’ve been overtaken in the League standings by Laois, Carlow and Westmeath.

Last year, Offaly lost a League quarter-final by just two points to eventual winners Kilkenny. That level of display would have been more than enough to see Carlow off in Sunday’s Division 1B relegation play-off but, for a variety of reasons, there were only seven starting players common to both games.

John Kiely and Micheal Donoghue may be able to withstand that kind of player turnover but no other manager can, not least Kevin Martin. Secondly, Cusack questioned the size of the county and what could reasonably be expected.

Currently, Offaly’s population stands at 78,000. That’s 20,000 more than when they won their first All-ireland in 1981, a time when they were also competing at the very highest level in football.

Offaly’s success in the 1980s and 1990s could be viewed as a microcosm of the Irish rugby team.

They have been consistently competitive in the Six Nations since 2000 but, historically, Ireland have far more wooden spoons than any other country and still have very limited playing numbers compared to other nations.

Would the losing tradition and narrow playing base be tolerable excuses if Ireland were to revert to being serial flops again?

Finally, Cusack reasoned that “some influential voices have not been helping the Offaly cause to stay with the trends and stay with the times”.

It was clearly a dig at one or two pundits but to draw that conclusion is to overstate their influence.

He did touch on one interesting point. Hurling has undergone a tactical revolution in the past 15 years or so, yet no Offaly figure could claim to have an influence.

A few had reasonable managerial careers but none as impactful as some of their contemporaries in Clare, for example.

The greatest responsibility lies with successive administrations of the Offaly county board, which still retains some tired old faces going back the guts of three decades.

For years they had no real plan and initially ignored a player pathway produced in 2016.

In the meantime, what’s most worrying is that Offaly hurling hasn’t even bottomed out yet.