FORMER CAT FENNELLY DIPS TOES INTO FOOTBALL WATERS WITH KILDARE
MUCH has been made of Mickey Graham double-jobbing in the New Year as he mixes managing Mullinalaghta’s fairytale All-Ireland club SFC run alongside his new role as Cavan boss, but he isn’t the only one who will be kept on his toes.
After captaining Ballyhale Shamrocks to Leinster club hurling success earlier this month, Michael Fennelly will have little time to spare in the coming months as he juggles playing and his role with the Kildare footballers.
Less than a year since calling time on a glittering Kilkenny career which saw him capture eight All-Ireland titles and skipper Brian Cody’s squad to Liam MacCarthy success in 2009, Fennelly is dipping his toes into the inter-county scene as a performance coach under Cian O’Neill.
O’Neill will be hoping that Fennelly, 33, can sprinkle some of the same magic which saw the Cats conquer the hurling world for much of his career onto the Lilywhites as they head into 2019.
“He’s going to be working on those hidden intangibles, like your teamwork, coherence, resilience. He’ll be a great aid for me, for the management team in terms of his observation role but most importantly for the players,” O’Neill said of the role of the 2011 Hurler of the Year in their set-up.
Feedback
“He’ll be there to observe them when it matters most, be it training or matches, give feedback, one-on-ones, acting as a conduit between the players and the management. It’s kind of a very broad role.
“We felt that it was somewhere that, especially with the younger guys coming through, that we can make great gains in this year. Liam Moggan has been in with us for the last number of years and he’s done a fantastic job.
“So it’s just a tweak in that regard. We’ve a couple of those tweaks in the backroom so he’s had a big impact in the short period he’s been here so very happy.”
Those changes also include the addition of Alan Flynn as coach – Ronan Sweeney and Enda Murphy have stepped away after two years – while Tom Cribbin and Karl O’Dwyer have come on board as selectors.
Daniel Flynn has not committed for 2019 but the loss of their star forward has been slightly alleviated by the return of Eoghan O’Flaherty, who played his first competitive intercounty game in over two years during Kildare’s comfortable O’Byrne Cup defeat of Carlow last Saturday.
“Eoghan is a great guy on the pitch and a great guy off the pitch and when he decided to step away two years ago it was really disappointing but I understood his reasons obviously. Your family takes precedence and he was getting married,” O’Neill said of the Carbury attacker.
“The fact that he wanted to come back and give it a shot, for a man that hasn’t played at this level in two years, we’re delighted to have him back and he’s a great leader too. The younger fellas will definitely learn a lot from him.”
Many have voiced their opposition to pre-season games being played so early in the GAA year but O’Neill has “no problem with matches before Christmas”, although he would have liked to return sooner than December 8 when the winter training ban officially gave them the green light.
Another manager quite happy with the early-season games is Carlow’s Turlough O’Brien and he would favour keeping pre-season competitions rather than adding extra championship games, where clubs lose out.
“I wouldn’t get rid of them. We’re going to play challenge matches anyway. No, I wouldn’t get rid of them but long term I think we can’t just keep adding games into the championship,” O’Brien said.
“The ‘Super 8s’ and now we’re talking about a ‘B’ championship and we’re talking about, on the other hand, that we want to do something for the clubs. You cannot do both and that’s the reality of it.”
O’Brien makes no bones about survival in Division 3 being the priority for the year ahead.
“That’s our number one goal, to stay up in Division 3 and get a bit of experience up there and settle ourselves down and see can we compete at that level,” O’Brien said.
“We’re using the O’Byrne Cup to blood players and have a look at them and we’ve had a lot of players coming into the panel and it’s great to see it in Carlow because in previous years we might have been struggling to have a team for the O’Byrne Cup.”