Kelly gets another year in the Louth hot seat

GAA LOUTH COUNTY BOARD

COLIN Kelly was eventually granted a third season in the Louth hotseat at Louth’s July County Board meeting on Monday night.

Club delegates in Darver debated whether they should first consult their club committees on the matter, while others queried whether Kelly’s backroom team should be nailed down before they voted on his re-appointment, but in the end the Drogheda man was returned to the senior football manager position by an overwhelming majority.

Chairman Des Halpenny revealed that reviews had been carried out with all inter-county management teams, with the exception of senior hurling boss Dee McCarthy, who will sit down with the management committee over the coming days.

Minor manager Wayne Kierans and U21 bosses Eamonn Dunne, Eugene Judge and Ken Rooney are all entering the second year of two-year appointments, but after serving his first two seasons in charge of the seniors Kelly’s third year had to be ratified by the county committee.

Mr Halpenny revealed that the primary target of promotion out of Division 4 had been achieved, with the added bonus of a National league title and championship win over Carlow.

Na Piarsaigh’s Gerry McGee queried whether delegates were in a position to re-appoint the manager without consulting with their clubs, but Mr Halpenny said it would be very ‘unusual’ to send the matter back to clubs.

‘It was well flagged that we would be conducting reviews with all our inter-county managers and returning here in July with recommendations, so clubs would have had a chance to discuss it already,’ he said.

St Patrick’s delegate Paddy Oliver said he had no problem with Kelly being re-appointed, but he said delegates could be buying a ‘pig in a poke’ if they didn’t know the makeup of his backroom team. He said Paddy Crozier added a lot to the set-up in 2015, but could be cast aside.

Mr Halpenny stood firm on that particular issue, stating that if the board believed Kelly was the right man for the job, then he would be trusted to appoint his own selectors. He added that the management committee unanimously agreed to propose that Kelly serve another year.

Pat Toner put a motion forward to extend Kelly’s tenure, which was seconded by Mr Halpenny and just one delegate voted against it.

Also at the meeting, the circumstances of Louth’s controversial six-day turnaround between the Leinster Championship and All-Ireland qualifiers was addressed by the chairman.

Mr Halpenny said Colin Kelly was rightly annoyed about being asked to play six days after the Meath defeat.

However, he said the matter had been ‘blown out of proportion’ and was largely ‘media driven’ and insisted that the whole issue should never have arisen in the first place.

He revealed that the A and B draws in the qualifiers were designed to avoid short turnarounds, but that there had been an oversight between Croke Park, who fix the qualifiers and Leinster Council who fix the Leinster Championship games.

It had been reported in the national media that Louth, Meath and Carlow were asked to bring the Leinster quarter-final game back a week or two, but Mr Halpenny said this only happened in April when the error was spotted.

He said at that stage all three counties would have had to agree to move the Leinster game, but it quickly became clear that one county wasn’t prepared to agree to a switch.

‘They were trying to close the stable door after the horse had bolted and it was never going to work as one county made it clear they wouldn’t be prepared to bring the game forward,’ the chairman said.

‘There are two main issues with it; the first is that the initial fixture shouldn’t have been made in the first place and I’ll be personally watching out for that next year.

‘But the second issue as far as I am concerned is about fair play and why other counties were subsequently given more time between games and the fixture schedule was altered accordingly.

‘We requested that our match with Derry be put back by a week and they turned us down. That is double standards.

‘So they are the issues we were unhappy about and we have every right to express that. People in the media seemed to be trying to deflect from the real issues.’