CARRY ON CAMPING
High jinks and high workrate always made training trips worthwhile
‘ONE OF OUR LADS TOOK A PUNCH, THAT WAS THE END OF OUR NIGHTS OUT’
APRIL is not saving club football. Various initiatives have been proposed for this rescue mission, and keeping this month free of inter-county activity is the most high-profile.
But you won’t find a person who will argue the club game has benefited as a result.
And one of the knock-on effects has been felt by inter-county squads. In attempting to curb the encroachment of the county game onto the squeezed club scene, the GAA have taken a stern approach to training camps.
Trips abroad are now frowned upon by Croke Park. But here’s the thing: just as we know the club game isn’t thriving in a county-free April, so we can say with confidence that stopping counties from spending a few days training together in Spain or Portugal isn’t breathing new life into club football either.
Indeed, club players across Ireland are experiencing huge frustration. Every county footballer is a club man first and foremost; it’s where we start, it’s where we’ll end and it’s where friendships that last a lifetime are forged.
We know clubs are suffering, but we also know that banning overseas training camps is not alleviating their pain. This is important because I know how valuable these trips can be. The perception might be that they are junkets, handy jaunts for pampered stars.
In fact, they were integral to some of the successful Kerry sides I played on throughout my career.
Our first one was to La Santa in Lanzarote. It was Jack O’Connor’s first spell in charge and Pat Flanagan oversaw training. It was one of the most physically intense experiences I’ve had as well as being immensely beneficial.
We did three sessions a day, starting on the running track at 8am for an hour. Then we had breakfast and went back to bed.
We were up at noon and played football from 1pm for at least an hour, followed by recovery in the pool, lunch, more rest and the day ended with a gym session in the evening.
We did six days of that, so do the sums: in less than a week, we had 18 top-quality sessions.
That was priceless as you might not get that done in a month at home with the all the complications and distractions.
But a training camp offered the possibility of intense, high-quality sessions.
Now it was taxing on the body, and we knew we had a tough week’s work done getting on the plane home and we took a huge amount of confidence back to Kerry. We faced into the summer ahead, fully trusting in our fitness. Down-time was vital, too – it allowed us to forge bonds that stand to you on the field. The complex had a huge pool with a diving board. It must have been 50 feet high. We launched ourselves into the water with Séamus Scanlon watching on, feeling envious. Séamus couldn’t swim, but he was awful keen to get the buzz of diving off the board. So he decided to do it, after asking a group of us to wait for him when he hit the water and get him to safety.
He duly dived, but when he hit the water he started flailing and as the first man on the scene, I got an elbow square in the nose. William Kirby eventually got Scanlon to safety, all was well and we had an anecdote that got us through plenty of training sessions that summer.
Management learned as we went on these trips, too.
On one camp, the manager at the time decided it was a good idea to cut us loose for a social night.
It ended with one of our party getting a punch and suffering a significant facial injury. That was the end of the nights out, and from then on everyone understood the nature of our training camps. We were there to work, and we extracted as much as we could from it, like the year Éamonn Fitzmaurice took us over to the English rugby club Harlequins who were under the leadership of Conor O’Shea.
I came to put a huge value on these trips. I would often feel I was only playing my way into proper fitness during the League, but knowing there was a camp at the end of it reassured me.
I knew the quality and volume of the training would have me up to speed in time for the Championship. Managers would often give away some of their thinking, unwittingly at times, on these trips. We would always play at least one serious internal match, which was an A versus B game, in all but name.
Everyone knew what side they needed to be on.
The League was over, the Championship was imminent, so how the teams lined up in these games would always give a strong hint of what way they were thinking.
The importance of these pre-Championship training breaks to the Kerry teams I played on was high. And I do believe counties are missing out by having to jump through hoops now to have them approved.
If a county can afford them, if players fundraise to cover the cost or the county board can find sponsors willing to subsidise them, then they should be allowed to pursue them.
Stopping counties travelling is doing nothing for clubs.
Far better to scrap pre-season competitions, tighten up the calendar, start the League in January and leave the end of summer and all of the autumn for club championship games.
I would consider myself a traditionalist, but we’ve already brought the football final forward, and we should continue to utilise time for matches as thoroughly as possible.
That will help clubs, but putting an end to training camps will not.