HARD ACT TO FOLLOW
Mickey Ned O’Sullivan on the tough task facing Jim Gavin’s successor
‘WHOEVER SUCCEEDS GAVIN CAN’T BE THE CENTRE OF ATTENTION’
HIS identity will be revealed later this week, but whoever gets to walk in Jim Gavin’s footsteps should, at least, take comfort that it is a road which has been previously travelled. It is not so much that the new Dublin manager will have a hard act to follow, it will quite likely be an impossible one.
And no-one is pretending it to be otherwise. Even Bryan Cullen, Dublin’s former All-Ireland winning captain and head of the county’s strength and conditioning department, admitting that the new boss will take up a ‘poisoned chalice’.
It wasn’t quite spelled out in such graphic language to Mickey ‘Ned’ O’Sullivan when he took up the seat vacated by the most successful manager in the history of Gaelic football, Mick O’Dwyer, who cashed in his Kerry chips in the autumn of 1989.
It was quite the pay-off too, eight All-Irelands inside 12 years cementing O’Dwyer’s legacy, while that twinkling eye full of roguery insulated him from the three barren years at the end of his reign.
As will be the case for whoever succeeds Gavin, O’Sullivan knew that when the measuring tape was set on his tenure, it was never likely to offer a flattering reading.
And so it would prove; by the end of his three years he won just a solitary Munster Championship, and even that was sandwiched in between two of the most brutal days in Kerry’s history.
His first summer ended to the sound of Cork supporters telling the Páirc Uí Chaoimh gatemen to ‘lock them in and make the f**kers watch’ as they were beaten by 15 points.
His last ended with Marty Morrissey in his ear, informing him ‘there won’t be a cow in Clare milked for a week’ as his Kerry team were the fall guys in one of the biggest shocks of the modern era.
By the time it was all over, he had won just 14 of his 31 games. To the outside world it represented failure, but O’Sullivan had set his tape elsewhere.
‘I knew that Kerry supporters expected an All-Ireland every year because that old line about the Kerryman with an inferiority complex believing he is only as good as some other county holds true when it comes to football.
‘That was par for the course but that did not worry me. I knew I was bringing in players and blooding them. I only inherited three or four players from that great team. I had to start from scratch so I never felt under any great pressure because my job was to develop a new group of players.
‘I knew there would be no All-Ireland but I knew we had to set the foundation because no new players had been brought in during that era. I knew that because I was part of Mick O’Dywer’s management team and that was the big mistake. It was also why I opted out of the management team after four years.
‘I said it to Micko that we had to start providing a link to the future because I could see it was the end of an era. There was no real goodwill to that suggestion and I left,’ recalls O’Sullivan.
He only agreed to succeed O’Dwyer on the basis he could take on the Under 21s as well, winning three Munsters in a row as well as the All-Ireland in 1990.
‘If you looked at Alex Ferguson when he was in charge of Manchester United, he worked off percentages in the age profile of his squad. He would have had 15 per cent between 19 and 21, maybe 30 per cent between 21 and 24 and so on.
‘But when it came to players hitting 31, 32, more often than not he discarded them and he would replace them with a kid because he wanted to keep that balance.
‘I had just two players at one stage, Tom Spillane and Ambrose O’Donovan, between the age of 22 and 33. So it was always going to take at least five years – to get those players who were 21 to 26 or 27 before you could win an All-Ireland.’
And that was exactly how it turned out. When Kerry drew a line under an 11-year All-Ireland famine in 1997, seven of the team that started – Declan O’Keeffe, Liam O’Flaherty, Éamonn Breen, Seamus Moynihan, Maurice Fitzgerald, Pa Laide and Billy O’Shea – had played and won at U21 level under O’Sullivan.
Of course, it can be argued that the road which O’Sullivan travelled and the one which rolls out in front of the new Dublin manager could hardly be more different.
O’Sullivan inherited a team in chaos, while Gavin’s successor inherits one which is championed as the greatest ever. But where O’Sullivan’s job was to transition Kerry in terms of personnel, Dublin’s new man will want to put his own stamp on the group without tampering with the winning culture that is his predecessor’s legacy.
That is a delicate balance to find, one made all the harder because of the quality which Gavin brought to the job, reckons O’Sullivan.
‘Jim Gavin always reminds me of a great quote from Harry S Truman, who said you can accomplish anything as long as you are not worried about who gets the credit.
‘He had no ego and what he did was set up a process, but more importantly he empowered the players.
‘His leaving will not be as big a wrench if whoever comes in to succeed him understands the process and that means that they are not the centre of the whole thing.
‘The responsibility and the authority comes from the bottom up and not from the top down. He understood the whole idea of management which is to get the best people possible around you, the best S&C man, best coach, best stats man and invest your faith in allowing them to do their job. In doing that he empowered them and because of that they felt accountable to him. ‘He is the first manager that I have seen who has truly understood the concept of management. It was never about Jim Gavin, it was always about the team.
‘He had inculcated values in everyone else that it was not about them and it was always about the team.
‘He has that process in place and if that can be explained to the incoming person, it might be a blessing in disguise because a new person can energise a group and bring it to another level if they understand management.
‘There was a reason they were able to always drive it forward with 10 minutes to go because it was their team and each and every player had developed leadership skills as result of his process.’
Indeed, it is possible that as rushed and chaotic as Gavin’s departure was, it might just prove to be the perfect timing for his team, argues O’Sullivan.
‘There is no guarantee that had Jim Gavin stayed he would have won next year because once you achieve your pinnacle, after that you are dipping. There is a graph that comes with every team and this was the summit of their graph. The five-in-a-row was the climax, six-in-a-row could never be that.
‘If Jim Gavin stayed and walked into the dressing room next week and said
“Let’s go for six”, the magic would probably not have been there, whereas the five-in-arow was always tinged with magic. I think he made a good decision.
‘He did an amazing job. They always seemed to be able to forget what they achieved. It was the next ball that mattered.’
But is Dublin’s crisis everyone else’s opportunity?
‘In one way, it says to Kerry, Mayo and Donegal, Jim Gavin is gone, there is an opportunity here and it will certainly give them a boost.
‘On the other side, they will be facing a winning group with a fresh voice who could re-energise the whole thing and make them even harder to beat. We just don’t know but isn’t that the beauty of it?’