No rest for the driven
Overseeing sustainable progress is the measure of success for Carlow manager Carew and it’s an all-consuming passion
AS ANOTHER reminder that the GAA’s split season has no definite line of demarcation, Niall Carew will be at Netwatch Cullen Park to take in the Carlow county final. ‘People think it is a six-month season but it is a 12-month job,’ explains the Carlow football manager. ‘Last weekend, even though it is the offseason, I was at two games on Saturday and two
games on Sunday, so it is an hour’s drive each way and you are four hours at the games, so that is 12 hours last weekend.
‘Never mind all the other stuff such as meeting up with the county chairman Jim Bolger this week, so it goes on and on and on.
‘It is constant but it has to be constant to keep the wheel moving.’
His achievement, since taking over the Maynooth Sigerson Cup team in 2004, is that for the most part he has kept those wheels moving up the hills of Gaelic football’s back roads.
Next season will be his ninth in inter-county management and, in that time, he has never managed outside the bottom two tiers.
The closest he came to the sunlit uplands was a Connacht final appearance with Sligo in 2015, with the consolation prize – after an inevitable mauling by Mayo – of a last-12 game in Croke Park against Mickey Harte’s Tyrone.
It is not that he hasn’t been exposed to the game at the top level – he spent five years as coach with his native Kildare under Kieran McGeeney when the Lilywhites regularly featured at the business end of the All-Ireland series – or that he is not in the glory game, he just measures it in a different way.
After two years with Waterford and three seasons with Sligo, he thought his time on the inter-county circuit was done in 2017 when he declined the offer of a fourth year at the helm. But when Turlough O’Brien decided his time was up in Carlow, mid-Covid and mid-season in 2020, he found that he wanted back in.
It wasn’t a lengthy queue. Carlow had gained momentum under O’Brien’s evangelical presence. They won promotion from Division 4 and earned a never-to-be forgotten Leinster SFC win over Kildare in 2018, but success couldn’t be sustained.
Small counties may get up and over the hill but the reality is they will almost certainly freewheel back down again.
If Carew’s two-and-a-half-season reign as manager was to be measured on where they finished this spring, they would have ranked as the number 31 team in the country, with only his former county Waterford keeping them off rock bottom.
It would, however, be a false measure on a number of counts.
What attracted Carew to Carlow was the scale of the challenge.
‘I probably got the tail-end of that Carlow team that had been playing for nine or ten years, so after that it was a rebuild.
‘We had to start from scratch because you had the likes of John Murphy, Sean Gannon, Paul Broderick and Shane Redmond (the latter pair will line out for Tinryland against Palatine in today’s county decider) all retired.
‘This year we blooded probably 15 players in the National League, which is probably unheard of. We were lucky because it had to be done and we found four or five excellent players.
‘There is something nice about building your own team and building your own style of play. In fairness, the other players were well drilled by Turlough, and he did an excellent job with them and they had a certain style of play, so it was always going to be hard to change that. But gradually we managed to put in our own style with new players coming in who bought into it even more.
‘The opportunity to build your own team and play your own style of football rather than inheriting something was probably the biggest attraction.
‘We have a settled team going into the League next year, whereas in this year’s League we were guessing, but now we know what we have and they have a full League, Championship and Tailteann Cup under their belt.
‘We felt we improved in every game last year even though the table didn’t reflect that,’ insists Carew.
A solitary League win, a home loss to London and a 23-point mauling by Sligo might suggest that represents a positive spin, but the summer revealed progress, even if it was not evident in a five-goal demolition by Louth in the Leinster SFC.
The advent of the Tailteann Cup was something new and exciting and Carlow’s win over Tipperary – All-Ireland semi-finalists only two years earlier – was the single biggest head-turning result of the entire competition. It is seductive to suggest that had the second-tier championship been in place when he was in charge of Waterford, who he took to within a point of dumping Galway out of the All-Ireland qualifiers, or Sligo, who would have been favoured to win the competition, it would have been a game-changer.
He views it differently and rails against the notion that the League is the priority for lower-tier sides or that even a brand new shiny cup in the summer beats Championship as he knows it.
‘The Tailteann Cup is good but I would have focused on the qualifiers and tried to get a big win when I was with Waterford and Sligo – a big win there would have been my Tailteann Cup even if there was no name on it.
‘Any big win for smaller counties is memorable, like when Carlow beat Kildare in the Leinster Championship. When I was with Sligo we beat Roscommon and that was massive, with Waterford we were two points up and Galway got a goal in the last minute to beat us in the qualifiers in Salthill. That would have been our Tailteann Cup if we had got over the line that day.
‘And while I will absolutely prioritise the League, getting a big Championship win will always trump getting out of any division.
‘When you have a big crowd in the summer and plenty of exposure for your players and county, getting that big Championship win, you simply can’t beat it.
‘I know getting up the divisions is great for developing your football and the higher division you are playing in the better, but I would safely say if Carlow got to play Kildare again and beat them in the Leinster Championship like they did a few years ago, they would take that ahead of getting out of Division 4.
It is so memorable for everyone. They had never beaten Kildare like that before. I was at the game that day and there was some atmosphere – it still lives on for Carlow people.
‘I remember when I was involved with Kildare, and Wicklow – in Mick O’Dwyer’s first year – beat us in Croke Park in the Leinster Championship.
‘They didn’t get out of Division 4 that year but I can guarantee you, ask any Wicklow person which they would have preferred, and you know the answer they would have given you.’
The Tailteann Cup does, however, give Carlow something meaningful to shoot for next year and, the way both teams and supporters embraced it, holds the promise that next year may even be better.
Allied to that, it will come with a new structure, ensuring that each county – in both the Sam Maguire and Tailteann Cups – will be guaranteed a minimum of three games
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Carlow beat Kildare by seven points (2-14 to 1-10) in the 2018 Leinster SFC quarter-final
with the initial round played off in a four-team minileague.
The top teams in each group will advance to the quarterfinals, with the four second-placed teams meeting three of the best finishing third-placed teams and New York in the preliminary quarterfinals.
Despite the promise of more games, Carew is not impressed with the structure, and also believes that offering a pathway back into the Sam Maguire, for the winners at least, will make the Tailteann Cup more sustainable.
‘I would certainly have left it as a knockout championship because it adds that bit of spice; it is a last-chance saloon for everyone.
‘I know people are on about getting more games, but you are only going to get one extra game because that last one in the group is going to be a dead rubber for a lot of teams.
‘I think what will also happen next year, with regards to the profile of the Tailteann Cup, is that the media will not be in a position to give it as much column inches as there will be round-robins in both tiers and there will just too many games.
In that event, the Sam Maguire will take precedence.
‘That is why if the Tailteann Cup was knockout it would have more coverage because you would not be covering as many games. If it was left to me, it would be a knockout and whoever wins it – or even both finalists if that was easier logistically – would get into the last 12 of the Sam Maguire, and that would make it really exciting. Having talked to a few people in Croke Park, they are still open to trial and error in terms of finding the best structure.
‘It could take 10 years to do things normally but I do think they are moving quicker these times and I do think they will revisit it because we probably have missed a trick with how it has been done.
‘The round-robin theory is great because you are supposed to be getting all these games, but how competitive those games are is the key as well as how attractive they are to the media and supporters.
‘And if you are going to have a dead-rubber game, you might have only 40 people watching it and that is a disaster. It takes the good out of it.’
That reservation aside, though, Carew is feeling good about the future for Carlow.
‘I do believe that every team in Division 3 and 4 has a realistic chance of winning the Tailteann Cup.
‘We could have sneaked it against Westmeath this year and they went on to win it. I felt we were well in the mix and I think next year we will be well in the mix again.
‘The players got confidence from the win over Tipperary and from running Westmeath close, so we would feel we have a realistic chance.’
As ever, though, the glory will be in the journey.
‘This is something you need to have an appetite for.
‘Going in to any inter-county team, the main thing is that you can improve that set-up and that is your trophy.
‘If there is silverware at the end of it that is brilliant but the trophy at the end of it has to be that you feel you have made an improvement, and that players, supporters and the county board can see that too.’
That is how the wheels get to move.
I will prioritise the League but a Championship win trumps any promotion