Ballyduff boss just trying to manage

LIKE every senior club football manager in the county, Ballyduff’s John Paul Leahy should be slap bang in the midst of April’s Club Championship season.

With the North Kerry side having beaten Renard in last year’s county junior final, Leahy’s charges find themselves promoted to the Premier Junior Championship, where they were due to be facing into a group involving Gneeveguilla, St Pats Blennerville and David Clifford’s Fossa.

However, replicating the scene all over the country, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought everything to a standstill. The pitches are empty, the footballs are nowhere to be seen, the boots are gathering dust in the cupboards, and players, administrators and supporters are left counting down the never-ending days to a return to action, with not even a glimmer of light as to when that might be.

Surreal times, for everybody involved in the GAA and, most importantly, for those who are trying to keep this dreaded virus from reaching their nearest and dearest. Lives have been changed, changed utterly.

Leahy works for TLI and now resides in Abbeydorney with wife Caroline and sons Éanna and Senan. Like every family in Ireland, their daily routines have been seriously affected in recent weeks.

“Yeah, the boys have no school at the moment. They are being home schooled. My wife is home now, she is not working. She got knocked out two years ago, she has an auto-immune disease, so is in one of the vulnerable groups,” he explained.

“I was working away, but we are in lockdown for these two weeks, at least. I had been working away from home for the previous few weeks because I am always dealing with people in this job, so I had to keep my distance.

“You would be concerned for everyone. My father is in his seventies in Ballyduff, my mother is near to seventy. Anybody over sixty even, you would be getting wary for them. The parents-in-law are in their sixties, they live right beside us here in Abbeydorney. And, of course, you would always be thinking of the older people in the club in Ballyduff.”

While health is undoubtedly the biggest priority at this unique moment in Irish and world history, sport is also never far from the mind of the majority.

For Leahy, returning to the hot seat in his native village (for his second stint in charge) following a year with Keel in 2019, was something that the 40-year-old was really looking forward to. Now, after one county league match in early March, the GAA’s traffic lights are well and truly stuck on red.

“Yeah, we just are able to put up a group plan for everybody on a Saturday or Sunday, and then the players have to go away and just do their own individual programmes for now. Go out into the back lawn, into a field, fellas can go to the beach if they are within that 2km radius, all that sort of thing.

“We can’t really police it at the moment. But when they all do come back, we will be doing a fitness test, and nobody can hide, but I’m trying to be positive on the group. When players are telling you that they are doing the work, you just have to trust them.

“We have about ten lads on the panel just out of minor and about six of them are getting ready for the Leaving Cert. For them, a break from their studies to do a bit of individual training can work wonders for mind and body.”

For a team that lifted county silverware last year, and reached the North Kerry Championship semi-final before losing in a replay to Brosna, it seems quite strange that they continue to languish in Division 5 of the County League.

Their opening encounter of the 2020 campaign on March 8 resulted in a draw with Cromane at home

(2-8 to 1-11) in a contest where one of Ballyduff’s up and coming prospects, Kevin Goulding, kicked 1-6 against a dogged Cromane inspired by veterans Seán O’Sullivan and Donnchadh Walsh.

“It’s been the club’s ambition for the last ten years to get out of Division 5. It’s just that the timing of the county league kills us. We need a good start to get ourselves going. Obviously, we didn’t lose the first game this year, but we didn’t win it either. It’s all about building momentum.

“For instance, against Cromane, the two Boyles [Mikey and Pádraig] and Michael Slattery had played a challenge game with the Kerry hurlers that very morning. We weren’t banking on them at all that day, but they said they would come on for the second half, and that’s what Mikey and Pádraig did, while Michael had picked up a knock.”

Being a dual club will always create those kinds of issues for the likes of Ballyduff, but with their football and hurling teams having the same four men on the management team (Leahy is joined by Gary O’Brien, Joe Murphy and Stephen Carrig, with O’Brien at the helm of the small ball side), that has helped when it comes to synchronising training sessions.

“In fairness, our secretary Mike Hussey is very good too. He is last year’s football manager, so he knows the scenario that we face in the club. That weekend of the Cromane game, we played County SHL against Ballyheigue and County MFL against Churchill on the Saturday. So, we had three games in Ballyduff in two days,” he stressed.

Oh, for those carefree times... With Croke Park watching and waiting like the rest of the country as the rate of infection and death tolls increase every day, the normally unstoppable juggernaut of the inter-county season is firmly stuck in neutral. A penny then for the thoughts of county secretaries as they attempt to plan a new, curtailed fixtures programme, if, and when, we get back to some form of normality.

“In fairness to Peter Twiss here in Kerry, he will look at every angle and deliberate on what is best. Regarding the county leagues, are they going to go? I don’t know, but we had a situation in Division 5 before, and it might work again now for all divisions.

“Split the 12 teams into two groups of six. We have all one game played already, so that leaves four more for every team. The top team on both sides would get promoted, and the two second-placed sides would play off for the last spot.

“That is one option anyway where you wouldn’t have to play the final ten league games in each division, which already looks like an impossibility. Looking outside the window then, you would imagine the club championships could go to straight knock-out.

“Everything probably will, to be honest. The senior hurling championship, the senior football championship etc. For one year only. Because this is an extraordinary year. That’s if we ever get back!,” admitted the Ballyduff bainisteoir.

Leahy’s first County Junior Premier clash was to be against Fossa, and the current captain of the Kerry senior football team. A mouthwatering confrontation, to say the least.

“To be fair to David Clifford, he is only one man. You have to look after his brother Paudie, Emmet O’Shea, Tadhg O’Shea, Matt Rennie. You could put your whole focus on David and leave the door wide open for the rest of them.

“It might not even work out that way now. The County Board might have to make a whole new draw and run it as a straight knock-out, and get it over with in four weeks flat. We’re all in the dark at this stage.”

To have any future date to pencil into the diary would be a crumb of comfort for every manager in Kerry and beyond. While any sign of light at the end of the tunnel may well be weeks and months away, John Paul Leahy and others will continue to dream about wearing the tracksuit and pacing the touchline once again.

Because, without the promise of better days, we would be stuck in Groundhog mode forever.

Last weekend and next John Paul Leahy should have been managing his native Ballyduff in the County Premier Junior Championship. Instead himself, his wife and their two sons are, like tens of thousands of other, just trying to manage getting through the Covid-19 crisis, as he tells John O’Dowd