O’Brien is hungry for more success
CASEY O’BRIEN has shown real managerial class this season to have guided his team from a difficult start in the league to looking like an almost unbeatable outfit in the context of the Wicklow Senior football championship.
With each passing game they look more and more accomplished in terms of hunger, ability, organisation and planning and it can’t be overstated what a challenge AGB face some 3.30pm this Sunday.
As always, the former Wicklow hurling boss was modest and calm when discussing what has been a very impressive season so far following a thumping at home to Baltinglass in an early league game in Dunbur Park
‘We’ve played very well this year; things have been going well. We’d a bad start to the league and we kind of threw the gauntlet down to the lads then and said, ‘look it lads, we’re not going well, and if want to hold on to the Dunne Cup and start heading into the championship we need to get a couple of wins under our belts’, and they responded under that pressure. It just carried on then through the championship. We’ve been going well but we’ve taken every game, every league game and championship game one game at a time and that’s all we’re going to continue to do, one game at a time.
‘It’s great to be back in a county final. In years gone by we’ve won championships but we’ve never given ourselves the proper chance to get back into a county final and try and retain it but at least we’ve given ourselves the chance to do that and it hasn’t been done since 1961, that’s the last time we did a double,’ said the Pat’s boss.
It’s worth noting that that defeat to Baltinglass came around the same time as the sad passing of club and county legend Mick Murphy.
‘Baltinglass beat us by 15 points. To be honest, the day we played Baltinglass we had only been back three weeks, and one of those weeks, our secretary Mick Murphy had passed away, so we had gone back, done a week, missed a week and then done another week. So, we had really done no work going into that but that’s the way we had planned it. We didn’t feel that you could go on for the whole year hitting the ground running so we slowly built it and slowly built it.
‘Mick was a massive figure in the club and jerseys have his name on the back of them and hopefully we can go on and do it for him,’ he said.
Football managers across Wicklow must be looking at St Patrick’s and wondering what the secret of this juggernaut is. It obviously helps to have a panel of very talented footballers but there are talented footballers in every squad, and few have appeared as ruthlessly efficient as O’Brien’s men have.
‘It’s a combination of few things,’ explained Casey. ‘You have to hand it to the players first of all, they’ve kept their heads right.
‘We’ve played a small part it but they’re still very hungry. We’ve played numerous A and B matches, 15 on 15, whatever you call them, with substitutes, and that’s down to the players pushing one another to the last. You have to hand that to the whole panel. The unfortunate thing about is that we can only pick 15.
‘I’ve a good team around me. Garry Duffy is an excellent coach, Damien is a Moorefield man, knows football inside out, and Ronan Connolly, he’s won three championships with Pats’, he’s very close to the players, they respect him.
‘The team I have around me are very good. And this year we brought in Gary Dempsey, ex soccer player, played for Dunfermline, Aberdeen and Everton, and he’s lives down here and he’s done a lot of work with the lads and the fitness levels have gone up with him.
‘The lads have been going to him sometimes twice a week, sometimes once a week. It’s something different, you can’t be doing everything on the firls. We do circuit training with him, spinning, boxfit, the lads bought into it. Last year we did yoga.
‘We’re only taking one game at a time. We’re under no illusions about Leinster or anything else. We have to win the county final first, simple as that,’ he warned.
A quick reflection on the championship seaosn for Pat’s sees Casey O’Brien highlight a trend of nip and tuck games in which the Dunbur Park man just pull clear from in the second half.
‘We started off against Éire Óg. I don’t think we were firing on all cylinders that day. We went in two points down at half-time. The lads responded really well. Éire Óg set up really defensively. They played two sweepers against us and it took us a while to break them down and I think it was Dean who got in andgot a goal and we ended up winning by five poits. We spoke afterwards and we knew that going forward that that wouldn’t be good enough.
‘The next game we played Bray and Bray were after having a good game against Blessington and we hit the ground running, and we won well.
‘Then we played Avondale who had had a couple of great results and we ended up beating them by 16 points but there was never that much in it. They missed a few goal chances and we found a few things that we needed to work on from that game.
‘Then we played Baltinglass, nip and tuck early on, but we just seemed to pull away. Then it was the Blessington game.
‘Again, it could have went either way, but we just seem to be getting away from teams in the second half recently.
‘Last weekend it was Avondale again and in fairness to Avondale and their line, I thought they did a lot of homework, they won an awfu llot of breaking ball. Again, nip and tuck coming up to half-time and Dean got the goal. We knew the first 10 minutes of the secondhalf were going to be very important and in fiarness the lads nearly took the doors off the hinges going out and we won it in those 10 minutes.
‘Semi-finals and finals are different. We got the goals at the right time against Avondale. A final brings its own thing. Pictches will be heavier, you don’t know whnat the weather is going to be like, you can get bookings or whatever, county finals take a life of their own.
‘Whoever comes through that game, Blessington only lost one game, AGB haven’t lost any games, they dropped a point to Rathnew.
‘Whoever comes through will feel they are there on merit. AGB, if they win, will be going through unbeaten. It’s going to be a hard team to face regardless.
In terms of the future, Casey O’Brien is very philosophical on the responsibilities him and his players have to the Pat’s jersey.
‘There’s been managers before me and there’ll be managers after me. There’s been selectors before the lads and there’ll be selectors after the lads.
‘There’s been coaches before Gary Duffy and there’ll be coaches after him. And there’s been players who wore that jersey before these lads and there’ll be players after them. We’re only here to mind it at the moment and pass it on and that’s the way it works as simple as that.’