‘It wasn’t toxic last season’
THREE weeks from Sunday and hurling’s brave new dawn sees Dublin take on freshly crowned National League champions Kilkenny in the first round of the round-robin Leinster championship. The days of straight knockout are gone. As a taster for the summer ahead, it will whet the appetite nicely. Eoghan O’Donnell is one of those who always believed the talk of Kilkenny’s demise was wildly exaggerated. ‘People were talking about the decline of Kilkenny but I think everyone has lifted their game to match Kilkenny. Some people wrote Kilkenny off at the start of the year and they threw it back in their faces so no one is going to make that mistake again. You have Galway, Wexford and Offaly and you saw how much Offaly improved their game — they gave us a good beating and then lost to Kilkenny in the last game of the League so there really is no picking your punches in the Championship because you can easily fall through that trap door and get relegated.’ There’s the new format in one rush of words from the Dublin defender who had a strong claim to be the best full-back in the country this time last year: a rapid-fire series of games with a place in a Leinster final for the top two, a place in the All-Ireland series for third place, and the danger of relegation to the Joe McDonagh Cup for the bottom placed team. O’Donnell flatly rejects the notion that spring form would suggest the second-round match against Offaly at Parnell Park in early June could be branded as a potential relegation shoot-out. ‘If we’re listening to that stuff what chance are we giving ourselves going out? The standard of Galway, Wexford and Kilkenny is where you have to be. There is no point aiming for a third spot, you have to aim to beat them, so we don’t think along those lines at all. ‘You are using the motivation of winning rather than losing. You’d be looking at a Leinster title as motivation rather than relegation.’ He namechecks Cian O’Callaghan, Sean Moran and Oisin Gough as the Cuala regulars set to return but how many others remains to be confirmed, Mark Schutte accepting an invitation last year to join the football squad and Con O’Callaghan playing a starring role.
Prior to Pat Gilroy taking charge, the three-year tenure of former Cork goalkeeper and coach Ger Cunningham was a turbulent one, ending in relegation to Division 1B last spring and a 6-26 to 1-19 defeat by Tipperary in the All-Ireland qualifiers. But O’Donnell said the negativity around Dublin hurling last season, the idea of a ‘toxic atmosphere’, didn’t tell a proper picture of what was going on inside the camp.
‘There was [a negative picture], which was such a shame because to be honest it was one of my most enjoyable years of hurling and anyone in the camp will say that it was one of their most enjoyable years. This idea of a negative atmosphere snowballed and it kind of seemed to be all people talked about. We didn’t get the results but we had lots of poor results under [Anthony] Daly and previous managers. It wasn’t down to one manager. The manager is there to put the structure and system in play but at the end of the day, we step across the line.
‘Pat is highly recommended but we’ve had bad days this year so I wouldn’t blame managers or systems or structures like that.
‘At the end of the day it’s the players that do it and the players that have to lead it.’