LILIES NEED AN END GAME
Cian O’Neill’s first season in charge of his native Kildare was marked out by their inability to see out games from winning positions, he plans on altering that trend
CIAN O’NEILL gets to tick a box today when he eyeballs Dublin for the first time as Kildare manager, but it is neither the time nor the place of his choosing. It comes seven months too late and an O’Byrne Cup semi-final in Newbridge is a 500-mile barefoot slog from a Leinster final in Croke Park of which they were within half an hour’s stroll last summer.
Seven minutes into the second half and they led a Westmeath team, one that had already been condemned to the National League’s bottom tier, by half a dozen points. What could possibly go wrong?
Kildare’s capacity to find ways to lose games – already half-won – is an affliction they were burdened with long before O’Neill was entrusted with their care in the autumn of 2015, and evidently it is one they have not kicked. They went 30 minutes without scoring and a couple of points eked out in injury time was not enough to prevent them losing by one.
But any shock at the way that game rolled was feigned. In their opening match against Wexford, another bottomtier team, they somehow managed to win while scoring just nine points. They only hit two in the second half (both within a minute of each other at the start of the final quarter) as they revealed their grim summer game face.
They played with double, at times even triple sweepers, as a combination of Eoin Doyle, Morgan Flaherty, Ryan Houlihan and Emmet Bolton dovetailed on guard duty. That it was excessive few doubted, but, with an apparent clear road to the final, it was easy to assume that O’Neill had Dublin on his mind.
The other assumption was that he got spooked after his team were torched in the League’s Division 3 final shoot-out by Clare. They conceded 2-17 which prompted a radical shift away from orthodoxy.
Such a change, however, left them with too little time to test out a new way of play. It left them unable to defend en masse, but they lacked the fluency and organisation to transition into attack and were, therefore, a blunt force.
It’s not a narrative to which O’Neill necessarily subscribes.
‘The transition into our tactical plan for the Championship was always going to happen after the League,’ he explains. ‘The bottom line was that we did not execute our gameplan the way we should have.
‘Even though we beat Wexford, we were less than convincing and then against Westmeath we lost out by a single point, but for me it was never to do with tactics.
‘I mean, you don’t go six points up against a team if you are doing something that is radically wrong but you lose a game like that because you did not stick to the tactical plan that got you six points up in the first place. A lot of it came down to game management, to not taking opportunities when they presented,’ he added. ‘The obvious regret is coughing up needless scores when we were dominating games. It happened a couple of times in regular League games, it happened in the League final which was a game of importance to us, it happened against Westmeath when we were six points up where we once again imploded for want of a better word. ‘It is not that there is any single thing to regret because it happened for different reasons and it is all about learning from that and make sure that they are not repeated this year,’ insists O’Neill. If that sounds like a manager making a stout defence of his tactical whiteboard, his protests also have a ring of truth. The bottom line is that it was difficult for him to play his cards any other way last year. True, such a radical change of game-plan in mid-season with such a narrow window to perfect it was unwise. However, given the modest nature of the opposition in Division 3 and the absolute necessity to gain promotion, there was little opportunity to try out a defensive system. His thinking may also have been influenced by his time as Kerry coach when overseeing a similar tactical change in 2014. The Kingdom used the window between the end of the League and the start of the Championship to morph from porous fringe contenders to air-tight would-be champions in a matter of weeks. But Kerry’s skill-sets and football smarts are on an entirely different level, and it was too much, too soon for his Kildare team. The expectation is that they will go a new way this year; their preseason doing little to douse that anticipation. They have played aggressively on the front foot, pressing high to sting early and often for scores – racking up 8-50 in booking their place in today’s semi-final. But that had more to do with fielding a strong team while playing against weakened and, in IT Carlow’s case, farcical opposition. He knows that simply “gegenpressing” the best teams, not least Dublin, will invite far too many problems. He is in a far better place to manage an evolution rather stage a fool-hardy revolution.
This time he has no need to trawl deep – he had 48 in his pre-season panel last year and ended up using north of 30 players in League and Championship – which means he can go with a settled team.
He will also hope to have a fit one, Indeed for all the talk of tactical malfunction last year, they would most likely have made it to the Leinster final had they not lost natural ball-winners Daniel Flynn, Kevin Feely and Paul Cribbin to injury.
They will also be playing Division 2 ball, meeting teams of the stature of Cork, Galway, Meath and Fermanagh, which should ensure they won’t hit the end of the spring as ill-prepared for the Championship as last time.
There are also some new familiar faces back, on and off the pitch, with Seán Hurley, currently rehabbing from surgery, ready to pick up the threads of a promising intercounty career he abandoned for the AFL. Meanwhile, Ronan Sweeney, after coaching stints at Waterford and Sligo, is bringing it all back home as is Enda Murphy, who played such a transformative role in helping Castleknock become a senior force in Dublin.
The building blocks seem more real which might ensure that this time he gets to meet Dublin at the time and place of his choosing, with the draw opening up the prospect of a shot at the Leinster final.
He refuses to be drawn on that, but he is certain of one thing.
‘You can’t be thinking about the opposition, even Dublin with the success they have had. If you are to have any aspirations about beating them you have to focus on getting your own house in order. We have to look at ourselves for that and not look anywhere else for excuses.’