ONLY WAY IS UP FOR OFFALY
A Kilcormac-Killoughey win in Leinster will impact on Kevin Martin’s Offaly plans but he sees a bigger picture
FOR a man with conflicted interests, Kevin Martin is very clear in his mind as to how he wants today to roll. In the battle of emotion and self-interest, the new Offaly hurling manager will stay true to his faithful heart and hope that Kilcormac Killoughey get over the line in the Leinster final against All-Ireland champions Cuala.
If that transpires, it will come at quite the price for Martin and Offaly.
With the recall of Conor Mahon, Dan Currams and James Gorman, nine of the Kilcormac team are part of Martin’s panel and their absence this spring would most likely sabotage the county team’s Allianz League campaign even before it had started.
At best, should Kilcormac book a February All-Ireland semi-final date against either Gort or Liam Mellows, they will miss the opening two games of a Division 1B Allianz League campaign that, in its new condensed form, is more of a sprint than a marathon.
And should the Offaly club repeat their run to the 2012 final, Martin will be without those players for the entire campaign.
Inheriting a group whose only win this spring was achieved against Kerry, and facing road trips to Dublin and Galway, he oversees a squad which hardly needs diluting.
But right now Offaly hurling is in no place to pick and choose which battles it wants to win.
‘It might not be an ideal situation for me but it is not about me,’ insists Martin.
‘Any boost we can get for Offaly hurling we will take and Kilcormac winning would be a great boost. We are at a low ebb at the minute and we need to get things sorted, we need to pick things up,’ insists Martin.
It is a daunting task and he is but the latest in a long line to try and do that.
There are few better qualified as he has both the pedigree as a two-time All-Ireland-winning player and the stripes as a manager. Ironically he earned those in 2009 when he led Tullamore, as playermanager, to an against-the-odds win over Kilcormac in that year’s county final, opening the door for a successful stint with Westmeath where he won the Christy Ring Cup in his first season. But he readily admits that nothing compares to the challenge he faces now in a county that is in dire need of stability. This is the third successive season that Offaly start out under a new manager, with Éamonn Kelly and Kevin Ryan having served just one– year stints. If the League is daunting, it is but a mole hill compared to what the summer is likely to offer. A new Championship format will see them play Galway, Kilkenny, Wexford and Dublin on consecutive weekends. It is five years and counting since Offaly last won a Championship match against a traditional top-tier county — Wexford — and last year they shipped a 43-point aggregate hammering at the hands of Galway and Waterford. The fear is that with a panel light on numbers and quality, one hammering next summer will simply lead to a series of bigger ones. ‘It is probably not ideal for me coming in my first year to have four big games like that and I know that people outside the county are not expecting us to win any game but at the same time we are not going in there to make up numbers. ‘There are two ways of looking at it; you could stick with the old system and try and get into a qualifier situation but I have been thinking about this and while people might think that it is not an ideal situation for Offaly to go into four big games like this, it could be the best thing that ever happened us.
‘Players want to be playing against the best; they don’t want to be down in the second or third tier, so that it makes all that training worth doing.
‘The player in me would love to be playing in these four games in the summer,’ says Martin.
The problem is that Offaly no longer produce players of his stature with his two All Star awards to match those All-Ireland medals.
That is down to a number of reasons, but negligence at county board level is impossible to ignore.
Earlier this year, a hurling review group, chaired by Liam Hogan, walked away from implementing a plan which had previously been left to gather dust by the board’s executive, before their hand was eventually forced in the main by media reportage.
But delivery of that report became problematic amid accusations of a lack of support from the board’s leadership while the relationship between the implementation group and the board has become so toxic that former Taoiseach Brian Cowen has been drafted in in a bid to broker peace.
Martin is keen to bring a unified approach to the job but not at any price; it is understood he delayed his ratification until he got the assurances, which he had sought from the board, to get the job done.
On the face of it, he is starting from a better place, not least because they now have facilities which befit a county team — the Faithful Field in Kilcormac consists of four floodlit pitches, with gym and canteen —but the cards are still stacked against counties like Offaly.
‘We have a population of 65,000. I was talking to the chairman only a couple of weeks ago about finances and how it was going to pan out during the year, and looking at the kind of money that counties like Dublin and Tipperary spend on their teams.
It has become very expensive to prepare teams, especially now with
Any boost we can get for Offaly hurling, we will take right now
We have to be classed as a weaker county, whether people like it or not
sport science and I do believe that Croke Park has to help the weaker counties and we are classed now as a weaker county whether people like it or not.
‘We are up against the likes of Galway who have their performance analyst and nutritionist and we need to nail down that as well if we are to compete against the bigger teams.
‘It costs money to do that, but Galway has a huge population in comparison to ourselves and they can afford to do that. I think that is why there has to be central assistance for the smaller counties like Offaly, Laois and Westmeath.’
But, more than anything, Offaly have to find a way of helping themselves.
They need to restore old values, and play under the same flag of faith again.
‘It has been gradually getting worse over the years, there have been internal problems between players and the board but we are all Offaly people at the end of the day and we all want to see Offaly doing well.
‘If everyone puts their shoulder to the wheel — players, management, county board — I think we can turn it around and make it better.
‘That’s why I am here.’