CLUB GAME IS GAA ’S GREAT LEVELLER, INSISTS DEMPSEY
‘THE CLUB SCENE LENDS ITSELF TO MORE ENJOYMENT AND TIME OFF’
LUKE DEMPSEY describes the All-Ireland club competition as ‘the great leveller’. As a well-travelled former inter-county manager, the gap between the game’s haves and have-nots almost caused someone who now has 24 unbroken seasons of involvement on the sideline to walk away.
During his last stint with Carlow, he saw how inequities off the field such as finance and sponsorship meant that player talent combined with coaching and management could only go so far. It galled him to take part in a competition in which the bunch of players under his guidance had no realistic chance of winning silverware, of surviving when swimming with the sharks in the Leinster or All-Ireland Championship.
For someone who always dreamed big, making his name guiding Westmeath to a first minor All-Ireland and then doing the same at Under21 level — taking Kerry’s scalp in the final a further challenge to history and tradition — the modern inter-county game holds little romance for break-out stories.
That’s why the club has reignited his love for the game.
The mathematics teacher at St Joseph’s, Rochfortbridge, was planning a gap year after finishing with Carlow in 2012.
‘I was giving up after Carlow until the Moorefield lads rang,’ he explains. ‘I didn’t want to go out on a low note, fed up with the whole thing. I certainly didn’t intend that. The club scene lends itself to more enjoyment, more time off. It’s not as intense as the inter-county game has gone so it’s been thoroughly enjoyable.
‘When I went to Moorefield I was at the end of a long spell in Carlow. My fourth year in Carlow, I felt jaded, tired. Going to Moorefield was very refreshing in that it was the county I was born in, played my football in. And I really enjoyed their professionalism.’
Successive county titles followed before he took over St Loman’s in Mullingar. A hat-trick of county titles there makes it five on the trot when the two clubs that contest this afternoon’s Leinster club final are combined, Dempsey’s deep connection with both teams the stand-out subplot.
‘It’s very unusual,’ he admits. ‘Something you wouldn’t think about in your wildest dreams. You’d never think you’re going to end up so soon after the last club I was with, playing them in a Leinster final.
‘When I was with Moorefield, I knew they had the potential, the organisation, club structure, and the player interest to get to this stage.
‘Certainly, with the improvement Loman’s have made over the three years, this group of lads deserve to be in a Leinster final.
‘Both clubs are progressive, both on the edge of two towns and both thoroughly deserving of being in the Leinster final, given the paths they have taken.’
When he surfed the wave of his own success to take over the Westmeath senior team in 2001, he came so close to working the oracle with a special group of players, coming tantalisingly close to knocking out the Meath team that reached the All-Ireland final that year.
His time in Longford coincided with the last great scare on the road for Dublin in Leinster in June 2006. But despite the dominance of Dublin clubs in provincial competition, he doesn’t get the sense of those inter-county inequities filtering in to the club scene.
‘The club is the great leveller with the big divide at inter-county. It’s the great leveller because the provincial inter-club competitions have been marvellously streamed.
‘If you take Multyfarnham as a village in Westmeath who didn’t win a junior championship for 50 years — they won it in Westmeath and now they’re Leinster champions. What that has done in the village, where there wouldn’t have been a predominance of footballers, wants to be seen to be believed. To see the joy it has brought the entire village which is not a GAA stronghold in Westmeath. ‘The joy it has brought to the Loman’s supporters and the town of Mullingar. ‘It is still a great leveller that the likes of Rathnew, a great traditional club in Wicklow, would beat a powerhouse like St Vincent’s, who would beat many an inter-county team. ‘Also, when I was in Moorefield, the support they have. Club is all about family. I’ve seen it at the coalface with Loman’s and Moorefield, the work families have put in to the clubs.’ He has no doubt it’s the fairest competition the GAA has. ‘It really is. Allied with the National Leagues. The way the leagues are streamed in Divisions 1 to 4. The leagues are excellent. When I was with Carlow and Westmeath, the League was always important. I remember some manager used to annoy me by saying they weren’t taking the League seriously which was b ****** t really. It was only an excuse for them doing poorly.
‘Every manager takes the League ultra-seriously now because it is their level. Every match is a dogfight. That is only second to the club competition.’
He doesn’t see the same purity of competition in the way the race for the Sam Maguire Cup is set up.
‘The provincial championships are a farce,’ he says bluntly.
‘Turning a blind eye to them for years is not doing the GAA any service at all. Because it’s only catering for Division 1 counties who will invariably get to the Super 8, now that it has been made even more elite.
‘I’ve been saying this for donkey’s years, there has to be a secondary competition. If there is 32 counties, if you half them, you’d have 16 in two competitions.’
Just mimic the tiered club model. Run a second-16 competition parallel with the Sam Maguire Cup with the finals on the same day?
‘Exactly. Some inter-county managers who get a good run say this is the way players want to go. Until that changes, you’re left with the acceptance of good performance rather than winning trophies.’
That’s not enough in his eyes to justify the level of training, the
finance needed, the effort put in by the players. ‘I don’t think it is. You enter a competition to have a realistic chance of winning a trophy. That’s the way I always went about it. When I was down in Carlow, you set your goal of winning a trophy, the Division 4 League. Which we never did but you set your target.
‘Deep down in my subconscious, to set a goal of winning the Leinster trophy – a Leinster semi-final was the best we did when we beat Louth – in your subconscious, you know you’re not going to win the trophy. You’re hoping for a good run then in the qualifiers, which is not good enough. A manager’s subconscious or thoughts, no matter how hard they try to mask them, will invariably trickle out to the players.’
He sees that reflected in the struggle of counties in the lower tier to even get their best players to declare.
Even back in 2001 he was being compared in print to legendary Meath manager Sean Boylan in terms of style of management: ‘there is a sense about him also that his talent for team management is innate, natural, intuitive, an extension of his personality’, a sentence that seemed to get to the heart of his relationship with players and that draws a laugh when put to him.
‘I love managing groups,’ he says simply.
‘Like when I’m teaching, I wouldn’t be considered a strict teacher. It is personality. The aim when you’re with a group is to get the best out of each individual when no two individuals are the same.
‘Having fun, enjoying it — because it is a sport — not taking it too seriously, yet having set targets and goals and a gameplan that suits each group.’
And then he has to go, the school bell calling.
Whatever happens at O’Moore Park this afternoon, he’ll have a share in the winners’ dressing room.