Different code but same principles, insists Gilroy as he gets down to work
DRESSED in a camouflage jacket, Pat Gilroy has the look of a commander-in-chief just landed at Abbotstown after a tour abroad.
It’s no sartorial affectation – Dublin’s new hurling manager has clearly identified that the regulation county windcheater isn’t going to be enough to stay warm on a bitingly cold Wednesday evening at the National Games Development Centre, where a largely secondstring selection is busy putting Meath’s first team to the sword.
Alongside him on the far sideline is Mickey Whelan, another of the St Vincent’s old guard and his trusted coaching lieutenant when the pair plotted a path to Dublin’s first All-Ireland football triumph since 1995 back in 2011. Selector Paddy O’Donoghue is another link to that success.
Anthony Cunningham, who steered Galway to All-Ireland finals in 2012 and 2015 wears a Dublin branded woolly hat alongside him, while long-time former servant Brendan McLoughlin is part of the gathering as goalkeeper coach.
With the build and presence of an NBA player, Gilroy has that same ability to instantly command a sideline – or a room. Afterwards, just inside the tunnel, he talks through his hopes and ambitions for 2018.
He insists there is ‘nothing to heal’ when asked about the divisions of the three-year tenure of his predecessor Ger Cunningham, reaching a point where an alternative 15 of absent, disaffected or dropped Dublin hurlers started circulating last summer.
While it would have been easy to rue the absence of Cuala’s clubtied contingent, especially for a Division 1B league campaign that leaves no room for promotion error, he prefers to take a bigger picture view and says ‘any success is good’ for Dublin hurling.
The last thing he wants to do is start making excuses ahead of time.
If some faces in his back-room team are familiar from his first coming as Dublin football manager, the template he is following with the hurlers is roughly similar. The 6am sessions that made the world sit up and notice back then have already provided a way of seeing exactly who wants the jersey, with a second session fitted in the same day. It’s like a Darwinian experiment to ensure the survival of the fittest – mentally as much as physically.
Carrying two squads means the net has been cast wide, allowing him to pick a squad for Wednesday night, select another for a challenge against Tipperary yesterday and still freshen it up again for today’s Walsh Cup game against Antrim.
Danny Sutcliffe, an All-Star attacker when Dublin won a first Leinster title since 1961 under Anthony Daly in 2013, caused the first seismic crack to appear when he opted out after Ger Cunningham’s first season in charge in 2015 and took off to America to apply the Masters in finance he garnered in DCU. He was still based in America when Gilroy rang him after being appointed last October.
‘After I put the phone down,’ admitted Sutcliffe, ‘I just kind of accepted it. I was back.’
That’s the kind of force of personality Gilroy brings to it.
At 25, Sutcliffe still has a career stretching out in front of him instead of leaving a truncated career behind him.
When Gaelic Voices for Change were in the initial stages of planning a sleepout by intercounty players in solidarity with the crisis homeless situation, Gilroy immediately committed the Dublin hurlers to it. When it was pointed out that the date hadn’t even been locked in at that stage, the reply was unequivocal: ‘They’ll be there’.
And so they were. Some of those shaking buckets that evening were to the fore on the pitch on the same Wednesday night – returned former National League and Leinster title winning captain Johnny McCaffrey was back from exile and in the thick of the action at midfield, with Fergal Whitely also putting his hand up with four points from play in a dynamic showing while wearing number 11 on his back.
Just as he reconstructed the Dublin football team in terms of setup – the awkward process of putting a stronger defensive system in place leading to some bumps in the road but ultimately All-Ireland success – there were signs of something similar against Meath, with extra bodies regularly filtering back around the middle third and half-back line. In losing to Galway and Tipperary in Leinster and an AllIreland qualifier last summer, Dublin conceded eight goals and 54 points. And he made no bones about admitting: ‘defensively we need to be a bit stronger’. His credentials in the business arena were one reason why he suddenly emerged on the shortlist for the GAA director general job before Paraic Duffy got the nod back in 2007. Gilroy clearly wasn’t daunted by the fact that no manager has ever pulled off a double of Sam Maguire and Liam MacCarthy Cups. Next Saturday, Gilroy and Whelan will jointly deliver one of the keynote addresses at the GAA’s Games Development Conference at Croke Park. It’s titled: ‘Different code, same principles’. That might as well be the tagline for Gilroy’s second coming as Dublin manager. To try and replicate the same level of achievement with the county’s hurlers will be his greatest challenge yet.