Cunningham has the form to provide stability in Roscommon
NOT a serious ball kicked and
already the sense is that Roscommon are bunkered in for a spring that threatens to break rather than make them. Their new manager Anthony Cunningham declined media invites for interviews this week ahead of today’s Connacht SFL final clash with Galway in Tuam.
In a sense, you can see his point. If he did not have bad news to proffer, he would have no news at all.
The last manager to hitch a ride on the close season managerial merry go-round in mid-November, with time already against him so, it now appears, are circumstances.
By the time the ball throws in next Saturday night in Castlebar – barring no more injury casualties today – he could be down almost 10 of last year’s panel.
At full strength, they would have to strain every sinew to survive in the Allianz League’s top tier. At half-strength, all that remains to be seen is whether they will go down fighting or simply sink like a stone. That bad? Pretty much. A quick audit of the missing can only send a chill through the hardpressed Primrose faithful.
Seán McDermott and Ian Kilbride have hung up their inter-county boots for good, while midfielder Cathal Compton has gone to New York, where he will be joined by Fintan Cregg come April. Ciarán Murtagh has also been lost to the travelling bug for the season.
Niall McInerney, who is studying for his medical finals, and Diarmuid Murtagh, who is rehabbing from a detached retina, have both been ruled out for the entire spring while talented forward Brian Stack is also on the long-term injury list.
The futures of John McManus and Peter Domican are shrouded in doubt and neither are expected to be involved this year.
On the plus side, they have Seán Mulloly back to assist a hardpressed defence.
On the minus side, he lasted just 28 minutes before he was forced to hobble out of last weekend’s preseason loosener against Sligo.
Is it really that grim? Perhaps not, the likely availability of McInerney and Diarmuid Murtagh for the Championship might lighten the mood a little.
But right now, the odds are stacked against Cunningham.
Roscommon have made the last three Connacht finals, but that had as much to with benevolence of the draw as to the team making any major stride towards becoming a serious top-eight outfit.
The reality is that Galway, in the 2017 final, are the only serious team they beat during that spell. However, the knowledge that they were assured of a place in the last 12 from the get-go provided Cunningham’s predecessor, Kevin McStay, with a safety net which won’t be available to the new man.
It meant that no matter how rough things got in the spring, there was always a bail-out.
In 2017, they lost their first six League games and still ended up as Connacht champions. That prospect is simply not on the table now. After Cunningham deals with a problematic spring, he is set to run straight into Mayo in the Connacht semi-final, ensuring there is no fast-track to the business end this time.
If all of that is not enough, Cunningham, along with Mark Dowd and Iain Daly, will also have to show the team a new way. Roscommon emerged from McStay’s three-year tenure as a team who were easy on the eye but ultimately hard on themselves.
They were committed to expressing and enjoying themselves on the field which were commendable characteristics, but it came with a brutish price tag when they ran into the country’s top teams who were blessed with both structure and quality.
In their last four Croke Park visits, all in the last 20 months, Roscommon have leaked four goals in each game.
Those are the kind of numbers
that end up on toe tags and even though they did win one of those games, it happened to be the most insignificant – last year’s eight-goal Division 2 final shoot-out against Cavan. The other three – against Mayo, Tyrone and Dublin – were lost by an aggregate of 54 points.
That is what happens when you are kicking it out against the elite and you don’t have a plan in place to stem the bleeding.
But they may, in Cunningham, just have the right manager at the right time.
Before it all went pear-shaped with the Galway hurlers, he was the one who stripped an ageing team bare when he took them on in 2011 and rebuilt them from the foundations.
That is less of an issue (a climbing age profile is not a problem for Roscommon) but he also provided the Galway hurlers with a defensive structure – not least his deployment of Johnny Coen as a sweeper and the dropping deep of his half-forward line – and Roscommon would certainly benefit from a strategy to protect a porous defence. In truth, what Roscommon needs more than anything is a period of stability. The retirement of the former Ireland International Rules defender McDermott brought back into focus the managerial chaos which has undermined so much of the hard work invested in impressive underage structures down through the years. In his 14 seasons as a county senior, he witnessed 10 managerial regime changes. They need a steady hand now and a strong nerve to guide them through what promises to be challenging times at best and hard times at worst. GALWAY V ROSCOMMON Tuam Stadium, 1.30pm
THERE WILL BE NO PROSPECT OF GETTING A BAIL-OUT