THE MEN BEHIND THE MEDALS
Without a backroom team of 20-plus experts and sound financial support, there is no hope of All-Ireland success
‘THE RACE FOR ALL-IRELAND GLORY IS NOW AMATEUR IN NAME ONLY’
ON THE first weekend of last March, Ireland was suffering from the cold embrace of Storm Freya with plummeting temperatures and high winds enough for Met Eireann to issue a status yellow snow and ice warning.
Cue the footage of various parts of the country being battered and photographs of the unseasonal weather, one picture showed a young child in Kildare feeding rams from a bucket – the field they stood in was covered in a blanket of snow.
Another photograph taken on the Monday had a different feel to it, an airport check-in shot with a strong holiday vibe. The Tipperary hurling squad – with many of its players in shorts – posed under the Shannon Airport sign ahead of jetting out to Alicante on a warm-weather training camp in the gap week before their final round game in the Allianz League Division 1A.
Ronan Maher was one of those wearing a short-sleeve training top in the second row for a photograph that required a panoramic view to fit everyone in. He was one of 31 in that back row alone. Hunkered down in the front were another 22 people. The only one not officially attached to the squad was Andrew Murphy, the managing director at the airport.
After touching back down on Irish soil the following Friday night, the Spanish sun clearly had an invigorating effect on Liam Sheedy’s team. Making light of the short turnaround, they carried the work from the camp into the away trip to Páirc Uí Rinn where they demolished Cork to the tune of 1-29 to 1-16. On May 12, they returned to Cork for the first round of the round-robin Munster Championship at Páirc Uí Chaoimh and again humbled the then reigning provincial champions in front of their own.
It’s not a huge stretch to join the dots from Sheedy’s native Portroe to Alicante to Croke Park. When it comes to All-Ireland final day in August, the match-day programme only lists 26 players, exactly half the size of that travelling party.
A 20-plus backroom team is pretty much a given now for those with real All-Ireland ambitions, in either code.
In 2016, the magic number was 23. At least judging by the separate shots of the victorious All-Ireland winning backroom teams in hurling and football. There was Tipperary manager Michael Ryan, one of 23 in the shot taken on the pitch after the final whistle and the skewering of Kilkenny.
And there was Dublin football manager Jim Gavin, smiling in the Dublin twilight after completing step two of the five-in-a-row.
Some of the faces alongside him gave an illustration of how the game has long moved on from a manager and a couple of selectors to specialists in the various aspects that now go with the inter-county scene.
In shot was media manager Séamus McCormack and head of performance analysis Ray Boyne – who would be part of Tipperary’s 2019 follow-up success. Former WBA super bantamweight champion Bernard Dunne was the lifestyle/performance coach.
Missing from the picture were significant others such as strength and conditioning coach Bryan Cullen – the 2011 captain who moved from Leinster Rugby to take up the
full-time post with Dublin
GAA.
Gavin’s capacity to surround himself with a strong support team has been a distinguishing feature of his record-breaking tenure, one that has transformed the face of Gaelic football.
Sheedy too, has managed to do something similar in his first year back in charge, creating a template that has set the bar.
That included setting up a highprofile commercial board to prop up the county senior team with the likes of Niall Quinn and Alan Quinlan on board. There is also the patronage of his Portroe friend Declan Kelly, chairman and CEO of new sponsors Teneo, a global firm of heavyweight financial standing.
Listen to Sheedy, directly after the final whistle of the All-Ireland and the emphatic 3-25 to 0-20 win over Kilkenny.
‘This journey was never about me, it’s all about the team and the backroom team we put around them. Eamon O’Shea, Tommy Dunne and Darragh Egan are just unbelievable men – all three. And Cairbre [Ó Cairealláin] doing the S&C, the condition he has got those players in is just fantastic. They challenged the lads and the lads responded. So (I’m) just thrilled.’
John ‘Bubbles’ O’Dwyer echoed the same sentiments as he came in off the field.
‘Just Liam returning is no good, he’s only as good as his backroom team. He came back with a backroom team that was different class so he got the people that he wanted and without them, Liam is no good, he’ll tell you that himself.
‘The whole professionalism and the way they go about their business. Our S&C, our nutritionists, our coaches, there’s everything that you look for, it’s given to you on a plate and there’s no stone (left) unturned and we got our just reward at the end of the day.’
Professionalism is the word that jumps out. Looking at the elite end of inter-county competition, the All-Ireland race is amateur only in name.
And yet there is so much more to it than logistics. Take the Waterford hurlers as an example. They too went on a foreign training camp. They lost every Championship game in Munster, they crashed and burned to the extent that Páraic Fanning’s tenure ended after a single season. So the group dynamic – the team spirit, the bond, the unity of purpose – is clearly huge.
Here’s Brendan Maher talking about the difference that type of back-up can make. From a point where a cruciate knee ligament injury last summer threatened his career, he dedicated himself to the Tipperary cause, even parking his day job with Teneo in Dublin to free up the necessary time to get back to peak fitness. An inspiring presence all the summer through, he looks a nailed down All-Star.
Maher had his operation on July 20, 2018. His return to the group environment in November proved to be the turning point in his recovery, particularly the impact of Cairbre Ó Cairealláin who himself had moved with the position to live full-time in The Ragg. ‘I got a huge lift from just being back amongst the group. And our new S&C Cairbre was brilliant with me.
‘He had actually rehabbed one of the Arsenal soccer players last year on an ACL so he had a full programme done out, and we attempted to work off that.
‘We set out some targets. I was meeting him inside in Thurles at 7.30 before work for an hour and going off to work and coming back. Then I’d train that night with the lads so he was with me for every session. He didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t part of his job. He fully invested into it. He saw that I was determined to get back strong and he helped me along the way.’
Sheedy picking up the phone to Ray Boyne and bringing him in to dovetail with the performance analysis of Damien Young was another example. In one interview, Boyne explained the level of detail that his role involves.
‘We would break the performance into four sections; the physical,
By Philip Lanigan
the technical, the tactical and the cognitive,’ he remarked.
Seán Flynn and Finn Briody helped Young with certain areas while the raw number crunching fell to Boyne and his two sons Darragh and Conor.
‘It meant we could break the game down into data sets. I can give each of them something to monitor. And then I can layer them on top of one another.
And you can begin to see where the trends are. That can give you the information that can help coaches when they’re working with the players in training. Your pass ratio. Your pass return. That’s beginning to look at the technical side, which the electronics don’t pick up. When you haven’t got the ball, positioning.’
Limerick won the AllIreland in 2018 with JP McManus in the background, a big benefactor, another powerful sponsor. Sheedy, who served as chairman of Sport Ireland’s High Performance
Committee, looked at Gavin’s Dublin and took a model of best practice and applied it to hurling. This is the sophisticated sphere into which Gaelic games have moved. The problem for other counties is that they risk being left behind.
Micheál Donoghue was a surprise departure as Galway hurling manager and the word is that keeping up with rising costs was an issue, especially with the county board under the financial spotlight in recent years and keen to rein things in. The unstable nature of county board finances often means they are stretched to the limits already as things stand. The pressure is on counties though to keep pace.
Just this week, Kilkenny announced a new sponsorship deal with UPMC – a company partnered up with the Pittsburgh Steelers in the NFL – one which involved a naming rights deal for Nowlan Park for the next 10 years. ‘The partnership will enormously benefit GAA players in Kilkenny across all age grades, including development squads, with the provision of the most modern technology and training systems available,’ remarked county chairman Jimmy Walsh. A long-term strategic vision and partnership. And the right people to make it all happen. That’s the name of the game as the next decade unfurls.