‘You can be amateur but aspire to be professional as possible’
Former Dundalk FC boss Keegan is excited to bring Pro-Licence expertise to bear on Leinster GAA...
THERE’S not too many who can switch seamlessly between talk of managing his native club Rathdowney Errill in the senior hurling championship last year to Roman Abramovich and the perils of the millionaire, or billionaire, model of professional sports ownership.
But then Shane Keegan actually has first-hand experience of both, to a degree.
Meet the UEFA Pro Licence coach and exDundalk manager who is running a hurling coaching clinic next weekend, and who is now embedded in Gaelic games – when we talk on Tuesday, it’s literally the first day of his new job as a Leinster Games Development Officer.
Not to mention juggling that with a recent appointment in the League of Ireland, with new Limerick First Division outfit Treaty United, as the Head of Academy.
Conducting a Zoom interview while keeping one eye on his sevenyear-old son running about in the background being just another example of his ability to multitask.
Through his own podcast ‘How to Win at Dominoes’, he interviews the sharpest sporting for their insights into couching.
From the guiding principle of current Leinster rugby coach Stuart Lancaster (‘Start with the Why’); to Pádraig Harrington talking life lessons from Seve Ballesteros; to boxing and high-performance guru Gary Keegan on a winning mindset
More recently, he tried to unravel the secret of Limerick hurling’s modern dynasty with Paul Kinnerk.
Watching Thomas Tuchel swapping in Kepa and Caoimhín Kelleher stroking home the winning penalty for Liverpool in the Carabao Cup final, he discusses whether managers can be too clever, along with all things related to his lifelong passion for coaching.
First then, his brand new job, and the whole Games Development Officer model that Leinster GAA is expanding – in light of the impact made in Dublin for more than a decade – and the promised rebalancing of central funding by Croke Park.
‘We had our first day of induction training with the Leinster Council,’ he explains.
‘It’s brilliant what they’ve done. They’ve decided that what was happening in Dublin was working in terms of all the clubs pretty much having their own Games Promotion Officer. Said, “Can we try and make this happen in the rest of Leinster.” ‘To try and help make that happen they’ve come forward with around 50% of the funding themselves for these different GPOs.
‘Clubs can go with a One Club model where they pay the remainder of the wage and get the full working week or there’s a Two Club or Three Club model where you can take in a half or a third of the wage and get a half or a third of the hours. That makes it affordable for everybody.’
GAA Congress last weekend talked up a new distribution of funding monies broadly linked to membership and registered players on the ground and Keegan is one of 30 new coaches that are being employed in Leinster.
From someone who made his name with Wexford Youths and Galway United, he understands how the model in pro sport would suggest that paid coaching expertise works with the professional academy models based on similar pathways.
‘If you look at the GAA or soccer or football in this country, you’ve had some fantastic coaches over the last 20 or 30 years but they’ve all pretty much been volunteers. You look at the levels coaching has gone to now – the planning, implementation and review process for any session – the time that requires can be beyond your average volunteer. So this was going to have to happen.’ Having worked at the high end of League of Ireland, and at the high end of coaching as someone with a UEFA Pro Licence, how does he feel the GAA at elite inter-county level compares to pro sport, or even the semi-pro model in operation here in domestic football?
‘For me, the level of professionalism in inter-county set-ups at the moment is just incredible. It’s got to the stage now where it has seeped down to club level. I would still have this thing against the old-style selector in a management team, particularly at club level. He’s long gone out of the county scene. The fella who turns up at training, stands with a cigarette in his mouth chatting sh**e to everybody and is adding nothing productive.
‘I had four guys with me with Rathdowney-Errill seniors and they all had a very, very specific job. Some were coaching the backs, some the forwards, the keepers, taking stats. There’s no space for hangers-on anymore.
‘I did a piece before for the Times. I remember one of the articles I wrote was, well actually, intercounty GAA set-ups – in terms of their professionalism – are 10 miles ahead of a League of Ireland set-up. And that’s not to give out about a League of Ireland set-up – that’s the reality. That’s the reality because if you think about it, if you’ve got 100 grand to spend as manager of St Pat’s, you’re going to spend 80 to 90 grand of that on signing players and paying those players every week.
‘So you’re left with your 10 or 20 grand to try and assemble a management team with a level of expertise
I love coaching but I know that I can be a bit of a control freak
around it.
‘If you’ve got that same 100 grand and you’re a manager of an intercounty team, you’ve got that money to literally use on creating your management team or set-up for the most professional environment possible around the players. GPS, your trip away, all that sort of thing.
‘So it’s no surprise that it has allowed inter-county teams to pull in a higher level of expertise because they have more funds to
work with. There is that tension then all the time with the amateurism ideal, when the boundaries are being pushed all the time at the highest level. If the GAA then is professional in everything but name, is it going to head down that road? I don’t think so.
‘I’d be surprised. You can be an amateur organisation while aspiring to be as professional as you can in your set-up.
‘And that’s what all these teams are doing. Hit best practice in as many areas as you can. Find what can give us the slightest edge. The essence of it all has to be high standard coaching.’
Can you be too clever? Take Sunday’s Carabao Cup final. While the statistics backed Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel – it backfired when his replacement keeper for the penalty shoot-out skied his team’s last one over the bar.
‘You can be too clever. I’d hold my own hand up – I’d be guilty.
‘I’d be an over-thinker at times and sometimes you can overthink things. Sometimes the blindingly obvious is the thing to do. Rather than trying to be different or coming up for something for the sake of it.
‘I’ve seen it work with Sligo Rovers – they had a bit of success with it in FAI Cup finals, a keeper change before penalty shoot-up.’ Keegan’s memory is good enough to recall the 2011 final when Paul Cook made the bold decision of replacing goalkeeper Brendan Clarke with Ciarán Kelly for the penalty shoot-out and the latter became the hero for the second year in a row.
Recent weeks has seen a focus come on sport and ownership and the financial ties that bind.
While the four-year ownership tenure of
Dundalk by a PEAK6led group of investors and US-based chairman Bill Hulsizer produced an array of trophies, the end was messy.
Keegan himself was originally brought to Oriel Park as opposition analyst by former manager Vinny
Perth who stepped down in 2020. Keegan then
assumed more responsibilities alongside Filippo Giovagnoli and Giuseppe Rossi, who were brought in via a New York youth academy. Except there was a problem for UEFA competition. In December 2020, Dundalk were fined €50,000 by UEFA for ‘shadow coaching’ due to the fact that the manager Giovanogli did not have the relevant qualification to be involved at European level. Keegan had been fulfilling the role of manager in the competition as, unlike the Italian, he has a Pro Licence. When there was an awkward re-juggling of roles in 2021, with Keegan named as manager and Giovagnoli demoted from head coach, it was all too messy and Keegan walked. Recent weeks have seen sport intersect with bigger issues than ownership, which has become tied into war, military manoeuvres and geopolitics.
‘You see all the craic with the statement about Abramovich handing over ownership – has he really handed it over?’ asks Keegan.
‘Same with anything, money makes the world go round. For my sins, I’m a Spurs fan. We’re a prime example of a team, as Daniel Levy will argue, that is trying to manage their finances reasonably prudently, rather than having an oligarch or a sheikh flash the cash and get you where you need to be.
‘Look, what Leicester did was a once-off. Will probably never happen again in my lifetime, but by and large, for sustained success, if you want that in the Premier League, it probably means finding a billionaire owner. And not being overly concerned about where he got his billions from.’
Is it naïve to think there is going to be a kind of reset with that ownership model, a corrective?
‘I think it’s possibly gone too far in England to reset itself. A better comparison is the League of Ireland.
I was at Dundalk during all the madness that went up there. If something like that happened again, where somebody with money came in looking to buy a League of Ireland club, I think there would be more due diligence done. Particularly a fan-owned club would be very, very reluctant to let that happen. Because it went so awry in Dundalk.
‘The supporter-owned models – to me, Bohemians have been a shining light at it, Sligo have done particularly well. Cork looked like it was going fantastically only for it to go wrong, so that shows you can have a club-owned model that goes wrong, same as something can go wrong when you have a billionaire calling the shots. It’s hard to know what works best.’
He clearly has such a passion for coaching. So how different is coaching and managing, even as he looks back through the prism of that Dundalk experience?
‘The Dundalk experience, everybody knows I was manager in name only, to get around licensing
A good coach is not always a good manager. It’s a different skill set
situations there. But it’s still an interesting debate. They’re two very different skill sets.
‘I come from a sales background. I always found it strange that people assumed that a good sales person would be promoted to be a good sales manager. A good sales person is absolutely not necessarily a good sales manager. No more than a good coach is a good manager. Just a very different skillset. Some have the personality to do both.
‘I love coaching, that’s where my passion is. I’m also admittedly a bit of a control freak so when I’m not manager… Being the manager maybe satisfies the ego as well.’
It’s that love of coaching and the idea that best practice should be shared which brought him to organise a practical hurling coaching workshop next Saturday – full details can be accessed via KeeganCoaching.ie.
Derek McGrath, Christy O’Connor, Seoirse Bulfin, Eamon O’Shea, Kevin Murray, Willie Maher – there’s something there for anyone interested in the game. A number of the select list have appeared on his own podcast and he explains the setup at the LOETB Centre of Excellence in Portlaoise. ‘Derek will be in at 11am. He’ll put on an on-pitch session for 40 minutes, then a 10 minute Q and A, where the coach explains the thinking.
‘Then bang, on to next coach. Each a practical session.
‘As coaches, we can get consumed by the content – how big is that grid? What we need to be looking at is the softer skills – what’s his body language? Is he telling them what he wants or is he using guided discovery to lead the players to understand? How is he coaching rather than what is he coaching? The aim is to go away with a better idea of how the best coaches coach.’