Kildare can learn from McGeeney’s success with Armagh
Armagh's All-Ireland success, with former Kildare manager Kieran McGeeney at the helm, offers hope for Kildare Photo: ©INPHO/James Crombie
THE past couple of weeks should have come with a trigger warning for Kildare folk. Thankfully they haven’t done it much over the last twenty-odd years but anytime the Galway Tribe descend on Croke Park for All-Ireland day is incredibly hard for a died-in-the-wool Lilywhite.
Galway have the hex over us, and it didn’t start with ’98 either, though hopefully someone will accidentally drop the “Year ‘til Sunday” master tape over Salthill pier someday. No disrespect to John O’Mahony. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
Until Niall Cronin’s minors beat them in the All-Ireland B this year you had to go back to 1985 for the last men’s team beating them, the seniors winning in Newbridge when Larry Tompkins scored 1-5.
Galway people don’t lack confidence. You’d have to admire it really, though what it is based on exactly I’m not sure. They haven’t won an Ireland since 2001 and out of 24 final appearances they’ve won nine and lost fifteen.
But it still hits deep to see those maroon flags in Croke Park. You’d never get over the despair of standing on Hill 16 in ’98 at the final whistle and realising Lily wasn’t marrying Sam after all, that injuries to key men had caught up on us and that even Micko couldn’t lay the seventy year curse.
I was out the gate that day sharpish, half-way down Clonliffe Road and hitting sprint mode when Ray Silke collected Sam. I’ve never been back on the Hill from that day to this.
Of course, them having Pádraig Joyce at the helm now doesn’t help matters for a Kildare supporter, solid unflappable Joyce who declared on day one he was there to win an All Ireland. Pure Galway that.
Seeing Armagh in the final was triggering too, though. While Galway had a bona fide Kildare man at Joyce’s side in Cian O’Neill, Kieran McGeeney is surely an honorary Lilywhite?
We’ve watched from a distance as he dusted himself down from his expulsion from the Short Grass in 2013, gazed through our fingers as drama met tragedy as his beloved Armagh fell short in increasingly more agonising ways over the course of a decade. The man was cursed, savagely and inhumanely so. We understood that pain.
Apparently sixteen Armagh clubs voted against Geezer remaining at the helm last Autumn, but forty-six rowed in full square behind him, reminding us that twenty-nine clubs and officers ousted him by one measly vote eleven years ago in Kildare, just as the most promising group of under-21s since the 1960’s was coming through to freshen up his squad. A travesty.
But back to Armagh. Let me say this carefully, but I think they are probably the most ‘functional’ All Ireland Champions of my lifetime. That’s not entirely a criticism, indeed it is to their absolute credit.
As Aidan Forker said, they made “anything possible” with “faith, belief and hard work”. I can’t say I am a big fan of their approach at times, but they at least were more direct on Sunday than a Galway team who seemed programmed to avoid shooting until the perfect opportunity arose. Their players (Shane Walsh in particular) seemed to have forgotten how to execute.
It was a game light on collisions, short on kicking and largely bereft of aerial action. The shooting, when players ran out of other options, was appalling at times, mainly by Galway it has to be said. Despite that inbred cockiness they panicked down the home straight.
Armagh were marginally more clinical, and you felt the hand of fate was guiding them with the new President Jarlath Burns looking on from the Hogan (what a leader of substance he is by the way). But it was a poor advertisement for gaelic football, particularly after the thrills and spills of the hurling the week before.
Where does it all leave Kildare? Well for starters we’re in Division 3 which is where McGeeney found Armagh when he took over from Paul Grimley in 2014. But it needn’t be a permanent demise as he showed.
The second thing that struck me is that Dublin and Kerry collectively are at their lowest level for a good while. Two fairly ordinary, in historical terms, teams made it to the final. Mayo and Tyrone are rebuilding, and Jim McGuinness doesn’t have the talent available he had last time. Derry may have hit their ceiling. And for the second year in a row the winners came from Division 2.
Make no mistake, Kildare are light years currently from those levels. But it needn’t take too long to turn things around, as McGeeney himself proved before in Lilyland. Step one is to appoint a serious management team with the ability to inspire, coach and develop the crop of talented underage players who have lined out for us over the last four or five years.
Step two is to take a serious look at the sort of players Kildare are producing and whether we are doing enough to develop those lads physically to compete. Looking at both of Sunday’s finalists their physique was alarming, and clearly it doesn’t aid them in putting the ball over the bar, but you need to be fit, strong and athletic to compete.
It is no coincidence that Julie Davis, who was with Geezer in Kildare, was name-checked regularly at the weekend, her strength and conditioning work a notable factor in their success. We’ve highlighted it before here, but Kildare have a serious blind spot when it comes to that aspect of modern football.
Even if we get that right it will take a few years to bear fruit, which is as good a reason as any to learn from Armagh’s approach and appoint a manager with a medium-to-long term remit to bring Kildare forward. And to show him patience. If his name was Brian Flanagan, it would make even more sense.
Cill Dara Abú
