John Sugrue has guided Laois to successive promotions in the Allianz Football League.
By John Harrington
When John Sugrue looks back now on his time as Kerry football team trainer in 2007 and 2008, he admits he was “a little bit wet behind the ears.”
Ten years on he’s now Laois football team manager and suggests the job he did with Kerry “was maybe not in keeping with what I would demand of fellas now.”
Based on those two comments, Sugrue is clearly both a very honest character and one who demands high standards of himself and others.
After all, as a key member of Pat O’Shea’s management team he helped Kerry win the Sam Maguire Cup in 2007 and then reach the All-Ireland Final the following year again where they were narrowly beaten by Tyrone.
Not bad for someone who was a little bit wet behind the ears.
It can’t have been easy either for a rookie trainer to walk into a Kerry dressing-room packed with All-Ireland winners and big egos and convince them that he - a good club player who had never quite made grade at county level himself – was the best qualified man in the county to put them through their paces at training every night.
“Yeah it was (tough),” admits Sugrue. “They challenge you but you've got to back yourself and you've got to have an idea and a plan.
“In fairness myself and Pat would have met very frequently to set out our training sessions and agree our training plan and decide what we wanted to work on.
“It was a challenging environment, there were a lot of big characters in there but look you live and you learn and you try and push on from that.
“We were lucky and we were unlucky. We were lucky we won an All-Ireland in 2007 and we were unlucky we lost an All-Ireland in 2008.
“That was a very strong group and that was a group that had a real strong identity about how they played football. To a certain degree it was only a matter of trying to keep them going.”
John Sugrue
The Laois dressing-room he walked into after being appointed as manager late last year was a very different environment to the Kerry one he inhabited in 2007 and 2008.
Successive relegations saw them drop to Division Four of the Allianz Football League, and they made an early exit from the 2017 Championship after heavy defeats to Kildare in Leinster and Clare in the All-Ireland SFC Qualifiers.
“Yeah it's a different dynamic but it's a different dynamic only in the sense that I think guys need to form their identity to a certain degree,” says Sugrue.
“There is an identity in there and I'm very hopeful it'll come out in this year's Leinster championship to a great degree. I don't think it takes that long to form your identity if you focus and you work hard and you've got a clear idea of what you're trying to do on a football field.
“So I suppose that's part of it. It has come through to some degree in the national league and there's been a consistency of approach by our fellas, they've gone about doing what we've asked them to do and they have been disciplined to date.
“We'll see if we can extend that into the Leinster championship now.”
Laois certainly went from strength to strength during their League campaign, culminating in a convincing Division Four Final victory over Carlow at Croke Park.
Carlow v Laois - Allianz Football League Division 4 Final
They’re favourites to beat Wexford in their Leinster SFC opener on Saturday, and Sugrue sees no reason why they shouldn’t be ambitious and set high standards for themselves.
“As far as I'm concerned any team you're involved with, you want to try and improve the standard and what they're doing and improve their mindset,” he says.
“If you do that, I think you can rise the tide a small bit and that's ultimately you're going to do when you go into any dressing room.
“In Leinster look Dublin have set the bar, they're not going to make any apologies for that and neither should they.
“Lots of teams have decided to lie back and look at them. We're trying to get our guys in order to compete with those around us and try and get a leg up on them who are around us and that's everyone bar Dublin, Kildare to some degree as well.
I definitely think there's more in us than what we probably showed in Division 4 but we've got to produce it.
“Laois teams in the past have maybe to some degree turned up some days up and more days they mightn't.
“So we've got to achieve a level of consistency first and then see where we can get to after that.”
