Best of 2014: Oisin McConville on Football
Best of 2014: Oisin McConville on Football
Armagh and Crossmaglen Rangers legend Oisín McConville cast his expert eye on the 2014 All-Ireland Football Championship as GAA.ie's football columnist for the year.
Here, we reproduce some of the highlights of his column, which featured on GAA.ie throughout the summer.
I think perhaps the best example to illustrate how possible it is for top inter-county footballers to have equally fulfilling club careers is in the most successful county of them all - Kerry.
The single biggest compliment I can give to Kerry is that it never seems to be an issue there. They just seem to go and play their games, and they probably play as many if not more club games than any other county in Ireland. They don't seem to overtrain their players. They just seem to always play games, whether it be League, Divisional, Kerry County Championship - they always seem to be playing, and they seem to be playing at times of the year when other counties are closed down.
The big thing then is that, whenever Kerry get far enough on, there is a lull in the club stuff and I think everyone accepts that because Kerry have been so successful over the years, 36 All-Ireland titles and all that. Take this weekend just past - Kerry qualified for the All-Ireland quarter-finals when they beat Cork in the Munster final on July 6, and the following weekend their players were playing championship with their clubs. No problem. James O'Donoghue, who was lighting up all our television screens two weekends ago, was one of the main men last weekend as his club Legion knocked out Colm Cooper's club Dr Crokes.
I mean, take Cooper for example. He has been so committed to Dr Crokes for years - winning Munster titles, trying his hardest to win an All-Ireland with them - and he has balanced all that with being one of the top players in Ireland with Kerry. Cooper has played as much football as anyone in the country, and he still has been able to excel. Until his injury this year, he had hardly ever even been injured in 12 years of playing at the highest level.
Let me start by taking you back to a time when Gaelic football was a bit different. When I first broke onto the Armagh senior football panel in the 1990s, I discovered that an annual ritual took place every year in Navan, a couple of weeks before the start of the championship.
Meath and Armagh used to meet every year without fail in what I can only describe as a war of a challenge game around late April or early May. The game was often held behind closed doors and it's a blessing that it was because it literally was war. I don't know where the idea for the game started, I don't know who drove the staging of it, but I'd love to know who did because I would have told them to drive it in another direction!
It was the toughest, most physical environment you could ever end up in as a Gaelic footballer. It just used to always end in fights and rows. The chosen referee of the day was obviously given instructions to let a lot of things go, because his whistle hardly blew. And with that being the case, it meant a row was the only way to settle any grievances that happened...
When I started playing football, goalkeepers were, for want of a better word, clowns. They were almost invariably 'characters' of some description - jokers, messers, whatever you want to call them - but whatever they were, they certainly weren't key men on the teams I played on in my early days.
Kicking around as kids at school or wherever, the lad who ended up in goals was usually the least athletic kid around. It was a position no-one wanted to be in, because it was seen as something that didn't really matter. Essentially, if you were no good out the field, you ended up in goals.
That situation might seem sort of childish and not bearing any relation to how things were at adult level, but things actually didn't change that much when I started playing senior football. Even at inter-county level it was a bit like that.
Benny Tierney and Paul Hearty are the two goalkeepers that I played most of my adult football with. Now Paul is a serious character. It's probably not fair to call him a header (I know him well, so I can get away with that), but I think it's fair to say he's a bit of a loose cannon, as I think the following story attests to.
Benny Tierney actually told me this one. There was this day that Packie Bonner was up doing a coaching course in Armagh. Bonner was going through various drills and exercises, and for some reason, Paul decides to start belting balls around the place. He starts driving kicks around, and one of them ends up smacking Packie on the side of the head. Totally accidental of course, but when I heard it I wasn't surprised. That's just the sort of stuff they did.
When I think of the best referees I played alongside, the common denominator was their communication skills and their ability to be understood by players, which in turn, leads to respect. A referee I loved in Armagh was a man called Sam McClatchey. He used to stand in the middle of the field and would only blow the whistle if somebody was in serious bother or something like that. I loved him because you knew exactly where you stood. His saying was: "You keep talking, I keep walking." And I witnessed the man once taking the ball 100 yards up the field. That's in no referee's manual, but everyone respected him and every player in Armagh will tell you that.
He was like Pat McEnaney in that regard - you just knew where you stood with him. Jimmy White from Donegal was another great referee. Again, he used to let things go, but he was a brilliant communicator on the field. If I asked him what something was for, he would tell me exactly why. John Bannon was another one - I often used to disagree with his decisions, but when I asked him what something was for, he told me. I respected that.
Another referee I have serious time for is Brian Gavin. I ran into him by chance recently, and I have probably never spoken to a more reasoned person on the subject of referees. He understands the game, still plays it himself at junior level in Offaly, and I always get the feeling he actually enjoys the job, which is something you don't see too often.
I can't quite believe I'm not tipping Donegal here, but I believe Kerry are going to win on Sunday. Donegal have that special fire from McGuinness, and passion is the word that comes to mind with a lot of what they do. It's more ice than fire with Kerry and Fitzmaurice but the exterior should not fool you, because Kerry will be so intensely motivated to win this game.
What extra motivation do you need to win an All-Ireland final, you might ask? Well, I believe it can be a factor. Donegal's year has been interesting in that motivation has been a major force in their matches, one way or the other. They had it against Monaghan because of last year, but against Antrim and Armagh, I think it dipped significantly and that's why Armagh nearly beat them and Antrim were level with them at half-time. Hard to believe that, looking back now. They obviously had it in spades for the semi-final against Dublin. But I'm not sure if theirs will be as strong as Kerry's on Sunday.
I just am not convinced that Donegal can rattle Kerry or affect them tactically in the way they can to other teams. Fitzmaurice will have a plan in place to overcome whatever happens. Much has been said about Donegal's system and structure - all true of course- but the same applies to Kerry. James O'Donoghue gets so much of the attention and rightly so, but the thing about him is that he's a team player who shines in a well-oiled team structure.
This is a Kerry team that is new but which is now standing on its own two feet. What they need now is an All-Ireland title and only then can they truly call themselves a Kerry team. That feeling will burn through all of them on Sunday, and I think it will be enough to guide them home to the place their people know best.
Kerry? I thought they had a good chance of getting out of Munster but that the best they could hope for beyond that was a place in the All-Ireland semi-final. I never saw them winning it. I saw glimpses of quality from them in the early part of the year, such as when they destroyed Tyrone in the league, but they just didn't look physical enough to really compete. They reminded me of a group of kittens going out and trying to make their way in the world. They were cuddly and new but it was a while before we would see their claws. But hands up, I got that wrong.
As for Donegal, I thought they might have a decent year but I didn't see them reaching the final either. I said midway through the season that I didn't see a team from Ulster winning the All-Ireland title for five years, so not until 2019 at least. I'm sticking with that, and that's one year gone. I just don't think any team in the province has the quality at the minute to really challenge the top three of Kerry, Dublin and Mayo. Donegal do but there is a lot of speculation that this could be the end of Jim McGuinness's time with Donegal and if it is, I think they will struggle without him.
So here's to Jim. He has been a huge plus for the GAA and he has got people thinking outside the box. I didn't really enjoy the game on Sunday from a football point of view, but from a manager's point of view, all you care about is finding a way to win the game, and he has done that more times than not in his career. From his 24 championship games in charge of Donegal he was won 20 and lost four. That's some record. Like Kevin Heffernan, Mick O'Dywer or Seán Boylan, he will transcend his own era and I believe this era will go down in history as the Jim McGuinness era. Perhaps the next era to toast will be the Éamonn Fitzmaurice era.
In an ideal world, that masters fixtures list would have weekends allocated for club championship games in between the inter-county championship games. That would hopefully mean that the All-Ireland Club Championships could then be run off within the same calendar year, but am I being unrealistic in imagining that the increasingly powerful body of inter-county managers would allow their players to go off playing club football in the middle of the inter-county season? It doesn't seem very likely at present, given what we have seen happening in many high profile examples of recent seasons.
As far as I can see it, there are essentially two options. We could try and have the above situation, whereby the club championships are run off during the inter-county season at designated weekends, in a fluid union with the All-Ireland Series. If that doesn't happen, the other option is to change the structure of the current inter-county season. As it stands, the playing season of inter-county football lasts from January to September.
That could easily be condensed and wrapped up by the end of August, or even earlier. For example, the Ulster Senior Football Championship Preliminary Round takes place in the middle of May every year more or less as a stand-alone fixture in the whole country. Like most championship weekends in the first two months of the summer, there are only a handful of games taking place. Then teams have waits of five weeks or more for their next matches, depending on whether they win or lose.
The whole thing takes an age to conclude and something that could be completed in one month ends up taking the guts of three. Why couldn't all the provincial quarter-finals in Ireland be played over two weekends? The same with the semi-finals? It would greatly help to condense the calendar, would minimise the strain on players and would bring forward the commencement of the club championships, thus liberating the vast majority of players who play GAA in this country (non inter-county club players) to actually play some meaningful football.
