biffinbanner wrote: ↑Sat May 18, 2024 10:47 pm
i feel we have been getting rid of managers too fast over the last 20 years since paul o kelly really. are we too expectant of mangers? you cant be blaming managers for player non performance. our u20s dont seem to be progressing as we had hoped for .a lot due to injury and many due to physicality. im sure niall macnamee would be top class no matter how incompetent a manger was over him? if the players are not there its hard to expect a manager to wave a migic wand.
I've heard a fair bit of this type of argument, including one prominent podcast where the defeat to London was explained away as Offaly's expectations being too high, and a failure to accept our standing in the overall pecking order.
Defeats like the one in Rathkeale this weekend and against London a week ago are spectacularly worse than anything we've experienced in the last 70 odd years, at least. Nobody's castigating this team for failing to get promotion from D3, or even for the difficult afternoon in Croke Park against Dublin. Expecting more than that, might be unrealistic.
Expecting us to at least go close in Tailteann cup games against London and Limerick is not unrealistic. In fact, younger people might air the phrase "the bar is on the floor" if that's all we feel is reasonable to hope for out of an Offaly football team.
We have been consistently a mid-table Division Three county for a long time now, and there are fewer key absentees from the panel than usual (by which I mean players that were unavailable for selection). Would Paddy Dunican be a welcome addition to the panel, or John Moloney? Yep, absolutely. There's probably a couple of others that might push for places if they were available as well, while at least four or five of the current senior hurling panel would be very capable footballers.
BUT - Offaly ALWAYS have to deal with a few cases of 'thanks, but no thanks'. I can't remember the last time you couldn't point to at least one or two players that would have been a boost to the cause, but they chose to do other things rather than play intercounty football at the time. In the main, Declan Kelly is picking from the best of what's out there, and the big players that aren't there, are missing because he doesn't want them - as is his prerogative, of course.
Have Offaly historically struggled with "backdoor" competitions? Hell yeah, and when you add in the trauma of Liam Kearns' death slowly catching up with players last year, not to mention the emotional energy expended in that remarkable Leinster semi-final against Louth, I personally found it very easy to forgive the lacklustre effort in the 2023 Tailteann Cup. I was at the Wexford game last year, I shrugged it off very quickly, and if anything, it felt to me like the players were relieved to be done, so rightly or wrongly, I felt relieved for them. I only spoke to Liam Kearns a few times in my life, mainly when he was here managing Clann, and he was a very impressive figure, very honest and direct, and very likeable for that. I can only imagine what the players would have felt, having worked with a man of that calibre so closely and intensely.
This year, for the first time in a long time, Offaly went out of the Leinster championship at the hands of Dublin, which was a game that even the most optimistic of Offaly footballer would have known that we simply could not win. There was no shock or disappointment to get over, other than the disappointment at losing in the manner in which they did - and even then, there was a couple of weeks to recover. Once we made the slow start to the league and promotion was off the table, everybody - players, management, supporters - knew we were destined for the Tailteann Cup. There was no excuse not to be at least as good as we were in 2023, and probably much better.
And yet our backdoor/Tommy Murphy/Tailteann Cup effort is the worst it's ever been.
I've no problem with the arguments that say Declan Kelly has clearly lost the dressing room and needs to go, and there is merit to them. I've no problem with the argument that he's an All-Ireland winner, he's one of our own, and how he has started slowly in a lot of his different managerial roles, but he has invariably been successful in the end, so we should show him patience. There's legitimacy in that thinking as well.
But spare me this garbage that we expect too much, or that no Offaly team has embraced the second chance in the last 20 years. We NEVER lost to teams like this, in this fashion, ever before.
I still remember being genuinely disgusted when we lost to Louth in the first year of the backdoor, or when we lost by seven points to Limerick in the Gaelic Grounds ten years later. But that was a Limerick team that lost to Kerry in the Munster final by three points the year before, and who went all the way to the All-Ireland quarter-final (again losing to Kerry) in that year, 2011. It was a Limerick team with Seánie Buckley, Ian Ryan, Ger Collins, and plenty more proper, serious footballers, and I've a strong recollection of Niall McNamee having a nightmare day as well, scoring a point or two but missing a lot of chances. Those defeats look like very strong form when compared to where we are now.
You don't have to agree or disagree that Declan Kelly is the problem, and like all things in life, there's no doubt a few factors involved, things are rarely that black and white. But we should all be able to agree that this is NOT business as usual, and that there is something badly wrong that can't just be explained away by saying we're not as good as we were 20-25 years ago and how we should all make peace with that.
Simply put, we shouldn't be rash and trigger happy, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that we should be demanding answers, and action - of some sort.
Kevin Egan. Signed out of respect for players and all involved with Offaly.
