Very unusual to appoint a guy that late, had they made an appointment previously?
What’s this chap’s name?
Joe Fortune, managed Dublin Minors a few years back.
He managed Dublin minors to beat Wexford when we played them in Carlow a good few years back. Originally from Enniscorthy area I believe.
Any relation to Fr Sean Fortune?
Sean was a north county man and then he turned crazy when the south county air fried his brain.
Managed DIT this year as well.
He may be a teacher in Dublin I think
Primary school teacher in County Fingal.
Westmeath should have beating the Dubs tonight.
The missed a penalty and about 10 frees, the did not have the belief, Dublin looked very average tonight.
Incorrect. It was his St Peter’s College education that turned him.
[QUOTE=“cthon, post: 970964, member: 2588”]Westmeath should have beating the Dubs tonight.
The missed a penalty and about 10 frees, the did not have the belief, Dublin looked very average tonight.[/QUOTE]
Most Dublin hurling sides are generally average hurlers, mullockers relying on strength and conditioning to horse teams out of it, but they will generally be found out in the big leagues.
you are one bitter cunt…Laois progressing to the level of running Antrim close and you’re talking about Dublin being found out …
[QUOTE=“cthon, post: 970964, member: 2588”]Westmeath should have beating the Dubs tonight.
The missed a penalty and about 10 frees, the did not have the belief, Dublin looked very average tonight.[/QUOTE]
Did Westmeath believe the penalty was harshly awarded & miss on purpose?
I can merely judge Dublin on their own merits, not others. Bitterness or other counties merits fail to come into it. You seem a little upset over my evisceration of that oddball U14 coach yesterday, so I’ll let this uncharacteristic outburst of yours slide for now.
hardly an outburst…I couldn’t care what you say about a man you never met…
At least we are competing in the big leagues.
True for you buddy, we’ll gloss over the fact you finished joint bottom of that big league this season after being promoted into it last season #bigleagues
Its fair enough if you want to row back from it a bit, I’m cool with that pal.
here you go … here’s your oddball… helping kids in deprived area…what a weirdo…another great call by you pal…well done…
Dublin are on the verge of qualifying for an All-Ireland final, something the county hasn’t done in 16 years. Paddy Christie will miss out on that experience but his passion for coaching is helping future generations of Dublin footballers win in all kinds of ways, and not just All-Irelands
THE last time Dublin played Donegal in the championship, the last point of the game was kicked by Paddy Christie.
There had been something of a carnival atmosphere about the new Croke Park all through that heady summer of 2002 but that sunny Saturday evening it reached a crescendo. For the first time in seven years Dublin were going through to an All-Ireland semi-final and the confidence and football coursing through Tommy Lyons’ team was best exemplified by the fact it was their full-back who had come up to sail that 45 right over the bar.
Croker was packed, the Hill was in full voice and what had began as the summer of Saipan was shaping up to end as the summer of the Dubs.
For Christie it remains one of those magical occasions, even if he and Dublin were to finish that summer and every subsequent one without that All-Ireland medal. In many ways though, he got just as much of a kick out of another footballing activity he undertook that weekend.
The previous evening he had taken the Ballymun Kickham U16s for training. For six years he had been coaching those kids and the timing of that session wasn’t by chance. For most kids their age in Ballymun, Friday evenings represented hanging out, drinking, mischief, trouble, worse.
“I see seven towers, but I only see one way out,” Bono once sang about life in that neighbourhood but thanks to Christie and the club, those kids could see another.
Philly McMahon would have been one of them. Back in the summer of 2002 there was no guarantee he would go on to become a 2010 GPA All Star or a teetotaller or a university student. He could have gone the other way.
“Philly will smile when he sees this but he wasn’t exactly the easiest young fella to deal with,” smiles Christie himself.
“He’d be the type of guy who could tell you to eff off very quickly or might not appear for two weeks. But being involved in a team and having a focus helped him and in those years when the lads would have been coming to watch Dublin matches, I’d say to them, ‘Well, in a few years’ time that could be you’.
“Now, some of them would probably have looked at me odd but Philly genuinely believed, ‘Yeah, I could do that’.”
The ones that got away still torment him though. Irene, his wife, can often tell. Christie has had a terrific return rate with those kids he started coaching way back in 1996 when he had just broken onto the Dublin senior team himself. Thirteen of them would go all the way through to play senior club football alongside him, even though the only trophies they ever won along the way up were a couple of U21 county titles towards the end. Yet he can’t help but think of the two or three who got away, or in his mind, he let get away.
When they were 16 or so Christie brought them up to Dr Niall Moyna in DCU and this one kid’s fitness scores were off the charts.
“Paddy,” said Moyna, “this kid could run for Ireland in the 400 metres.”
But that kid ended up being one of the few they lost and ended up getting into a lot of trouble afterwards.
“You still think of what if you had done things a little different. I’m still far from being the finished article, the complete coach, but at that time I was a long way off from where I am now.”
He cringes when he thinks back on his early attempts at coaching and as a primary school teacher.
“Some of the kids would have been wild enough, so here they’d be, at half-three on a Friday straight after school, jumping around the place and I’d be trying to get them all quiet. It was killing my throat just trying to get them all in. Then it dawned on me — just put out the cones and the footballs, get some of them to do a few drills and then the rest will join in.
“It’s the same in teaching. There might be a lad in the back playing with his phone or looking out the window at the birds on the tree. Starting out, I’d have been roaring, ‘Hey, you!’ Everyone had to be on course with me. Stupid. You know what would have been the best thing? Let him bleeding be! Because I had 29 of the 30 going well and that one guy wasn’t affecting anyone else.
“I mean, I was often in lectures in DCU where people with PhDs were giving us all this great information and I’d be there, no more listening to them. I’d be scribbling out a training session for the U15s or going through in my head what kind of training we might be doing that night with the Dubs. So why was I expecting this 10-year-old would never get bored?
“After 15 minutes you might go over to him all right without distracting the others and say, ‘John, are you with us here?’ Laying it on heavy doesn’t work. I’ve seen more time taken up punishing kids that would have been much better spent coaching and teaching.”
Both disciplines are a real passion and vocation of Christie’s. Back when he was doing his Leaving Cert he used to scoff at his mother’s suggestion to consider a safe, pensionable job like teaching but in his last few years as a maths and physics student in DCU he found he much preferred coaching kids and so figured his mum might have had a point after all.
These days he teaches in Our Lady of Victories, the same primary school he used go to himself. He coaches a couple of U14 squads as well. One group would be the kids he began with four years ago once he had brought the 10-year-olds of ‘96 all the way through to U21.
This summer his new U14s won the All-Ireland Féile but he would like to think they’re only starting out.
It’s the same with the north Dublin U14 development squad he takes once a month. It’s not about producing players for now but for further down the line. You can tell by the methodical way they went about selecting the squad. Instead of the traditional couple of 15-a-side trials where you mightn’t get a pass from the stranger from a different club, every club was asked to bring along 10 players for a series of seven-a-side blitzes. That way they got to wear their club colours, got to be looked after by their own coaches and all got plenty of touches and games to impress.
“Another thing we agreed on was that if a small fella was maybe getting brushed off by a bigger fella, we didn’t hold that against him if he was showing well technically. The goal is that in four years’ time that as many of these fellas will be playing for the Dublin minors and that they’ll be better footballers for it.”
A big thing for Christie is that his players are able to catch the ball cleanly at the first attempt.
“I always felt the standard of fielding in Dublin was poor. You’d often see in club games a ball balloon around the square and three or fellas run out and all miss the ball. It would take until it bounced for someone to catch the ball.”
He’s looking for players to be able to kick pass the ball 30 metres, take their point from 30 metres, all with both feet. The trick though, is to get the kid themselves to realise the value of being so complete.
“Take Johnny playing for a Division Six club. His manager is probably telling his goalkeeper to aim his kickouts for Johnny and then telling Johnny to go as fast as he possibly can and score. Now they might win but how much is Johnny really coming on?
“And even if you were a more open-minded coach telling Johnny to work on his other foot or give a long pass, Johnny’s going to do what every human tends to do — stick to what he knows. He’s saying, ‘I’m scoring 3-5 every week; why do I need to kick off my other foot?’
“But then he comes into us and he’s marked by a kid who can keep up with him and taking the ball off him.
“I’d be wary of preaching to him. Telling somebody something does not mean they’ll do something. What you might say to him gently afterwards is, ‘Johnny, you’re after getting blocked down there twice — do you know why?’
“Even if he says, ‘I couldn’t get away from your man’, you might steer him by asking ‘Well, what do you think you could do the next time?’ Hopefully he won’t say ‘I’ll run faster’. Chances are he’ll say, ‘I need to be working on my other foot’. If Johnny comes up with the solution himself, there’s a better chance he’ll work on it rather than someone preaching to him. As a coach you need to realise it’s not about you, it’s about the player.”
There were no development squads when Christie was a youngster. He didn’t even make the county minor team, failing to impress in a couple of those old-style trials. And though he would break onto the senior panel 18 months later and was in line to start in that 1995 championship, a broken finger cost him his place and his All-Ireland medal, something he’d never get his hands on.
Yet when he looks back on his 11 years in pursuit of it, he can see why he didn’t. He might have been rivalling Darren Fay as the best full-back in the country but as a team Dublin simply weren’t good enough.
“You never ran onto the pitch thinking, ‘We’re going to lose this’ but in hindsight we didn’t have enough players, especially forwards, that were up to it. When Alan Brogan burst onto the scene in 2002 I remember thinking, ‘We have a chance of doing really well this year’ and it was no coincidence that was the year we started back winning Leinsters.
“You wouldn’t like marking him in training whereas before that it was only Dessie [Farrell] that you’d really worry about. Dessie was unlucky. I know he got his All-Ireland in 95 but after that he spent his time on an average enough team that was still all about trying to win an All-Ireland.”
Oh, how they tried to win it. Christie both laughs and winces at the memory of Tommy Carr’s first couple of years over the team, something he reckons Carr himself now does as well.
“Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we’d train in the army barracks in Rathmines. It was a horrible place. It reminded me of the Shawshank Redemption. I always thought that some night I was going to escape through 500 yards of shite and whenever you finished a session there you were on your knees with your hands up in the air like Andy Dufresne in the film. Peadar Andrews used to do all the training alongside me so I even had a Red beside me.
“One Saturday morning he had us out in the Phoenix Park running up and down every hill in the place. It was savage. You’d already have been exhausted from the Friday in the barracks and I was also doing my final year in DCU.
“There’d be days I’d be there where I could hardly keep my eyes open, where I could hardly walk.
“Looking back, it was lunacy. Fitness was never really a problem in Dublin. The problem with Dublin was we couldn’t score a lot of the time, maybe fellas weren’t good enough in the air, fellas weren’t good enough kickers of the ball. Running hills in the Phoenix Park didn’t improve us in any of those things.”
To Carr’s credit, he took a more scientific approach in his last couple of years, and even though his immediate successor would return to old-school ways in his tenure, Christie will always have some time for the much-maligned Tommy Lyons. During the summer months Lyons would see to it there were plenty of matches in training, something which Christie believes really helped his game, while it was under Lyons that he finally won on a Leinster medal.
“For a long while I was wondering if I was ever going to win anything. The week before the 2002 Leinster final I was down in the school here, just looking to pass the time, and the thought struck me — ‘Imagine if you lose this — a fourth Leinster final in a row!’ I immediately said ‘Put that thought away’ but deep down inside it was there.
“Near the end we were only a point or two up and Kildare came on the attack and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh, Jesus, here we go again’. But then somebody intercepted something and the referee blew the whistle. And at first I didn’t get it. I just saw fellas jumping in the air. But then it dawned on me, we’d won. And I just collapsed to my knees and looked up to the heavens and thought, ‘Thanks be to God’.
“I don’t know where that medal is. It had nothing to do with the medal. It was the fact you had gone through all that stuff and had come out on the other side and had finally won. That moment was the same for me as winning an All-Ireland.”
That’s a big reason why he left the game with no real regrets, no nagging sense he could or should have done more or the game should have done more for him.
Of course it has changed, even since he hobbled off into intercounty retirement the spring after captaining the Dubs to another Leinster in 2005. Dublin now play a mass defence which allows their full-back line to play in front of their men. Christie grew up on Dublin teams who knew nothing else but to just play man on man.
“You were either good enough or you weren’t,” he says, “and if you weren’t good enough, off you came.”
He thinks it’s too premature to laud this Dublin team and predict whether or not they’ll reach or even win an All-Ireland but what he will say is that it is generally more skilful and explosive than the gallant teams he played on.
Yet even if they do win that All-Ireland, they’ll be lucky to enjoy their careers as much as he enjoyed his.
“Up until that bother at the end with the groin, I think I only missed one league game, because of a serious chest infection. I’m very happy with what I got out of it. That’s not putting a spin on it. Maybe I’m meant to tell you that not winning an All-Ireland still eats me up, that I’m supposed to subscribe to this Roy Keane argument that you should never be happy with just what you have.
“But when I was growing up there was no one going around saying I was going to be the next [former Dublin and Ballymun full-back] Gerry Hargan.
“My parents were just regular Joe Soaps, my dad as a sales rep with Lyon’s Tea and my ma at home looking after me and my kid brother.
“So if someone told me over when I walked out of that primary school, ‘Listen, Paddy, you’re going to play for Dublin, you’re going to win Leinsters, you’re going to win an All Star, you’re going to captain Leinster to a Railway Cup, you’re going to play for Ireland in Australia’, I’d have grabbed it with five hands, not two.
There was a massive buzz playing in front of 80,000 in Croke Park. Or even the satisfaction if we had been going badly in the league and then we turned it round and won and you played well and you’d be maybe standing in the shower afterwards or at home that night lying in bed, just thinking about the game. And I get the same kick teaching lads and coaching lads.
“I don’t mean that in any disrespect to the fellas who have their six All-Irelands. That’s just the way I am. I’ve been very lucky in football.”
And Dublin football is still lucky to have him.
Can you bullet point that? Perhaps bold the part where they raise funds to take them abroad to train for an U14 tournament? I really don’t have time to read it all.
By the way, way to prove you’re not too put out by my evaluation of the man 