The vast majority of lads that I know that trained under him have nothing but positives to say about him in terms of preparation and training. Plenty of variety but he puts big stock in hard work in training and normally does a lot of physical/fitness work at the start od sessions and finished with high intensity ball work when lads are tiring, which mightn’t be everyones cup of tea. That is all well and good at Fitz and club level where games often are played in heavy conditions and become a battle/slog but the likes of Kilkenny and Tipp have made it their stock and trade to come firing out of the blocks and try and kill games off early at championship level and hopefully it is something he will improve upon.
No good having a team that has plenty left in the tank with 10 minutes to go if they have been blown out of it in the first 20. Hopefully it is something he will improve on
Maybe Liam Sheedy could be convinced to go to Clare if the package was lucrative enough, he had a successful stint training a club side there a few years ago…
You just described a run of the mill “alright” Club coach.
That is far from what i mean by a technical coach, Donal o’ Grady & Justin McCarthy are technical coaches. He is seriously lacking tactically as well. Your very defensive Puke for someone who never wanted him in there.
Anyway, off with ye, ye’ll make a fuck of it and hurling will be down one of its better counties in a couple of years.
Where did I ever say I didn’t want him. I am not his biggest fan by any stretch of the imagination but he has both big positives and negatives that he will bring to the job and is the best man available at this point in time. Before the Munster final hammering I would have had absolutely no objections to him getting the job
I fail to see how he will make a fuck of us either, given that we are pretty much rock bottom, he will improve us, how much I honestly don’t know but we are currently miles off what is required at this level and he will bridge that gap somewhat over the next 2 or 3 years.
He is defending a guy he didn’t want in there, talking about his training sessions etc, of course he’s defending him. Its not an opinion either, he’s repeating what others told him about actual events.
Many times before Puke has stated Davy would not be a good appointment.
It’s a question of (1) what else is available, and (2) where we are at. On the first point, it’s not as if we’re turning down some 5 star alternatives. You just have to look at some of the names being touted to take other teams to see that it’s pin a tail on the donkey time for a lot of counties. Ciaran Carey is taking over Limerick. I would take Davy every day of the week ahead of him knowing what they’re both like as coaches.
On the second point, Clare’s senior team is the worst we’ve had since the early 90s. We’ve lost all 6 championship games in the last 3 years and it’s bigger the margins are getting. We lost to a Laois team in the league this year that had 10 at training the week before the match. It’s an atrocious state of affairs and an experienced manager with age on his side and a good track record with young players is good enough for where we are at. Davy for all his faults is a lot better than some of the apes who could have got the job and brought us right back into the dark ages altogether. We need performances to improve significantly before we can get a bit picky.
Thats fair enough, and i suppose i’m addressing the medias excitment about it as much as anything here. I know you are not too enamored with going on the past comments.
He has run out on Waterford as well when there was a chance to actual bring them on a further step. What has he really done with them. Got them fit? Organised? In fairness to him, the one thing they have been left with is 4 or 5 young players exposed to the big day. That is quite significant IMO. Hurling wise i didn’t see any improvement in waterfod though.
Ah ya, i will traipse through it alright, you have said it.
You won’t find one, kev. As I said I am no means a fan of his but I have never said that he would be a disaster if he got the job. The only concern I have ever expressed about Davy getting the job is the politicing that would go on behind the scenes with it or the fall out from when he leaves, I didn’t want him getting the job after Mac left as there was already enough bad blood and politics involved at the time but never said he would be a disaster. If you want you can even have a look over on Clarehurlers as well. I have never said he would be a disaster or he shouldn’t be let near the job, sure why would I we have known for years that this day was coming. There are others I would have much rather see get the job ahead of him but none are in a position to take it at this point in time
Well the problem with assessing managers is that you don’t have all the necessary information to do it properly. There’s a lot of guess work involved and ultimately, all the emphasis gets put on results without perhaps having the right sense of where a squad of players are at. I think he did alright with Waterford. I don’t think they had an All-Ireland winning squad and they pushed Tipp in 2010 and Kilkenny this year about as close as I thought they were capable of pushing them.
When we were talking about it in Clarehurlers I said that my big worry was his inability to noticeably speed up a teams hurling, based on what my knowledge was of his training methods, i.e. hurling tired in training to build endurance and enhance concentration levels under pressure (something Loughane was big on). Speeding up lads’ hurling doesn’t require them to be fucked tired and that seems to go against the grain of what Davy’s about. My own attitude is that speed is as much about neurological development as it is about the physical mechanics of it, something that’s very much part of short distance athletics. You have to let the brain get used to doing things quicker and you don’t achieve that by constantly having guys working tired. Everything I’ve seen in Waterford’s performances suggests Davy hasn’t embraced this attitude and is still focused on heavy training approaches.
But from our point of view that isn’t the end of the world. Our biggest problem right now, the biggest thing keeping us from even competing, is our severely sub-standard physical conditioning. Tackling, tackle breaking, competing for broken ball, holding ground under a dropping ball, all these things we’re weak in. And we don’t stick the pace for 70 minutes either. What Loughane correctly identified in Clare hurling was these very issues holding back a nice hurling team in the early 90s. I think we’re in a very similar situation again. When we’re capable of physically living with top teams again we can start to demand other things, but until then we could do worse than have a man who has a decent track record in those areas.
TL;DR: Davy doesn’t seem to be the best stickwork coach but he’s good at at physically developing sides and we probably need that more.