Ah boy Ger-stick it to the hoors.
Nothing ground breaking about it, but it’s well constructed and get his point across. The PR battle is being won hands down by McCarthy.
Its interesting to note that he also mentioned the fact that players have been speaking out against the strike action. It’ll only take one of them to break before the whole thing falls apart.
Ger has opened several cans of whoop ass on the Cork hurling panel. Well in youngster.
FAO the cork contributors…
If this does come to a head and the cork players withdraw their services, will the club hurlers pass the picket and hurl for the county or will they back the intercounty lads…
Presume the intercounty footballers will back the hurlers after last year…
personally, and Im saying this from a remove as I am in Dublin.
I dont think there wil lbe any issue getting 15 fells to hurl for cork next year. Whether they will up to the standard or not is a different story but there is plenty proud Cork men around the place that have no time for this bolloxology out of the players.
Interesting to see if the footballers weigh in, Im not sure. they are quite happy with Counihan and it remains to be seen if they are willing to jeopardise this relationship as well
[quote=“dancarter”]
Interesting to see if the footballers weigh in, Im not sure. they are quite happy with Counihan and it remains to be seen if they are willing to jeopardise this relationship as well[/quote]
But after the hurlers going on sympathy strike last year in support of the footballers surely the footballers will have to back their fellow county men in some way, shape or form…
Maybe that whole thing was driven by the hurlers too though, so they won’t feel an obligation?
Funny how much McCarthy is winning the PR battle in this one. The players don’t appear to have any real grievance at all apart from the fact that they never really wanted him as their manager. And I say that as someone who would naturally support the fellas from my own generation ie the players.
[quote=“dancarter”]personally, and Im saying this from a remove as I am in Dublin.
I dont think there wil lbe any issue getting 15 fells to hurl for cork next year. Whether they will up to the standard or not is a different story but there is plenty proud Cork men around the place that have no time for this bolloxology out of the players.
Interesting to see if the footballers weigh in, Im not sure. they are quite happy with Counihan and it remains to be seen if they are willing to jeopardise this relationship as well[/quote]
There was article I read somewhere over the course of the week, where it quoted one ex Cork player (could have been thompkins) as saying that the footballers would be very silly to get involved in the dispute this time around. They’ve got what they wanted and Counihan has pretty much said he’ll walk if the footballers strike, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they distances themselves from it this time around.
I have a feeling that the footballers never asked the hurlers to get involved last year and that Donal Og & Co Inc just jumped on board to throw their weight around.
[quote=“The Runt”]There was article I read somewhere over the course of the week, where it quoted one ex Cork player (could have been thompkins) as saying that the footballers would be very silly to get involved in the dispute this time around. They’ve got what they wanted and Counihan has pretty much said he’ll walk if the footballers strike, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they distances themselves from it this time around.
I have a feeling that the footballers never asked the hurlers to get involved last year and that Donal Og & Co Inc just jumped on board to throw their weight around.[/quote]
ive heard otherwise about the strike last year
Fair enough. That was just my own opinion.
Tip for the weekend
Donal Og
John Gardiner
Jerry O’Connor
Will be retired intercounty hurlers by Monday am
[quote=“Mairegangaire”]Tip for the weekend
Donal Og
John Gardiner
Jerry O’Connor
Will be retired intercounty hurlers by Monday am[/quote]
Voluntarily or forced into it maire…I would presume the latter…
Voluntary 
“This game has given me everything …I was always proud to wear the jeresy …the time has come … I will take great pride … time to give someone else the privilage and honour I’ve had … I will be just as proud as a supporter … I thank the County Board … my team mates …our sponsors over the years … and the people of Cork”
Yet somehow their respective statements will reflect a polished and more cosmopolitan prose that will also serve to hide the hometown fighting-talk characterics of previous utterances. Similar to Ger Mc’s too; infact maybe even the same.
(I’m thinking Bill O’Herilihy meself; he loves using the word “bore”)
Politically; Gardiner nailed his and Cabbage Cusack’s coffin. They are finished. On the field and off it. They could do panto I suppose or even the Edinburgh Festival; they can convince themselves of anything if they thought they could earn a living at this stage of their lives by hurling. When these two go; it’ll be the end of the GPA. Start your engines.
Jerry’s going to go 'cause he was done last year anyway and Ben’s still winning allstars.
Frank is going to retire; honourably before the next Championship Season.
There’s the story line folks. Lets just keep it between the TFK Cast and Crew for now.
Players have made an awful mess of this alright. The complaints about McCarthy talking to the media were a huge mistake. It was evident to anybody reading any of the papers that the players had given anonymous interviews with the papers to get their side of the story across first - how else did we get to hear of their grievances?
I suspect the same about the footballers not being too quick to support the hurlers this winter. The hurlers were only delighted to get involved last year, don’t see the same appetite for dispute being reciprocated.
Interesting enough article from Kieran Shannon in The Tribune. He certainly loves his sport psychology and feels players should be empowered.
http://www.tribune.ie/sport/hurling/article/2008/nov/09/the-balance-of-power/
The balance of power
AS it’s a year in which so many people have been mystified by “all this player power” yet all the while happy to applaud the Beijing glory of the nation’s boxers, perhaps we should start in the ring to appreciate why there has been so much player unrest on and off the hurling fields.
This time last year Gary Keegan and his high-performance team had hit a wall. Only one Irish boxer had qualified for the Olympics and the programme was running out of qualifying tournaments. Keegan knew he had world-class boxers and facilities, supported by a world-class backroom team. Why were they underperforming?
He called a meeting of coaches Billy Walsh and Zaur Antia, sport psychologist Gerry Hussey and the whole medical team, where after hours of brainstorming they identified the crux of the problem they had been spoon-feeding the boxers and it was reflecting itself in the ring. “We’d overlooked the importance of consultation and partnership,” Hussey would later say. “We had many ‘experts’ yet we had forgotten to consult the most important ‘expert’ of all the athlete.”
After that, the ownership of the programme was handed over to the boxers; Keegan, Walsh and Hussey became mere facilitators. Up to then the gym had been a cold, unremarkable place. Now the boxers chose the colours of the gym, created their own wall of honour, with photos of former Irish Olympic heroes and an emblem of the Beijing flame. They’d also write up on it their individual and team goals for each session.
There was set-time in each training session for the athletes to decide what happened next; if that meant going on the bags or heading home for a nap, it was their call. Soon, by the end of every week, the boxers were being handed a blank schedule and asked to draw up their own programme for the upcoming week, which would form the basis then of a 15-minute consultation and negotiation with the coaching staff.
“We were now developing routine decision makers as opposed to routine followers,” says Hussey. Every split-second in the ring, they were intuitively making decisions, and that intuition was rooted in making decisions for themselves outside the ring.
And that is why Ireland had five boxers at the Olympics and three of them won medals.
Hussey gave an outstanding presentation on this philosophical shift at the Coaching Ireland conference held in DCU this past September. The title of his talk said it all ‘From obedience to responsibility’ and was in keeping with the theme of the entire conference ‘Developing decision-makers in sport: an athlete-centred approach’.
Stephen Aboud, the IRFU national coach development manager, also proclaimed it was time to say ‘no’ to rugby robots, and instead develop players who “navigate, not replicate”. It undoubtedly creates a dilemma for the traditional coach, Aboud accepts. Initially they can have thoughts such as “I don’t feel in control. I don’t feel like I’m coaching.” But in time, they find the player-centred approach is actually more fun and successful.
It’s the way coaching in general is going, with the successful Olympic programmes advocating the right balance between directing athletes and letting them direct themselves. It’s one practised by Declan Kidney and Mickey Harte. When Harte took over Tyrone, he allowed the players a regular say in everything from what time they trained, to what pre-match food they should eat to what tactics they should play in the All Ireland final against Armagh. This year he let the players decide whether Stephen O’Neill could return to the panel.
And yet it’s a model for success that so many coaches, administrators and commentators are unfamiliar with, especially in the GAA and particularly in hurling.
Throughout his second stint with Tipperary, Babs Keating was exasperated at trying to communicate with the 21st-century player. Interestingly, Liam Sheedy has had no such difficulties.
Ger Loughnane felt the best way to coach Galway was for his players to fear him. They duly played with fear. Had they favoured his return for a third year, it would have tipped the balance for Loughnane, but they didn’t. Justin McCarthy brought a charisma and a knowledge of the skills that transformed Waterford hurling but his failure to adequately listen to the players was inconsistent with all good coaching practice.
John Meyler also paid the price not so much of player power but of player frustration. The weekend before this year’s Leinster final the Wexford senior team played a local intermediate club, Shelmaliers, in a challenge game. The players were baffled by the choice of such meagre opposition; was the coach using the game as a chance to try out some gameplan for Kilkenny? The answer was no. A senior player duly contacted Meyler wishing that some game plan would be devised for Kilkenny and was told he would discuss it on the Friday at 6pm before training.
A few players met in midweek and devised the plan of playing four men in the half-back line and bringing Stephen Doyle out to midfield to stifle Cha Fitzpatrick. When the players arrived at 6pm on the Friday, there was no sign of Meyler and when they eventually got speaking to him, Meyler cut them short, saying “the time for talking was over”. The players’ game plan, of course, worked remarkably well for the first 35 minutes, before Meyler at half-time moved Doyle back to a more orthodox spot and Wexford were duly annihilated.
Gerald McCarthy is actually one of the more progressive ‘old school’ coaches. Ten days ago he pointed out on Des Cahill’s Drivetime that the players could never accuse him of never consulting them. On the eve of this year’s All Ireland semi-final, John Gardiner and T om Kenny praised his capacity to communicate one-to-one. What they did not reveal was their reservations about his training sessions and match-day practices and their capacity to facilitate peak performance.
In that regard, the Cork players are like other elite hurling panels throughout the country. Gerald’s misfortune was to come after Donal O’Grady and John Allen rather than before them. Babs, like Michael Doyle, looked old school to a group of players that had worked with as progressive a coach as Nicky English. Likewise Considine after the consultative, modern approach of Anthony Daly; Galway with Conor Hayes and Loughnane after dealing with Noel Lane. The players had seen the future and that it worked or at least nearly did.
The reality is hurling has a problem and it is not player power. It is that too many coaches rooted in their own playing experiences of the '60s and '70s and administrators do not adequately know what it takes to facilitate consistent high performance in the 21st century.
Media commentators are as bad. Last week we had one writer talking about how the All Ireland final had reaffirmed that the Waterford hurlers were clearly disqualified to want the removal of Justin McCarthy. Was that same commentator in Walsh Park for all those sessions? Did he even pick up a phone to find out how bad relations between players and manager had deteriorated? Anyone within the camp will tell you, if Justin had remained, the team wouldn’t have got past Offaly, let alone Wexford and Tipperary. Players might not be best qualified to know who best should manage them, but often they’re eminently qualified to know who should not, and certainly more qualified than most county board officers and commentators.
After this writer ghosted Brian Corcoran’s Every Single Ball, I was taken aback by the number of friends that were taken aback by the facilitative style of John Allen as outlined in the book. The players, apparently, were “running the show”. But as Hussey will tell you, this year the boxers “ran the show”, and like Cork, had the medals to show for it. Because of the existence and distrust of the GPA out there, media and coaches alike will often cry “player power” when all players are looking for is the player-centred coaching approach that is en vogue throughout the sports world. That is at the heart of the Cork dispute. As the nation’s boxers go from obedience to responsibility, the county board wants the players to complete the shift from responsibility to obedience.
Word reaches me from Cork that Gerald Mc was on Prendeville this morning. When asked would Cork field for the St Colmans anniversary game on sunday week he advised that all of last years panel had been contacted but none were available to play.
He said he was at the Co U21 final at the weekend and the skill levels and quality on display was as good as he had seen in years (link below), he said Cork will field a team no problem, the inference apparently that he would use plenty of these U21s if required, makes sense as they are still hurling. I know one of the mentors involved in this game well and he would be fullsolid behind the players and Id be slightly concerned that there would be little encouragement to any of these players to make theselves available if asked.
It is mentioned over on AFR as well that Patrick Horgan has stated he will play next year, this would tally with an early report that a ‘young cork forward’ had said at meetings that he had no issue whatsoever with gerald Mc. Fair fucks to you horgan if this is the case, not easy to stand up in front of the militia and you only a young fella. A real Rebel
Interesting to see McLoughlin starring here, I see he was one of the players mentioned in another thread by Caoimhin as one to watch
I see Donal og is building bridges over in africa…thnk he would do a bit more of it in his native county:)
Nice one Puke. Fair play to young Horgan is right Dan, don’t let the bully boys in SIPTU get to him.
Fair dues to Horgan. He can obviously see how this is going to pan out and had the balls to stand up for his place on the team.
One thing that I don’t think was mentioned here before and maybe someone could clarify: When John ‘Gah’ Gardiner was on Primetime last Thursday night, he said that all of the panel except 5 of the more militant players were contacted re: the Colmans game. So if these 5 players (lets say Gah, Donal og, Ben o’Connor and 2 more) are now not part of the Cork Senior Squad, what leg have they got to stand on? They are no longer Senior Intercounty players, can they still be involved in the GPA? Interesting no?