Meath GAA discussion thread

Should go after Mr. Andrews.........Meath blood flowing in his veins. Mother and Father both from Meath. His mother is one of the finest proponents of the sideline umberlla I have ever seen.

One question I have is as follows.
Last week Sean resigns as director of football, no real reasons given
this week, banty asked by county board to resign, bit he refuses
then county board come out and state that they have given Banty a vote of no confidence and that Sean is the nominated candidate to take over.

Considering Sean resigned before the Louth fiasco, had the county board already decided to get rid of banty? and did sean know already? (although, why would he resign, it would have been a seamless move from DOF to Manager)

Colm O'Rourke's article from the Indo today on the current situation, he was a bit more fortright tonight on League Sunday

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/colm-orourke/colm-orourke-meath-merrygoround-spinning-out-of-control-3081206.html

Football affairs in Meath are beginning to resemble the film Groundhog Day, where the same thing happens over and over again. When all else fails, the solution is to sack the manager.
This is the fourth in rapid succession and maybe next year this article could be dusted off and reprinted to describe another season of turmoil. If the same mistakes are made on an ongoing basis, then the outcome will not be any different.
Whether Seamus McEnaney stays or goes is immaterial in many ways, in the same way as Eamonn Barry, Colm Coyle or Eamonn O'Brien. They are not the problem. There are structural difficulties with Meath football which need careful analysis, policy formation and, most importantly of all, implementation.
Whether this is possible in the present circumstances is questionable and the really big problem is the lack of direction, leadership and, maybe of even greater concern, accountability. Until these aspects are tackled then the drift towards bitterness and recrimination, which has been taking place for a long time, will continue. The end result is that a lot of good and talented people are keeping their heads down and don't want to get involved at county board level -- a great untapped resource just waiting to be released.
Of course, the county board is a properly working democracy and the work done by all who serve is phenomenal, so anyone who criticises this operation can put themselves forward in the same way as all the others. Yet even with all of this there is a need for specialists in areas who are simply not there at the moment.
There is a need for someone to coordinate a different layer of workers and in the past I have advocated a full-time official whose most important role would be policy and planning -- and ensuring things get done.
The recent Meath record in underage football is one of the worst in the country. I was involved at under 21 level myself recently and was not very successful at doing anything about it, so the first question to be examined is what is happening at underage and are quality players being lost or are they not there at all?
From what I see every day at school, there is huge potential and yet it just seems to disappear. If it is coaching or games development then they should be easily tackled, even if the frequency of games has improved a lot over the last couple of years. The GAA must be able to replicate what is happening in both soccer and rugby: a regular pattern of games which are known well in advance. At the moment, football matches come up and managers are busy trying to avoid clashes with other games which are scheduled for weeks ahead.
Then, on top of that, there is a huge gap for someone to monitor talented players at all ages and to have specialist coaching available to them. There is a huge pool of ex-inter-county players who would be quite willing to help in this regard. Nutrition, weights programmes and so on are the natural extension of that process. This should lead on to better standards at club level too.
The idea is that this whole process will end up with a core of top-class players at senior level, which is not happening at the moment. It should be. Meath has seen huge growth over the last 20 years and now has a population of around 180,000. Off the back of that, with proper systems in place, Meath should be a contender for the All-Ireland every year, not once every 20 or 30 years as has been happening up to now.
Football is the big game in Meath, there is a very good club structure and while there is no big soccer or rugby club, the influence of those games is beginning to take a firm hold in schools. This is an area which needs much greater attention -- where else could you have a captive audience of thousands of young people each day?
From the beginning of this article I made little mention of Seamus McEnaney or the current players, as the fundamentals of any organisation must be right before success is a possibility. This is something which is very evident in being principal of a big school. I have no doubt that the players who are being heavily criticised at the moment, and who are being accused of having no passion or pride, are just as committed as the many teams I played on.
Over my 20-year career with Meath, I played on teams which performed just as badly, or maybe even worse, than what is happening now. And I have seen managers in the same position as McEnaney too.
When he took on this job I had absolutely no opposition to the appointment of an outside manager. It has not worked out for him. This is certainly nothing to do with the level of organisation which the players would still say is very good. So they are willing to accept as much or even more of the responsibility for current results. They are feeling very miserable about the current turn of events.
Yet when McEnaney lost local selectors Liam Harnan and Barry Callaghan last year, the odds were stacked against him unless he delivered a major championship win. That looks a long way off now.
A number of years ago, I went for the Meath job armed with a ten-point plan for overall improvement. I did not get the manager's job and none of what I wanted was ever implemented. It doesn't mean that everything I sought was right, but there were plenty of things which would have improved Meath football fairly quickly.
The next time I go for an interview I will be bringing the same points in another showing of Groundhog Day.
After last Sunday, I hoped that Seamus McEnaney would walk away for his personal dignity. It cannot be any fun and there is the pressure and stress of families to consider. There is nothing wrong with saying that things have not worked out the way he hoped and the best position for everyone is to start again. After all, defeat in the championship was end game anyway.
Nobody doubts his hard work, passion and commitment and that of all his management team who only want the same as every supporter. Now the whole thing has turned messy and very personal. It means Meath won't be looking for another outsider any day soon and recent experience shows that locals are shafted just as quickly anyway.
Managing a county team should carry a health warning and these last few weeks have demonstrated in many counties that there is just as little loyalty to managers in football or hurling as in other sports.
It is a fairly sad situation to be writing this about my own county where I am convinced that there is more potential than we are seeing right now. Enoch Powell once famously said that all political careers end in failure and it is true of nearly every manager.
In Meath now it is a case of changing the riders on the merry-go-round again. Unless and until the right people are put in charge of the areas of key responsibility with clear targets and accountability, then it is only a question of how long it takes the merry-go-round to stop next time.


Have to say I agree with a lot of that, Paul Kimmage on i-talk sport made a comment today that O'Rourke needed to name names, well all I can say is mind your own business Paul. What is needed is for everyone to pull together and try to sort this out, that Sean should be back in charge by next weekend is a good start imo.

klong wrote: »

A fulltime official in charge of GAA strategy (and one with actual powers, by the way!) would be a good start I think. Adopt best practice from other counties (and other codes if neccessary) and use them to our advantage.

Unfortunately I'm living outside the county now and so wouldn't have the ear to the ground as much. What other ideas would do the business, folks?

I am not living in Meath either, another emigree. Listening to friends and reading other peoples comments, one thing that does not appear to have changed is how to progress players from the juvenile board, to the minor board. This was an issue many years ago, good players were lost between 14 and 18 because imo, there was no connection between the juvenile and minor boards, which meant that trainers and selectors of successful underage county teams, passed them onto the minor board, who then put in place their own trainers and selectors.
Living down the country now and have been mixed up coaching in the underage structure of a county that is now beginning imo to reap the benefits of progressing players through the grades all the way through to minor with much the same familiar faces, especially when they have been successful. There are some downsides to this type of policy, but that is for another debate.
Living on our history, which it looks like we have been doing is going to eventually leave us in a place like Cavan have been for 70 years, even they appear to be striving to change old practices, we are standing still.