Clare GAA discussion thread

Clareman wrote: »

Personally I think it's a disgrace having the son of the county board chairman as manager.

PARKHEAD67 wrote: »

Cratloe are still in the hurling.A lot more important to them Id say, although they will be gutted Id imagine.

ballykev wrote: »

Fitzgerald for Clare?

As this piece is written David Fitzgerald’s coronation as Clare manager is inevitable. The move by the county board has it would seem been met with universal acclaim in the national and most importantly the local media, with the latter erring on the side of caution, as it always has, loathe as it always is to criticize any element of the county hurling team. Thus due to the abdication of duty on the part of journalists in Clare, Fitzgerald will be appointed to the most important hurling post in the county, with the smallest level of scrutiny that any potential manager has had to face. He will be elected unopposed as his is the only nomination, even Josef Stalin would be embarrassed by such a whitewash. It is amazing to think that there was not another candidate, inside or outside the county deemed worthy of nomination at least. One would think that Fitzgerald was a great manager, worthy of a place beside the managerial greats of the game such as Cody and Ger Loughnane considering the sycophantic manner in which his appointment has been greeted by almost all and sundry.

The argument often used by Fitzgerald’s supporters in fact, is not that he is a great manger yet, but that he has a proven track record in colleges and inter-county management and therefore deserves the chance at the top-job. Of course there is a certain amount of legitimacy to this argument. Fitzgerald has enjoyed considerable success with LIT in the Fitzgibbon Cup and did, his supporters claim, achieve considerable success with Waterford, culminating in a Munster Championship win in 2010. Such achievements cannot be taken away from him and there is no doubting his enthusiasm and devotion to all the positions he has occupied. However considering the position that Fitzgerald is about to occupy, surely it is the duty of everyone concerned to analyse his credentials with a bit more scrutiny.

It is true indeed that LIT have enjoyed success under his tutelage; however one must consider the resources he has been able to call on during his two Fitzgibbon Cup wins. Players of the calibre of Eoin Kelly (Tipperary), Niall Healy from Galway, Barry Nugent, James McInereny and John Reddan from Clare, Joe Canning of Galway, Jackie Tyrell of Kilkenny and much more besides have all been available to Fitzgerald during his stewardship of the team. Obviously among these players there are varying degrees of skill and aptitude, however all such players were already inter-county players or were about to emerge onto the scene when they played for LIT. Thus it was almost impossible with such an embarrassment of riches to lose. Obviously there is a considerable gulf in class and ability between hurlers in Clare in comparison to Tipperary and Kilkenny as recent results have shown, however any player that plays for the county must have displayed a certain level of potential to be on the team in the first place, such players would be a considerable asset to any manager. One can only wonder if Fitzgerald was coaching the Mary Immaculate Hurling team, where county hurlers are quite rare, how successful would he have been? One can only wonder, my opinion being that the oracle in such a less privileged world would be much harder to weave.

What is clear is that the amount of technical training these players needed was minimal, one could even question the recent lack of success at LIT, considering the massive resources that are expended and the privileged positions the players on such teams enjoy, where courses seem to be created in order to attract particular hurlers to the college in order to bring success on the field. One also gets the impression that certain members of such teams are doing what in colloquial terms are ‘add-on’ courses for the sole reason to play hurling, something that increases their own profile and that of the manager, thereby upsetting the balance of the competition and artificially keeping LIT ultra-competitive when maybe the team should be facing a decline of some sort. It is interesting to note that the Institute of Technology in Thurles has now become affiliated with LIT; the cynic in me has the distinct belief that there might be a considerable influx of inter-county hurlers from Tipperary ‘attending’ college next year. Of course what such player transfers have done is improve Fitzgerald’s CV and make him appear a better manager than he is. Effectively in his role in LIT he is working with the cream of young hurling talent in the country in a competition that is completely overrated and overhyped, hype that increases annually, success therefore in such circumstances is inevitable and broadcast widely.

Whatever about the overrated nature of the Fitzgibbon Cup, inter-county hurling despite its poor standard outside of Kilkenny, Tipperary and Dublin, is the highest level in the land and the sphere in which Fitzgerald’s supporters believe he has earned his stripes. The argument is almost always the same, he has improved Waterford and established them as a top-four team and in the process blooded a considerable level of young talent. However what Fitzgerald’s supporters seem to have ignored was that in the years before Fitzgerald took over the team, from 2002-2007, Justin McCarthy had established Waterford as the fourth best team in the country; All-Ireland semi finals were contested by Waterford in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2007, with Waterford only beaten by a single point by Cork in 2006. Along with this McCarthy had seen Waterford end their own famine of sorts by winning the Munster Championship in 2002 by blowing away Tipperary, something that was a much greater achievement than Waterford winning the championship against a Cork team very much on the wane in 2010. McCarthy added to the win of 2002 by also seeing Waterford crowned champions in 2004 and 2007, with the only blot on the copybook being his failure to reach an All-Ireland final. Such a feat was deemed a success by Fitzgerald’s defenders for a brief period in 2008 until their complete evisceration in the final of that year by a rampant Kilkenny team at the zenith of their power. It is probably the case that for many players the mental scars of that day have never healed.

Thus if one was to fully analyse Fitzgerald’s record, he reached four All-Ireland semi finals and won one of them in 2008 and won one significant piece of silverware in 2010. In contrast McCarthy contested four All-Ireland semi-finals also, lost them all, but won three Munster titles. Thus Fitzgerald came to a county that had bucked tradition and was used to winning Munster championships, thus to say that his tenure was a success because he won one provincial championship is false because Fitzgerald was recruited at considerable expense if the grapevine is to be believed to win the All-Ireland. McCarthy had broken one hoodoo, the winning of a Munster Championship, this he succeeded in doing on three occasions; Fitzgerald’s brief was to win the All-Ireland, this he failed to do. To win a Munster Championship with a team that hasn’t won one in a great number of years is a terrific achievement because any potential manager has to surmount physical and mental boundaries; this is something Fitzgerald never had to do. Waterford had been champions in 2007 and therefore knew what it took to win it. The Waterford victory in the replayed final of 2010 is something that is blown out of all proportion. If a manager achieved such a success with Clare or Limerick, both counties who haven’t won it in over a decade it would be a great triumph, the same could not be said of Waterford. Essentially what Fitzgerald did was to continue the habit of losing semi-finals and little more.

Of course there is the argument that the Waterford team of 2008 was a team on the wane worn down as it was by injury and persistent failure to reach an All-Ireland final and in this instance Fitzgerald deserves credit for instilling belief into the Waterford players that they could indeed reach an All-Ireland final at least. However the teams that McCarthy’s Waterford faced were vastly superior to those that Fitzgerald’s Waterford faced. In the period 2002-2007 Waterford faced considerable opposition from a highly skilful Tipperary team that contained several of those who won the All-Ireland in 2001 and in Clare faced a team that contained some of the greatest players of the modern era, McMahon, Brian Lohan and ironically Fitzgerald himself. Not to mention the double All-Ireland winning Cork team who during this period were at the height of their powers propelled as they were by that famous triumvirate of Gardiner, Curran and O Hailpin. Thus during this period to win three Munster titles was a notable achievement. In contrast Waterford’s sole triumph under Fitzgerald came against a poor Clare side, that contains not even a remnant of the steel of old and a Cork team that had long since gone past its best, damaged as it was by the desire of a number of established Cork players to constantly be in the limelight.

Probably the greatest indictment of Fitzgerald’s term at the helm was his selection of Jerome Maher at full-back in the Munster final of 2011 against a Tipperary forward line that had scored seven goals in the previous two games. It was an act of the greatest folly on the part of the manager to play a rookie full-back against a team that was obviously going to go for the jugular from the off. Thus to a certain extent the mauling that Waterford received was partially the fault of the manager. Obviously considering the circumstances and the ravenous way in which Tipperary chased the game that day there were always only going to be one winner, however it is fair to say that Fitzgerald contributed to the easiness of Tipperary’s defeat by his kamikaze selection methods. To play such a player in such a scenario was symptomatic of another problem that blighted Fitzgerald’s managerial reign; his crass treatment of the senior members of the squad. This was especially clear where Dan Shanahan was concerned.

Obviously by the time Fitzgerald took over the reins, Shanahan was suffering from a severe loss of form; however it is true that in crucial games such as the 2009 quarter-final against Galway and in the 2010 Munster Final, where on both occasions he was used as a substitute, Shanahan made a huge impact, setting up the crucial goal against Galway in 2009 and scoring it in 2010 against Cork. Yet it often seemed to be the case that Shanahan was deemed surplus to requirements. One example of this was in the All-Ireland semi-final against Tipperary in 2010 when Brian O’Halloran, a teenager was the preferred choice at full-forward. That Paul Curran got the better of the duel and O’Halloran was withdrawn after 21 minutes was no surprise. The likelihood that a debutant would get the better of Curran on such a big occasion was quite slim; undoubtedly Curran wouldn’t have got the better of Shanahan so easily. That Shanahan wasn’t introduced until late in the day was nothing short of insulting. The fact that O’Halloran hasn’t featured since raises even more questions about Fitzgerald’s selection methods. The spin put on it was that the team needed fresh blood; however youth can be injected into the team without damaging the team as a whole and due to his poor treatment of Shanahan, Fitzgerald’s tactics were detrimental to the team, something that one suspects other senior players believe, but which they have kept their counsel on at present.

The only conclusion one can come to about the poor treatment of senior players is that Fitzgerald might have seen them as a threat and sought to make an example of them in order to ensure that his position would not and could not be undermined. Whatever the reasons it is true that Fitzgerald’s man-management skills leave a lot to be desired, which is quite worrying, considering that man-management is probably the most important part of management, especially in the modern game where players are quite sensitive and can be easily upset. Along with this his record, which many sight as the reason he should be appointed Clare manager isn’t as impressive as it might seem and upon closer inspection raises deep questions about his selection methods and overall knowledge of the game from a technical point of view and how it should be played. This is something the members of the county board should keep in mind before they rise to acclaim a new Caesar as appears to be the main agenda for the next county board meeting.

kstand wrote: »

Any idea who the 12 club delegates were? I bet that would make interesting reading...