Paddy O'Rourke Out!

[screenexile]

As McConville has said . . . surely 3 months is long enough to prepare a team for Championship! Surely the Cross lads are already fit at that stage so it's just a matter of fitting them into a gameplan? Or is that to simplisitc?

Also there surely has to be more Cross men on that team!

[armaghniac]

Surely the Cross lads are already fit at that stage so it's just a matter of fitting them into a gameplan? Or is that to simplisitc?

If there was a gameplan and Cross' players weren't fitting into it, that would be one thing. But there has not seemed to be a robust game plan in the sense that the players who were there all along don't seem to know what to do.

As I said, the problems yesterday had little enough to do with Cross'.

[Onion Bag]

Who are you referring to TYP

[armaghniac]

Who are you referring to TYP

Clue

[All of a Sludden]

I know that I will withdraw my monthly payment if there is a continuation with any remnants of the current management team allowed to go forward.

Do you honestly think any county board will worry about you stopping a direct debit?

[armaghniac]

I'd say the county board would be unhappy if a lot of people cut off their debits. Many Armagh people feel things could be better.

[TacadoirArdMhacha]

I'd say the county board would be unhappy if a lot of people cut off their debits. Many Armagh people feel things could be better.

Spot on. Actually I suspect that cutting direct debits is one of the few ways that those in charge will sit up and take notice.

[Orior]

Who are you referring to TYP

Ah TYP, give OB a better clue than that. It's TF.

[Dougal Maguire]

If there was any interest in building a team based on the greatest sides in the country then the availability of players from the end of march for a game in June would not be a problem.  The others would have a chance to claim a place in the early part of the year and the system of play would ensure that the Cross players would want and could be fitted into the squad and team.

Unless the whole management is cleaned out then there will be no hope of moving on.  There is one South Armagh man who can put manners on the county board and we can only ope that he is able to wield the power of the cheque book by calling the shots for the money he provides.  I know that I will withdraw my monthly payment if there is a continuation with any remnants of the current management team allowed to go forward.

Right, for a start this suggestion that there should be no problem with the Cross lads only being available from the end of March is nonsense. By that time nearly all of the competitive football at county level through McKenna Cup and League has been played.

As regards HM ffs it was him that was instrumental in bringing Paddy O'Rourke in in the first place. I see HM as part of the problem not part of the solution. There has to be something wrong when the team sponsor is carrying the footballs onto the field before a challenge match. You don't see the CX of Vodafone hanging round the Dublin dug out.

[Armamike]

As McConville has said . . . surely 3 months is long enough to prepare a team for Championship! Surely the Cross lads are already fit at that stage so it's just a matter of fitting them into a gameplan? Or is that to simplisitc?

Also there surely has to be more Cross men on that team!

It's not so much the 3 months but the lack of competitive game time during that 3 months for the non established county players from Cross who have the potential to stake a claim.  Cross's success is a mixed bag for the county.  There's a fantastic template for success that the county should be tapping in to and the absence of Cross players during the year should force others to step up and take their chance to shine. With one or two exceptions this hasn't happened though and a number of the Cross contingent don't get to show their worth during the league. In an ideal situation i'd love to see the new management have a full quota of players to work with from very early in the year, and get the message across very simply early on about the way they want to play. That needs to be reinforced, week after week repeatedly until it becomes second nature to the players.     

[lawnseed]

Good article by Peter Mackem this week in the observer. Talks a lot of sense on the bigger thinking thats needed, rather than focusing solely on the manager.

What were the main points?

Armagh must act now or face total decline
By Peter Makem

There's a difference between the problem of Armagh senior football and the problem of the current management.
In an article two years ago and largely repeated this time last year, I proposed that whoever became the new Armagh senior manager was on a loser if totally fresh foundations were not laid beforehand. I proposed that the problem was bigger than any manager and we were fooling ourselves unless competent people within the county sat down and took long and serious stock of the situation to undo the decline that had set in since the demise of the All-Ireland team around 2004-2005. We needed to go back behind the starting line, create a whole new system, develop players in a new manner and push back the boundaries of the game even further.

I also pointed out in last year's article that if the above development was not undertaken, we would be no further on in twelve months time, nor in the year after nor the year following that and so on. In other words the decline would continue, and that we would end up where we were in the mid-nineties and indeed back to the mid-seventies. That's exactly where we are now.

The past few championships have seen the tide go out as far as it did in those days. But even then, it was only marginally a problem of a manager. As a general rule going away back into the sixties, the managers were competent people who knew their football, Paddy O'Hara, Jimmy Whan, Mal McEvoy and so on and there were plenty of good and very good players around. That was not the problem. There was nothing to manage. There was no structure or order of things, and it was a good night when five or six turned up for training at all – with the dressing room before a match full of strangers to each other.

By structure does not mean an assembly of training and weight "specialists", specialist coaches, psychologists, stats people, and so on. Armagh has all that now and is going nowhere. In fact every county in Ireland has such an array of staff but again, it makes no difference to the vast majority. All the psychology in the world, all the weights programming and huddles is useless if the player doesn't know what to do when he gets the ball, or where to take a pass. All the physical fitness in the world is useless in the long run if players have no system to perform in.

Structure is a basic simple thing and the approach to it will vary from county to county depending on how high they genuinely aim. To achieve a new structure in Armagh – as the old one is dead and gone – it means first of all clearing the decks totally of everybody involved including the players and management setup. Next, people of experience and thought in the county will sit down and work out how the game can be brought to a new level through a new system of play. They will then carefully select players of potential – some of whom are already on the panel – and fit these into an effective system of football where everybody knows their role and all it geared toward the maximum scoring facility. It will take five or six months from now to do this preparatory work involving setting up a system of individual training to bring the player toward a new level of physical and mental ability – but only after he knows his role in the grand design. The bringing in of a manger is part of this new structure and system, in other words, he is the pilot of the new ship that is built.

CANNOT HIDE BEHIND EXCUSES
But although there has been no development of the Armagh team under his management, Paddy O'Rourke is not the source of our ills. The problem is not managerial but structural. Paddy had limited success with Down and there was no evidence that he would have any more with Armagh, especially an Armagh with little momentum left. The mindset that made the appointment instead of concentrating on the creation of a whole new system and structure is the problem. Armagh were not facing up to the deep realities of what was wrong and instead threw the job at somebody and get that much off their backs. But that merely of course, merely deepened the problem.

The real issue at present is the very mindset that allows the current situation to continue. All the underage work – which is very substantial and well organised including the Minor achievements of recent years – disintegrates when things reach senior level because the very thing it aspires to, that is, the senior team, is a void, emptiness. There are good structures everywhere in Armagh except at the very place when they are most required for ultimate development. It's like a hypothetical system in education where children go to primary school into secondary, get their 'A' Levels or other qualifications but find the Third Level institutions like Queen's and Jordanstown no longer offer degrees.

Accordingly there is a real sense that O'Rourke is a scapegoat and a cover for deeper failures in Armagh to address the points I mention. The bottom line, and it seems to be obvious to everybody, is that the County Board simply cannot continue with present setup or dress it up in some other way as this is not facing up to the reality of the problem.

Decline sets in to very institution and it goes on and on unless deliberately stopped. This is why every so often, a totally new momentum has to be created, a new and original system thought out and the whole train set in fresh motion. To realistically aim for the Sam Maguire in the near future Armagh requires the creation of a team to do extensive groundwork as indicated in new ways of team building and training before even thinking of a manger. As things stand, it doesn't matter who we appoint as there is no system to manage. But under a new system, the appointment is critical.

What is happening is all wrong. Promising players throughout the League have just vanished from the scene, one after the other. Our talented midfielders have not progressed at all nor is there proper cover in this department. Younger players from the Minor grade have not appeared. The team keeps changing from game to game and Stephen McDonnell, lone survivor of 2002 and one of Armagh's three or four greatest footballers of all time, is still the central figure on the team. Nobody appears to know what anybody else is doing on the field and things change from game to game. This is all because a total halt was not called to the drift some years ago, and a totally new system introduced.

Talk of maintaining Division One status as a sign of progress is nonsense. Many of the teams in Division One because they can stay there without breaking sweat in a competition that in reality is a series of challenge games that confers no status at all. It is not like the English Premiership where the league is the championship for the GAA; the All-Ireland champions could have Division Two status. If Armagh's Division One status is a sign of progress why are we collapsing in the championship?

Nor can we hide behind the usual waffle that "the players are just not there." Only last year Armagh gave Donegal a bad beating at Crossmaglen, a Donegal side that contained twelve of the players who are now in the All-Ireland semi-final. I met Brian McEniff over month ago in Bundoran and he said that Donegal were now a very different proposition and was confident they would win in Ulster at least, that Jim McGuinness had restructured the whole scene, that Donegal went back behind to the drawing board an took stock as to what had been going wrong for the past nineteen years and moved in a new direction.

It's never a question of the talent available. It's what you do with the talent available and Armagh are drifting year by year toward disintegration at senior level – not because of lack of talent – but because of lack of organisation.

Tyrone had players as good in the past as now but they were never remotely as organised. Their system has remained unchanged for the past ten yeas and new players just fit into it. Kevin Heffernan won an All-Ireland with Dublin in 1974 in his first year as manager with a group of players who struggled earlier in the National League of that year. He created a system and moulded the talents available into a superb team where not six months previous people were saying that "the players were simply not there". From a superficial perspective it always appears that success comes because a group of talented players arrive on the scene at the same time and the logic of tis is that you have to wait on this to happen for success. All the evidence points to the opposite. Success comes through the intensity of organising the planning and in the case of teams who have no tradition; it involves creating a totally new system of play and approach.

Armagh did this to win the All-Ireland in 2002 – which was perfected by Tyrone to win their three All-Irelands – and adopted by every other successful team including Kerry and taken to a new intensity recently by Donegal.

The proof of this is the great innovation by Down in the late fifties, a county that had scant tradition at senior level and whose mentors in 1957 decided to stop waiting on the fates and take things into their own hands by working out how to create an All-Ireland winning team. They build the players available into an idea, into a totally innovate structure of training and teamwork so that it appeared in hindsight that Down were lucky that a group of exceptional players just happened to arrive at the one time. But the truth is that there was only a blank sheet in 1957 when the new structures were set up and not an All-Ireland winning player in sight. It was a supreme victory of organisation and innovation.

However, Down went into a slow decline as the sixties progressed culminating in a serious defeat by Cavan in the Ulster final of 1967. It was at this point that mentors decided to sit down and take stock and find out what had gone wrong and to end the drift. So they brought out the blank sheet again, took back the best of the old team of 60/61 merged with largely members of the Minor team of two years previous and began a fresh momentum with a new system of play to end the drift. The following year they won the National League and the Sam Maguire.

COUNTY BOARD NO CHOICE
This is a much darker hour for the Armagh senior team than we imagine. The truth is this, that the powers that be have no choice but to do something radical regarding the critical situation at present, and a patchwork job, which is always the temptation, will merely mock the present generation of up and coming footballers who want to represent us at the highest level of completion.

To repeat, Armagh will continue to drift at senior level, moving deeper and deeper into the fog of the bad old times unless we go back behind the starting line with a blank sheet and work out a totally new enterprise. There is absolutely no hope without this.

We did it twice before in the mid seventies and the mid nineties and we have a solemn duty to do it again for the dignity and pride of Armagh and for the thousands of supporters and the new generation of footballers who all long for a return to the glorious days.

INSPIRED
I am always inspired by the heroic figure of former chairman Tommy Lynch back in 1974 when single handily, lit Horatio on the bridge, he held Armagh together in their darkest hour, and initiated the revival of the county team in one of the great acts of leadership in the county's history.

Conversely, I always feel bad when I think of the Armagh team of 1961 whom I saw as a boy narrowly losing the Ulster final 2-10 to 1-10 to All-Ireland champions Down at Casement Park, and still cannot forget the lost potential of that outstanding group of footballers who had the class to be All-Ireland champions the following year instead of being allowed to slide into oblivion.

I remember giving a talk at the O'Fiaich Library a few years ago to a group that included many of this team. I had one question for them. What happened the following year? Why did they disintegrate whereas they should have been primed to win the 1962 All-Ireland which was there for the taking? No one was saying much, but the real reason I suggested was that they were allowed to disintegrate. No genuine effort was made to sit everybody down, take stock of what went wrong, work out deeply what was needed in the team and plan a new assault on the coming championships. I looked down the hall and saw Kevin Halfpenny, Jimmy Whan, Harry Loughran, Johnny McGeary, Harry Hoy, Felix McKnight and the others who formed that side, and one thought arrived that would not go away – "We let that generation down". I remember standing on the podium while a debate went on realising that the say was true of the Armagh senior players of the thirties and forties who did not win an Ulster title and were narrowly beaten by Cavan or Monaghan time and time again. The county let them down as well. A good measure of justice was done to the footballers of the early fifties with two Ulster's and an All-Ireland appearance and efforts made to develop the minors of '49. But the 1953 side quickly disintegrated and apart from the single promise of 1961, several generations of footballers were allowed to drift into oblivion, into a barren age that lasted a quarter of a century until the mid seventies.

So as a new generation of Armagh players begin to knock at the door of destiny, I hope that we will be true to them and that somebody down the years ahead will not sit down and lift their pen to write – "We let that generation down".

Taken from www.armaghgaa.net

as above

[lawnseed]

Lot of nonsense on this thread from both sides. Paddy is doing a job and doing it well. He`ll get another year at least.

mmooo...

[All of a Sludden]

I know that I will withdraw my monthly payment if there is a continuation with any remnants of the current management team allowed to go forward.

Do you honestly think any county board will worry about you stopping a direct debit?

Looks like you are about to save a few quid.  

[All of a Sludden]

I know that I will withdraw my monthly payment if there is a continuation with any remnants of the current management team allowed to go forward.

Indeed. 

Will the prodigal son return? You may have to increase those monthly payments if he does, especially now that your sugar daddy has moved his money to Louth.

[lawnseed]

Prodical son? Nah.. Mcalindens the man