Thoughts on this article?
I’VE READ and heard so many times over the past year or so about people singing the praises of Tyrone’s training and GAA complex at Garvaghey. And rightly so in some respects, as it took great vision and leadership to make such a bold leap, a bit like the development of Croke Park in many ways.
But the fact is that there’s an awful lot of work to be done up there if they are to make it a really top notch set-up.
Yes, it’s a great facility, but the first big mistake they made was with the location. When you’re standing at Garvaghey and looking around you at eye level, there’s a reason why the only thing you see are wind turbines. Even on the hottest day of summer I still think there’d be a wind up there, testing conditions, and that makes it hugely difficult to try and get good preparations in when accurate passing is such a key aspect of your game.
Yes, there are trees planted and the likes which should in the long term help to shelter the place a bit from the elements, but that’s 30 years down the line and global warming might have taken care of the problem by then anyway!
What it is sorely missing is an indoor arena. You look at what is in Lavey, or the Meadowvale in Magherafelt and at the Mid-Ulster Sports Arena in Cookstown. It’s an indoor pitch where you are sheltered from the elements, where Mickey Harte or any other coach could take his players for a session, or for stretching, or anything else they wanted to do without sending the players out into the sort of arctic conditions we’ve seen in recent weeks.
You look at the building, which looks great from above, but realistically who is going to see it from above and the shape of the Celtic ‘T’? Unless you’re in your private helicopter or plane, or you’re a bird, then it’s not really going to make that much of a difference to you. What it has meant is that for the sake of a fancy architectural design, we have a building which doesn’t have a single square room or straightforward corner, everything a mix-up of odd shapes.
There should be a big hall where teams can operate, do circuits or gym work or whatever they have to do, but it was sacrificed for an auditorium. When I was there, it seemed like the gym equipment had all just been piled into the one room. There is no specific gym lay-out, instead the equipment all crammed into a room which was originally intended for storage.
It’s a great place for seminars, for county board meetings, and the administrative offices and board room look really well. But at the end of the day this is supposed to be a place for training and developing footballers to help them be the best that they can be. Is it focused on admin or on the players?
At the minute, I would actually say that it trails behind Derry’s new Owenbeg complex from a player’s point of view. It’s a start, a solid start, but there is so much more that could be done and needs to be done. The next challenge to the Tyrone fraternity is to make that happen.
I think it’s all part of a bigger picture for Tyrone GAA. It frustrates me every time I hear or read about the good work which Tyrone people are doing elsewhere, with other counties benefiting from their experience and their expertise.
Take Peter Donnelly for example. He’s getting huge credit for the work he is doing with Cavan, a real driving force behind their emergence as a real footballing powerhouse again. He’s going around schools, working with their development squads, and working with the senior team to help get the very best out of them. He’s even going to meet up with players at their universities for one-to-one sessions to work on particular aspects of their game.
But he’s doing it with Cavan, not with Tyrone. We should be bending over backwards to get men like that involved in our county set-ups. There is certainly the opportunity for him to be working with Tyrone.
We can see Cavan and other counties like Dublin who are constantly moving forward, but are we in Tyrone standing still? It’s areas like these where investment should be made, and it frustrates me when I see money being forked out on stupid things. I’ve seen that Donnelly has gone as far as visiting the training facilities of some of the top sports clubs in Europe, drawing on their expertise. Who are we sending to Bayern Munich training to see what we can learn from it? There is so much there that could be done, and we’re not doing it. It’s time for some outside the box thinking.
