Following their humiliation in the All-Ireland quarter-final, it looks like Kildare are going to pluck a selector away from their conquerors.
Originally from Newbridge, Cian O'Neill will be put forward by the Kildare Co. Board for the position of senior football manager this week.
Cian O'Neill (football) & Joe Quaid (hurling) will be put forward by Kildare Co Board for Senior positions at Tuesday night's meeting.
— Killian Whelan (@Killian_Whelan) October 3, 2015
O'Neill is fomrer course director of the BSc in Physical Education in UL and is current Head of the Sports Department at CIT. He is regarded as a pre-eminent authority on modern coaching and training methods in the country.
In 2010, he was Tipperary's fitness coach as they halted Kilkenny's five in a row dream. He subsequently got involved with Mayo, coaching them during their run to the 2012 All-Ireland final. Following their win over Dublin in the All-Ireland semi-final, Lar Corbett tweeted: 'Everywhere Cian O’Neill seems to go they become winners. Respect'.
In 2013, he became a Kerry senior football coach under Eamonn Fitzmaurice.
The GAA website did a fascinating profile on him during the 2013 season, in which he outlined what he believed was wrong with a lot of modern inter-county training.
The question of over-training cropped up.
I do know of counties who are doing four group sessions a week and three gym sessions and that to me is frightening. Unless you are doing two sessions a day you are training every single day at a specific site at a specific time – there is no room for manouevre in such a set-up. There is nothing necessarily wrong with seven sessions a week, but they should not all be high intensity gym and field-based sessions.
For me, an amateur athlete who has work, a family and a social life needs recovery days in there where they do nothing except relax and maybe do a recovery session in their own house. They have to get time to spend with loved ones and friends. I would be concerned with anyone who has more than five days a week of focused, high intensity or contact sessions...
He also believes in a less reactive style of coaching, one that centres more on the strengths of the team he's coaching.
That to me is the biggest coaching error that teams are making at the moment – they are trying to beat other teams by counteracting them when perhaps they should just get better at playing the way they play.
Read the rest of the interview here.
