Hurlers, not horses…
Around the country, GAA teams are in the dying embers of their preseason as they look towards the league and championship, which in many places is just a month away.
On the county scene, the landscape is a little different. They’ve been back training for months. Gym sessions, pool sessions, grueling endurance sessions… and eventually, as an afterthought, some skill sessions.
Speaking on the GAA Hour (40 minutes onwards), Antrim hurling manager Terence ‘Sambo’ McNaughton spoke about the job facing him to get Antrim back to the top rung of the hurling ladder.
Antrim hurling has been suffering. Long gone are the glory days when McNaughton said they could get on a bus and realistically expect to beat the likes of Clare and Waterford. Expectations may be lower now, but standards are not according to McNaughton.
“I used the terminology, ‘we’ll climb the mountain and see who’s at the top.’ We wanted to weed out the guys who weren’t committed.
“When we came in last year after the management resigned, we came in and the boys weren’t fit. There were boys coming and going like it was a drop-in centre. We had to change the attitude and we had to change the culture. So we’re down to… I’ll give you a statistic, we must have asked in over 70 players and we’re down to 28.
“The guys that are left want to wear the Antrim jersey and we don’t have to look in the car park anymore to see who’s turning up to train.”
The aim is to build a hurling culture in Antrim. A winning culture. One where men have pride in the jersey they wear. Where playing hurling for your county is seen as a privilege, not a chore.
To have that commitment and drive, it takes a lot of sacrifice, some of which is too much for many people.
But when you hear about the level of training needed to play for Antrim, it’s easy to see why people have fallen away from the panel in the extreme numbers they have. But this isn’t an isolated thing, this is happening in clubs up and down the country.
The extremes of preseason are put into perspective by McNaughton as he lays out exactly what his Antrim hurlers were doing for nine weeks… and it wasn’t ball work.
“I went and I met DJ Kane, the Down footballer, because traditionally the footballers always seem to train harder than hurlers. I don’t know if that’s right but up here you hear stories of Tyrone and that.
“I didn’t want a fitness trainer coming out of a gym or out of college with letters after his name. I wanted somebody who wore the t-shirt. In DJ you have a guy that was a leader, been there and wore the t-shirt.
“We asked DJ to, first of all, get these boys fit and to build character. We trained for nine weeks and we never held a hurl. With that in mind we wanted to see who had the character to stay at it. To play for Antrim, to get fit and to do the right things.”
Also on this week’s GAA Hour Hurling Show: Hurling rocket scientists, threats on Brian Cody’s life and boring, boring Tipperary.
