Meath’s new manager doesn’t deny Dublin their success.
Andy McEntee, the All-Ireland winning Ballyboden boss doesn’t blame the four players they have on Jim Gavin’s panel for not being with them until the Thursday before their championship game with Kilmacud but he does think someone needs to take responsibility to sort this mess out.
Boys like Michael Darragh MacAuley got one training session in with their club ahead of the second round senior championship clash whilst the rest of the panel have had to sit tight since April waiting for the go-ahead to play.
When they finally got to play, six months after their first round match, they got one match and that was their lot.
Other players like Colm Basquel and Shane Clayton’s last two years have simply been ridiculous. They won an All-Ireland with St. Enda’s in March 2016. That game was on a Thursday. They went on Saturday to play in a Leinster final with Dublin under-21s. When they lost the under-21 All-Ireland semi-final, they were called up to Jim Gavin’s squad and were released back to the club on Thursday. 21 months since they started training with the club on that journey.
Andy McEntee doesn’t think it’s acceptable and he fears that boys will simply stop playing if it continues like this.
“You have guys working, working, working for one game and what have you got for it? It’s very hard to take,” the new Royals manager told the SportsJOE GAA Hour podcast. “Long term, you have to question whether guys like that will continue to play football.
“How do you hold onto fellas over the summer when you say, ‘look, we have a big game coming up in October’?
“They (the four Dublin players in the All-Ireland final) played on the Saturday, we got together on Tuesday and Thursday and I had everybody with me on Thursday – for a game on Saturday. We had a large group of players preparing all year, or the guts of a year, for one game.
“It’s very severe. The way it (the Dublin championship) is seeded, by and large the stronger teams play one game at the start of the year back in April, and then you’re waiting around until… well, if you’re a betting man, you would say that Dublin are going to be in the business end of the championship every year.
“Whether they go on and win it or not is immaterial. It means you’re waiting around from April to September or October. For what? For one game.”
It’s a strange scenario where he steps up to senior inter-county management and he’s thinking that it might actually be easier.
“The truth is, managing a club team at the moment is way more difficult than managing a county team,” he said.
“You don’t have your players, you don’t know when you’re playing, games are called off at the drop of a hat and it’s very frustrating. You’re trying to make demands on club players that are bordering on unrealistic. You’re saying ‘you have to time your holidays around this and around that’ and you’re not quite sure whether you’re even going to be playing at that time or not.
“There are a lot of things that are out of your control and out of your hands and it makes a very frustrating experience at times.
Listen to the full interview (from 33:27) with Colm Parkinson below.
The GAA Hour continues on Wednesdays for the rest of the club season. Subscribe on iTunes.
