Ó Fátharta rails against belief counties are ‘flogging’ players
ALTHOUGH thrilled that his Connacht championship winning U20 side have the opportunity to challenge for All-Ireland honours, Galway football manager Donal Ó Fátharta says it’s disappointing that inter-county set-ups are not allowed any interaction with their squads during the up-and-coming club window.
Just to be clear, Ó Fátharta, whose side will face Kerry in the U20 All-Ireland semi-final on October 17, is not talking about physically training his team. Rather, he is referring to the monitoring of S&C and physical fitness loads during a hectic period for players.
He believes that the GAA directive forbidding inter-county managements access to their players has been made on that archaic premise of inter-county coaches “flogging” players when, in fact, there is a great deal of science behind helping players realise their potential, be it through tactical or video analysis or raising awareness on the importance of recovery.
Unfortunately, in a lot of clubs, this expertise may not yet have filtered down to adult teams – for whatever reason – and, with club championships looming, some may be playing a challenge to two challenge matches a week and working their players hard in between, with little time for rest.
“A lot of the chat is about burnout and county managers killing them and stuff like that but I didn’t see much talk about (the value) of mobility, injury prevention and strengthening,” says Ó Fátharta. “So, it is just a bit disappointing that county managers weren’t trusted. I am not talking about taking them from their clubs but helping them.”
In decades gone by, the chatter around inter-county teams was on how hard a management was working their players – taking training to the extremes on the sides of mountains and around race tracks and so on – but, he thinks, and hopes, inter-county training has moved away from all that now.
“What an inter-county set-up can provide now is a support network. We (Galway U20 set-up) have no interest in having our players in with us when they are with their clubs – absolutely no interest – but we have an interest in monitoring them and making sure they are getting in their injury prevention and stuff like that.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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