Lilies moving up a few steps
SO far, it’s been a good year for Cian O’Neill and his Kildare footballers, with promotion secured to Division 1 of the National League and a spot in the Leinster final for the first time since 2009.
The thing is, they have yet to face anything like the quality of opposition that lie in wait in Sunday’s decider at Croke Park.
Dublin will be the first Division 1 team his side have come up against this year — a significant step-up from the Division 4 bound Laois and stuttering Meath team the Lilywhites eased past in Leinster to reach this stage.
The positives are that O’Neill is working with a young Kildare team who are no strangers to getting the upper hand over their neighbours at underage level, taking minor Leinster titles in 2013, 2015 and 2016, along with an Under 21 provincial title in 2013.
And while many of his squad are lacking in experience against Division 1 sides, O’Neill himself knows exactly what it takes to make the top teams tick.
While the Kildare job is his first inter-county managerial role, O’Neill (above) has been a regular on the sideline in Championship football for the guts of ten years.
He claims to have turned down 15 inter-county jobs before he took over the reins in his native county in October 2015, succeeding Jason Ryan, who walked away from the position following a humiliating 7-16 to 0-10 All-Ireland quarter final defeat to a Kerry team in which O’Neill was involved as a coach/ selector.
His three-year involvement with the Kerry management team — along with stints with the Tipperary hurlers and Limerick and Mayo footballers — gave O’Neill first-hand experience into what is required to deliver success at inter-county level.
His first season at the helm brought signs of progress, Kildare winning six of their seven League fixtures to secure promotion before losing the Division 3 final to Clare.
The wheels somewhat fell off when the serious business of Championship football rolled around. Kildare edged Wexford 0-9 to 0-8 in a forgettable Leinster opener before losing out to Westmeath by a point after another lacklustre performance, a defeat which left O’Neill feeling physically sick and laid up in bed until five o’clock the following day.
His side picked themselves up for the qualifiers and got the better of Offaly before their summer was ended by eventual All-Ireland finalists Mayo, but O’Neill was confident that he was working with a squad that was going in the right direction. The initial point of focus in the first year had been restoring confidence in a side that had shipped 14-50 in their last three visits to Croke Park before O’Neill’s arrival.
Despite a disappointing campaign, O’Neill had at least seen that leaky defence tighten up, so the attention then turned towards getting Kildare’s forwards into gear.
They knuckled down and secured a second successive promotion this spring, bringing Kildare back to Division 1 for the first time since 2014 while they displayed an impressive, fluid attacking style in seeing off both Laois and Meath.
O’Neill’s vision was slowly coming into focus — the result of an almost obsessive approach to management that can be traced back to helping out with coaching a first-year secondary school basketball team at the age of just 13.
He is employed as Cork IT’s Head of Sport, taking roughly two hours to make the trip from Douglas to Kildare, a journey he uses to plan sessions with his management team on the way to training, before taking notes on his dictaphone on the way home, later transcribing the core points for future reference.
While few are giving his Kildare team any chance of causing an upset against Dublin this weekend, it is unlikely anything other than a harrowing defeat would give him that same sickly feeling he experienced after losing out to Westmeath last summer.
Sunday’s result will not define Kildare’s campaign, with defeat still leaving them just one game away from a potential All-Ireland quarter-final, and while some would point to that as genuine progress, O’Neill recognises such a result could only be taken as ‘relative success.’
Having lifted his team back to Division 1, O’Neill’s real aim is to get Kildare back competing for Leinster titles. They’ll get a taste of just how big that step is, very soon.