GAELIC GAMES:DERRY MANAGER Damian Cassidy is at a loss to explain the county's inability over the years to reproduce National League success during the summer. It doesn't make him glad to have lost Sunday's final to Kerry, but it did prompt him to look for other things from this year's campaign.
Since Cassidy’s playing days in 1992, Derry have won five NFL titles but none of them coincided with the years of championship success, including the breakthrough All-Ireland in 1993. “I really don’t know,” he says when asked why success in spring and summer proved mutually exclusive. “I’ve tried to make sense of it.
“Derry is a small football area. Derry city has 80,000 or 90,000 people but no county players or a senior club. Within an hour I could drive you through 90 per cent of the clubs that supply our panel. We’ve had five different clubs win the county in the past five years, so I’ve a panel full of players who have won county medals and last year a National League. That can take the edge off players.
“We wouldn’t be disrespectful about the league and if we could have won it we’d have taken it with both arms. But winning another league would not have been of additional benefit to Derry. We have done well in the competition over the years but it hasn’t translated into championship success.”
In a spiky first few months of intercounty management, Cassidy has expressed opposition to two of the major innovations brought forward this season, the experimental disciplinary rules, which failed to get the necessary two-thirds endorsement at congress, and the close season introduced last year on foot of anti-burn-out proposals, which prohibits collective intercounty training for two months at the end of the year.
The latter restriction, he feels, has damaged his preparations, especially with so many new players to be incorporated into the panel, a situation he contrasts with his experience as a club coach in Tyrone and Derry.
“The one thing I’ve noticed is the lack of time. Delays in county championships, because of the county’s involvement in the All-Ireland, give you as a coach a lot of time to work with players. County panels can’t train in November and December, so you have little more than four months to prepare for the first round of the championship.”
Faced with the imperative to improve the strength of the panel and to change aspects of the playing style, he wasn’t holding out great hopes for this year’s defence of the NFL title.
“I brought nine new players into the panel. In those circumstances I was afraid relegation might be a danger, so to have played new players and not alone retained our status but to have reached the final means I’m relatively satisfied.”
If he wants, Cassidy can take some consolation from the fact when the county last lost a league final, 11 years ago, they went on to win their most recent Ulster title.This year’s championship begins in three-and-a-half weeks against Monaghan, who eliminated Derry from last year’s All-Ireland, and Cassidy believes the league has done its work.
“In last year’s championship we weren’t able to deal with the loss of players so we needed to find significant cover throughout the team.
“On Sunday we were missing Patsy Bradley, who’s been tremendous for us in the last few matches, Seán Marty Lockhart, Niall McCusker and Paul Bradley. I don’t think we could have coped with those injuries last year.”
