Faithful Baker relishing scale of task ahead

The former Clare stalwart knows all about playing for a county which is surrounded by traditional strongholds but he believes in Offaly hurling, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

ON THE basis that you’ve got to start somewhere, Ollie Baker likes the bright side of the road far better than the dark end of the street. In Offaly, they’re in the weeds. He knows it, he knows you know it. But he won’t let it weigh on him because that would be like getting annoyed by the weather. He’s been a selector with Clare before and was again with Antrim last year so life on the breadline holds no great mystery for him. The choices are simple – you can shake your fist at the skies or you can turn your collar up against the cold wind and get on with getting on.

“In some cases, you’re just keeping going,” he says. “You’re just doing the same thing year in and year out. Something has to change if you’re doing all that and still getting beaten. At least get beaten trying something different. I’m lucky in that I’m coming in here to a county where Joe Dooley has done a huge amount of work getting young players ready for intercounty hurling so I’m not starting from scratch.

“When you have a team like Kilkenny or Tipperary in your sport, there’s no point in you being full of big talk like you’re going to have a cut at the All-Ireland or you’re going to focus on the league or anything like that.

“What you have to do first is make it so that your team is competitive in every game and that supporters can walk out the gate afterwards feeling proud of their lads and knowing they couldn’t have given any more. That’s what I’m after.”

Baker landed in Tullamore Garda station just over four years ago, not long retired from playing and with the game still tattooed onto him. Anthony Daly had extended his playing career with Clare by a couple of years and when the body had nothing left at the end of 2004, Daly decided that the man himself had plenty.

So Baker walked out of the dressingroom with his bag slung over his shoulder at the end of the summer and walked back in that winter with a stopwatch round his neck. When Daly left at the end of the following season, Mike McNamara kept Baker by his side for another two years. Retire? He never had the time.

“The involvement is the big thing. That’s what you get the taste for and you don’t want to let it go then. The relationship you have with players, that’s why you do it. It’s something that can’t be fully written about or fully explained. You can’t see it anywhere else only inside that dressingroom. What happens in a dressingroom is special. Before a game, at half-time and immediately afterwards – those are times for you and the men standing beside you and nobody else. Only the fellas within those walls can feel what it’s like and can understand it. That, to me, is the big draw.”

He kept his hand in with various teams here and there but always felt he’d like a crack at a county job. So when one came up on his doorstep last autumn, it was too obvious a chance to pass up. “I threw my hat in the ring,” he says. “I was as surprised as anybody that it came out the other side.”

It shouldn’t have come as such a shock. Although his sideline experience exists in the shadows, Baker the player had qualities any county board would feel comfortable in aligning themselves with. He wasn’t the sweetest hurler Clare had and he wasn’t always the fittest but he emptied himself in getting as close as he could to par in both respects. He always knew that his success was in some ways a blessing conferred by timing – “I was poxed to come along when I did. I had an All-Ireland medal won after only three and a half games for Clare” – but he never took it for granted. He worked and strove and fought for more.

It’s in that context that he looks to explain life in hurling counties that aren’t Kilkenny and Tipp. As the gap grows between the lords and the serfs, the temptation is freely available to just imagine an ocean that can never be crossed. But in Baker’s mind it’s not complicated. Counties that were once able to compete will be able to do so again if the will is there. But they’ve got to need it. Players, managers, supporters – it’s got to tear at their insides before they can get back to where they were. And it’s got to flow into every little corner of their being.

“Teams disappear when standards drop. With Clare, a team kind of all arrived together and then they all left together. There’s underage players coming through and maturing now but they weren’t there when we all left. There was no natural follow through, nobody to take up the slack.

“What a lot of players don’t realise is that they have a huge responsibility to fill the gap left when older players retire. I remember Paul Galvin doing an interview one time where he said that when he walked into the Kerry dressingroom as a young fella he was told that there were standards that everybody had to live up to. And then the older he got, the more he made a point of taking young guys aside and telling them what was expected.

“You see that in Kerry, you see it in Kilkenny, you see it in Tipperary. Because these are places where the demand from supporters is so great that players know they can’t allow the thing to go back. They know that continual success is all that will do. In counties like Clare and Offaly and Wexford, once the players retired expectations retired with them in many cases.

“It wasn’t deliberate or it wasn’t as if people stopped caring, it was just human nature. Those standards were allowed to drop and it was as if people just accepted the fact that in places like Clare or Offaly or Galway or Limerick or wherever, good teams come together almost by accident once a generation. If that’s in the backs of people’s heads, it’s very hard to keep standards up.”

You listen to him talk and you can see how it’s no great surprise that a quarter of the frontline intercounty managers this year are drawn from one specific team that rattled and hummed a decade and a half ago. Himself, Daly and Davy Fitz are different characters with different notions of the game but the search for standards is a constant. Always was, he says.

“When we were successful as players back in the ’90s, there was always an onus on us as players to go back to our clubs and drive training when we were finished with the county. It was never a matter of just coming back and rowing in with the lads that had been doing the training all through the year. It was more that you were expected to take charge, to run sessions, to set the example.

“That was replicated all across the county, which is why you had such strong clubs in Clare around that time. You had ourselves in Doora-Barefield, you had Clarecastle, you had Sixmilebridge and you had Shannon. We all won the Munster club in that period, driven by the intercounty players each of them had. That was responsibility you had and that’s what gave you the interest in maybe taking it further when you finished playing. You took a few sessions, maybe took over one of the underage teams, maybe got the odd call from a club in another county seeing would you come down and take a few nights’ training. It just went from there.”

Given the amount of timber that was trashed back in the day, he was a teensy bit wary of the welcome he’d get once he took the Offaly job. He needn’t have worried. The winter brought no retirements and that was without him having to go pleading. Every phonecall from a past player has been an offer of help, every chat in the street a vote of support. Not that he’d expect anything else before they’ve played a game.

If he had his way, they’d have half the league over them by now but his one true wish – that the GAA would change the calendar back to play league games before Christmas – won’t come true anytime soon. So he gets up and he gets on, juggling all the balls an intercounty manager has to as best he can. That expectations are low will do him no harm and Offaly people worried that he will be going bald-headed to create a team in the image he had as a player might find themselves pleasantly surprised after a few months.

“There would be a hope in the county alright that you’d play the game a certain way,” he says. “Offaly hurling was at the top for so long and they won so much over a 20-year period because of the style of hurling they played and I’d feel a certain pressure from supporters to deliver that. But it’s part of what I believe anyway, that in general the ball should be doing the work and so on. They have their style and their heritage and they’re proud of it. You have to respect that.”

They start the Walsh Cup next week against Westmeath and when the league does arrive they’ll have Antrim, Clare, Laois, Limerick and Wexford for company. Coolderry’s involvement in the All-Ireland club championship is a weight he hopes to have to bear until St Patrick’s Day but whenever he gets their players back it will be another injection of optimism, another shot of goodwill in a county that needs it. At the start of the year, he’ll allow himself that much at least. Bright side of the road and all that.