Cian O’Neill on the long and winding road to training: ‘I just love it. Connection – it’s a very special word’

It is early afternoon on a Thursday in December. Cian O’Neill is in his office garb: white shirt, blue tie, jacket off, crossing the bridge from work to play. On the passenger seat is a training plan for a 75-minute session, each drill divided into timed blocks and married to a purpose; everything explained, carefully. The Galway footballers had received a copy. Everyone on the same page.

From where O’Neill works and lives on the southside of Cork City there is no short road to Galway’s training centre outside Claregalway. In the maul of daytime traffic it takes the guts of three hours. The pitch session this evening starts at 7pm, but there is a management meeting at 5.30pm. Two minutes to spare. Early.

For 20 years the road has been in O’Neill’s blood. Somebody always wanted him, and if sometimes there was a desire to say no, that feeling would eventually be drummed out in arbitration. His relationship with the road, though, was cold and transactional; it took him places: Limerick, Tipperary, Mayo, Kerry, Kildare, Cork, Galway. Seven All-Ireland finals. Nine provincial titles. Always looking forward. Looking up.

He said once that it was an “addiction” and he still has no other word for it. “The only thing that keeps me going is the connection [with people],” O’Neill says. “When I go out on the pitch tonight I know I’m going to have the best 75 minutes. I just love it. I love being with the players. Connection – it’s a very special word.”

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There were times, though, when the road took a heavy toll, and there were times when it was crucifying. O’Neill spent the 2012 season with Mayo while he was living in Limerick. Bypasses and soothing stretches of motorway have been added since, but in those days he could not do the journey in less than three hours. Training was at 8pm to make it more convenient for Mayo’s Dublin-based players which meant O’Neill was never home before 1am.

To compound everything his back caved in. A couple of years earlier he had been in a horrific crash, and by the time he accepted the role with Mayo he had been through two surgeries. Nothing was settled. Two more surgeries followed in the next two years until O’Neill eventually submitted to a spinal fusion procedure. It was the last resort. By then he had no choice.

“I could be just walking up the stairs and, bang, the back would go. There were nights at training – rarely now – when one of the back room lads, or one of the players, would be putting on my socks because I couldn’t bend down,” O’Neill says.

“I had just started a new relationship with Tammy [his now wife] and there were nights when she was driving me to training because I couldn’t drive. It was bonkers. We joke about it now, but we nearly broke up because of it.

“I was in a management position in UL (University of Limerick) at the time and you’d be shattered the following day, shattered. I left Mayo at the end of that year and went to Kerry. One thing that really pisses me off is that people told me it was one big masterplan. It wasn’t. I physically and mentally couldn’t do another year [in Mayo]. If we had won the All-Ireland by 10 points [Donegal beat them in the final] I wouldn’t have been there in 2013. I was broken, literally broken. I put up two stone from eating sh*t on the road. I was in a bad way.”

When he took the Kildare job for the 2016 season, O’Neill was returning home; everywhere else, he was an outsider. In some places, that also meant he was a risk. When Liam Sheedy asked him to be the strength and conditioning coach for the Tipperary hurlers, 15 years ago, that side of the house had no history of plugging into football people. Nobody really knew who he was. O’Neill was younger than some of the players and his only previous intercounty experience had been with the Limerick footballers.

By then, though, Kilkenny had come under the influence of Mick Dempsey, a former Laois footballer, and Sheedy was open to fresh thinking. After a while O’Neill was tasked with the contact drills. When Sheedy stepped down after the 2010 All-Ireland, Eamon O’Shea and Michael Ryan went with him, but the players asked O’Neill if he would stay. As a performance review, it was a ringing praise.

Kerry football, though, was the game’s oldest empire with no history of importing know-how from the colonies. When Eamonn Fitzmaurice asked O’Neill on to his coaching team he knew that he would run the gauntlet of local opinion.

“As a non-Kerry person I’m pretty sure he got a bit of stick for bringing me in as a coach. It was the first ever non-Kerry coach. We had an awful start to the league that year [2013] and we only escaped relegation on scoring difference by a last-minute point up in Tyrone. So Eamon was under pressure already. Bringing a Kildare man in didn’t carry much meas with the public when things weren’t going well,” O’Neill says.

In year two they won the All-Ireland; in year three they reached the final again. In the off-season Kildare came calling. “I loved it down there [in Kerry]. I loved the players. I loved the management, the county board. Everything they did was just class. I would have stayed there for 10 years, but I couldn’t turn down managing Kildare.”

The decision was framed by other considerations too. O’Neill and Tammy were married in 2014 and their plan was to start a family. For the Kildare job, he reckoned the only good time was now.

“Basically, what was going through my head was, once kids come along I’m going to knock it on the head. I’m not going to be driving up and down the country if there were two or three kids running around at home. I was 37 getting married, so I wasn’t the youngest in the world. We just wanted to have kids straight away,” O’Neill recalls.

“Eight IVFs later, multiple miscarriages and a deceased twin in the womb, Luca came along last year.”

The Kildare gig was a searching examination of everything O’Neill knew and everything he thought he knew. At intercounty level O’Neill had performed every other role, except manager. His opinions were no longer just part of a stew; he was stirring the pot. He felt the weight of it.

“My first year in Kildare I definitely learned a lot about myself because I was putting myself under a lot of pressure and I remember I was shouting a lot [during matches],” O’Neill says.

“I’m quite vocal on the line anyway, but it’s generally positive. But I was shouting at referees a lot. It never happened before and it never happened since. I remember I lost the head against Mayo when we were beaten [in the qualifiers] and I went into the referee afterwards and apologised. I was out of order.

“I went in [to Kildare] with great plans and hopes. It was a bigger job than I expected. And maybe what I tried to do, in error, was tried to apply what I had been doing in Kerry, not realising that they weren’t ready yet – which is on me, not them.”

I love playing Mayo, I love playing Kerry, I love playing Dublin, because they give you a chance to win. They just back themselves to beat you

Everything was magnified. In O’Neill’s first season they lost a Leinster semi-final to Westmeath by a point and it was as if he had been infected with a new, virulent strain of losing. It floored him.

“We should have won that match. We didn’t. That was my first, major, crushing experience. This was different to just losing a match – in my mind this was failing. This was just crushing. Your own county. ‘Does yer man have a clue?’ – that type of thing. I didn’t leave the house for days,” O’Neill says.

“Tammy is a psychotherapist, not the type of person you want around, analysing you, when your head is up your backside,” he says laughing. “The only time I felt okay that week was walking in the gates of St Conleth’s [for training] and meeting the players. When you’re with the players, everyone feels the same. Then you go home and feel sh*t again.”

O’Neill’s final year will always be remembered for the Newbridge or Nowhere stand-off that electrified the national conversation for a week. But earlier that summer, they had been beaten by Carlow in the Leinster championship and he will never forget that. Carlow scored with every shot they took at goal: a 100 per cent strike rate. He never saw it before or since.

“That was the lowest point of my career, ever. That was basically me gone [as manager],” O’Neill says.

But after that Kildare went on a run in the qualifiers – they beat Derry away and Longford away and when they were drawn at home against Mayo in the next round it felt like they were due a break. Croke Park, though, had reservations about the capacity of the ground, and the prospect of supporters congregating outside without tickets and they pushed Kildare to nominate an alternative venue.

Monday of that week was consumed by shuttle diplomacy. O’Neill refused point blank to countenance any venue other than Newbridge. In negotiations with Croke Park the Kildare chairman refused to blink. O’Neill contacted every one of the Kildare players during the day and to a man they supported his stance. Marty Morrissey asked him to go on the Six-One News and he uttered the phrase that had been rolling off his tongue in private conversations all day: Newbridge or Nowhere. Every campaign needs an infectious slogan. Croke Park climbed down.

“The pressure to perform [against Mayo] was massive. I don’t think the players felt the pressure but I felt the pressure,” O’Neill says. “Number one, I was already under pressure because we had been beaten by Carlow. I was literally under savage pressure. But number two, how much of stupid backfire would it have been if we’d been beaten by 12 points?

“It came from a good place. ‘We’ve had a sh*t year lads, we’re entitled to this.’ We’d been relegated, we’d been beaten by a Division Three team. ‘We’ve earned this,’ kind of thing. That’s where it came from. It was a magical evening, it really was. It’s an awful thing to say that my greatest memory [from my time in Kildare] is a qualifier match. You’d love to say it was the day you won Leinster. I was happy for the players. They would have had to put up with a load of crap that year as well.”

It was a beautiful evening in Claregalway. Not a breath of wind. No cold. The other Galway coach, John Divilly, was missing so O’Neill had his hands on the levers. Pádraic Joyce stood aside and let him at it. For nearly 80 minutes the energy source for the session was O’Neill’s voice and his enthusiasm and his capacity to create an atmosphere. The drills challenged the players to think. The ball flew. Coming off the field he was hoarse.

More than two years ago Joyce called him out of the blue. O’Neill and Tammy had just been through their seventh failed IVF. Tammy persuaded him to accept Joyce’s offer.

This was a road with a heart. Their visions for how the game could be played were aligned: front-foot football, generously resourced forward lines, lightning transition from defence to attack. But in the modern game is that not a romantic notion? Can you win in that way? How does that stack up against a massed defence? Compromise, is the short answer.

“You have to balance it in terms of structure in defence and trying to marry two systems. If a team is playing very defensive its very hard to play the way you want to play. But if I read another idiot of a pundit or an ex-player that says coaches or managers are ruining the game – as if everyone is the same. Let them come and look at that session tonight. All we did was play attack and counterattack football,” O’Neill says.

“The problem is if you put 15 men behind a blanket it doesn’t matter what you do, you have to almost counter what they’re doing. You’re trying to do your own thing but you have to be pragmatic as well. I don’t particularly like those kind of games. I love playing Mayo, I love playing Kerry, I love playing Dublin, because they give you a chance to win. They just back themselves to beat you.”

O’Neill doesn’t drink tea or coffee but he keeps a packet of caffeine gum in the car for a shot of something to keep him going. Halfway through Limerick he starts yawning. To make the day stretch he reaches his desk at 7am. The following morning will be no different.

He did not hang around for the gym session once the field session had finished, and he did not sit down for the post-training grub. The traffic is light. He calls Tammy and says he will be home by 11pm. Against the road, that counts as a win. The road will have other nights.