In their determination to explain Eamon O’Shea, somehow, Tommy Dunne and Darragh Egan both resort to a pass they remember. In both cases it led to a goal in an All-Ireland final, though they could have chosen another pass from a symphony of thousands and it would have meant the same thing. Every creative thought O’Shea had about hurling was expressed with a pass.
Lar Corbett’s second goal in the 2010 final is seared in Egan’s memory. Noel McGrath released Corbett with a reverse hand pass, but the ball McGrath received was fizzed from 50 yards by Gearóid Ryan, like it was carried on a zip-wire.
“It was the Gearóid Ryan pass that we were really working on for three years,” says Egan. “That goal probably defined Eamon’s coaching in the ’08, ’09, ’10 era.”
The pass in Dunne’s mind was from another All-Ireland against Kilkenny, nine years later. Séamus Callanan won a ball in the corner and flashed a 30-yard pass to John “Bubbles” O’Dwyer, surging into space at the far post. He stunned the ball with one touch and scored without taking the ball to hand. The leverage for the pass, though, was the angle; without the run, the goal chance would have been strangled.
O’Shea has always been devoted to angles. In the past he has spoken about his admiration for Michel Bruyninckx, the former Standard Liege academy director, who developed a training method designed to improve the brain’s performance. It is Brunyninckx’s belief that 80 per cent of performance in sport is in the mind and it has always been O’Shea’s goal to nurture thinking players.
Hurling and soccer share very little common ground, but Bruyninckx said something in an interview with the BBC once that echoes through O’Shea’s coaching life.
“If a team consciously plays the ball at angles at very high speed it will be quite impossible to recover the ball [for the opposition],” Bruyninckx said. “The team rhythm will be so high that your opponent will never get into the match.”
When O’Shea returned for his third stint with the Tipp hurlers in 2019, Cairbre Ó Cairealláin was the strength and conditioning coach. Every training session was a collaborative work, but O’Shea had an executive veto.
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“If Cairbre arrived out with a straight-line warm-up drill it was put in the rubbish bin straight away,” says Dunne. “It just wouldn’t get over the first hurdle. Anything that was in a straight line was not going to work. Movement was such a huge part of the philosophy. The unpredictable nature of how we can attack teams from the goalkeeper out.”
Egan was on the Tipperary panel when O’Shea was the coach between 2008 and 2010, and he was still part of the squad when O’Shea was the Tipp manager between 2013 and 2015. Tommy Dunne didn’t know him before they came together under Liam Sheedy in 2019; Egan was part of the same management team. O’Shea didn’t arrive until the spring of that year, and immediately he set his mind to chemistry.
“The thing with Eamon,” says Dunne, “from a coaching perspective, we had to be philosophically aligned before we could go near doing something productive on the pitch. So we talked and talked and met and met for ages, on a weekly basis, and it was powerful stuff.
“We talked about ideas and attaching names to things. Not so much about game plans, but just ‘what if’ scenarios and ‘if we tried this how would it look?’. It was operating on a blank canvas with a huge amount of imagination and creativity thrown into the mix, where nothing was off the table. No sort of bizarre idea would be completely ruled out until it was discussed in savage detail. The pitch was the beautiful part of it, but the other part was just as exhilarating for me as a coach.”
The first thing you feel after an Eamon O’Shea session is that you haven’t trained at all
— Fergal Moore, former Galway captain
Since the beginning of last season, the Galway hurlers have been exposed to O’Shea’s fertile mind. When Henry Shefflin stood down as manager at the end of last summer and Micheál Donoghue stepped in, he was bound to approach O’Shea to carry on. Nobody expected O’Shea to balk at the opportunity.
Their relationship stretches back many years. When Donoghue coached his own club, Clarinbridge, to win the club All-Ireland in 2011 he invited O’Shea to take occasional training sessions; when Donoghue moved on to Turloughmore, the arrangement continued.
When O’Shea took the Tipperary manager’s job, the favour flowed the other way. At the beginning of O’Shea’s second season Donoghue was introduced to the Tipp set-up, inconspicuously and without any formal role. He travelled with O’Shea from Galway and blended into the scene.
“After 2013 [a season that had gone badly] Eamon may have felt ‘I need an outside set of eyes,’ and Micheál is a very, very sound fella,” says Egan. “On the field he had very minimal impact. I distinctly remember him taking one drill one time in front of the Old Stand in Thurles, but other than that it was more of a sounding board for Eamon.”
By the time Donoghue took the Galway job for the first time in 2016, O’Shea had stood down as Tipp manager and in the years that followed the Galway players were convinced that Donoghue had tried to pull him on board. O’Shea was a professor in University of Galway’s school of business and economics and Galway had been his adopted home for decades. From the stand in Pearse Stadium you can see his house up on the hill.
But the extent of his involvement was one-on-one sessions with players at Donoghue’s request. Joe Canning met him once in Pearse Stadium. The gates were locked, and O’Shea worked through some principles of movement and a few observations on free taking. He told Canning to pay attention to the sound of the strike.
Over the years, O’Shea was a generous teacher in those clinics. Egan was a student for four years in Galway and he used to meet him for lunchtime sessions in the ball alley in Salthill. But O’Shea comes alive when the field is full of hurlers and there is no sheet music, only his baton.
“The first thing you feel after an Eamon O’Shea session is that you haven’t trained at all,” says Fergal Moore, the former Galway captain, who trained under O’Shea in Turloughmore.
“You’re concentrating so much and you’re lapping up every word and the stuff he does is so different that before you know it, the session is over. Even the way he talks is totally different. He sees the game in a different way. It’s such a complex way in his head, but he’s such a brilliant communicator it comes out very simply. It’s totally stimulating and totally refreshing.”
For O’Shea’s sessions there isn’t a training cone on the field. Egan and Dunne refer to “drills” but they both know it’s the wrong word. He doesn’t coach by prescription; nothing is explained on a tactics board. He has spoken about his players taking as much pleasure in the scoring pass as in the score itself; the phrase he uses is “spinning the ball around”. Every pass is a “connection”.
In a 2010 interview with the online hurling magazine Sliotar, O’Shea tried to explain the abstractness of what he does and how it feels.
“This goes deeper,” he said. “This is to the soul, if it exists. It’s deeper than simply the physical aspect. This has to flow. You need to feel the confidence, the self-assuredness running through you. Then that takes over.”
For his coaching to work, though, players must be convinced and invested, and they must be capable. In 2010 Tipperary were the first All-Ireland winning team to put an emphasis on stick-passing, over short and middle distances. That skill had always been present in the game, but it was largely uncultivated. It is the dominant means of transferring the ball at all levels now, but that wasn’t the case 15 years ago. O’Shea ignited that revolution.
In Tipp, he had the players to animate his vision. “Awareness and the ability to use space, that’s a huge part of what he does,” says Dunne. “It’s very hard to coach that but he was always true to that. He’s very, very attack minded. He would always have been of the view, ‘We’re Tipperary, we attack and we just go for it’.
“I think he appeared at the right time for us. The players were perfect for him. For Noel McGrath, Larry Corbett, Eoin Kelly, Jason Forde, Seamus Callanan, Bubbles O’Dwyer, Brendan Maher, Bonner – they got this kind of stuff. They got it.
“It didn’t have to be perfect at training. It wasn’t perfect every night. There was a lot of chaos. Tons of chaos. Tons of mistakes. There were probably players wondering, ‘I f**king don’t know what’s going on here.’ I wouldn’t have been surprised. But I got it, and they got it. Enough of it happened in big games to know that it was right for us.”
What about the Galway players? Have they got it yet? Do they have the right players for his approach? Has O’Shea’s influence been visible in Galway’s play over the 18 months?
The suggestion is that Shefflin and O’Shea may not have been on the same page last season. That won’t be the case with Donoghue, or with Franny Forde, Donoghue’s closest ally over the years and part of the Galway management team again. Forde played under O’Shea in NUIG and Turloughmore. Their relationship has deep roots too.
But trying to work out which components of Galway’s play are down to O’Shea’s input so far is like trying to separate the milk from your tea.
“As regards Eamon’s stamp being all over it [Galway’s play], probably not,” says Egan. “But Micheál, Franny, Noel Larkin and Aidan Harte, they’re all modern thinkers in their own right. I’d say as a collective the five of them are trying to find a pattern that suits the players they have. At the moment, Galway are really trying to attack from deep. It’s unfair to say that’s Eamon.
“But he’s constantly evolving with the times, constantly learning how he can approach different players. He’s always thinking about different types of approaches. Two centre forwards around the centre back was something that Eamon brought to the table with us. It was executed brilliantly against Limerick in 2021 [Munster final] but we couldn’t finish the job.”
O’Shea retired from NUIG about 18 months ago, but before he finished he did a tour of duty in Australia. One day, a few weeks before Christmas, Egan got a text from O’Shea: he was at the Gabba, watching a cricket team going through their paces.
“He was talking about technique, and what their footwork is like and how they approach the ball.”
O’Shea’s mind was never full. There was always room.
