Kieran McGeeney is building for Kildare’s future, not worrying about make-or-break

Somewhere along the way, sand has become glass under Kieran McGeeney’s feet. If he was the kind of person who’d ever look down, he might start stepping mighty light across it.

Another Leinster semi-final and all of a sudden, it's being painted as a referendum on his time in charge of Kildare.

It’s a preposterous notion. Nothing about McGeeney tallies with a scenario whereby he would take over the county’s under-21 team, coach them to a Leinster title, hand seven of them their senior championship debuts and do so with one eye on the door. The long road is kind of his thing.

Go back to 2009, a year into his time in the Kildare job. After a settling-in season, his priority was raising fitness levels. There was ground to make up but he knew it wouldn’t be made up in a hurry.

"They were doing their two nights a week of group training at the time," says Waterford manager Niall Carew, McGeeney's right-hand man for five years in Kildare.

A different way
"They were tipping away in the gym on their own on top of that. But it was just what the rest of the middling teams were doing. Nothing more. McGeeney wanted to find a different way of doing it.

“His number one job was to get money in so that the players could have a gym of their own. We got a shell of a building at the K Club and the players themselves fitted it out.

“They fund-raised themselves, all of them with targets for what they could raise. Then they painted the walls and put down the floors and raised the money for the equipment.

“It wasn’t him saying, ‘Do that or ye’ll be off the panel’. It was him saying, ‘Let’s make this a project and let’s take responsibility for it’.”

Kieran McGeeney is easily recognisable in that anecdote.

So why then has the idea that this year is do-or-die for him gained momentum?

Partly it’s down to his longevity. After Mickey Harte, he’s the longest-serving manager in the country.

He has five months on Conor Counihan, who took Cork over in the middle of a fraught league campaign in early 2008. The difference being, of course, Counihan and Harte have won All-Irelands since he started with Kildare. McGeeney has won a couple of O'Byrne Cups.

Consistent knock
The most consistent knock against McGeeney's Kildare is the list of teams they've beaten in the championship in his time. Their 21 victories have come against 14 counties – Cavan, Limerick, Fermanagh, Offaly, Wexford, Laois, Wicklow, Antrim, Leitrim, Derry, Monaghan, Meath, Derry and Sligo.

Though most of those teams have bubbled to the surface at one stage or another over the past five years, Kildare were the bookies’ favourites on every occasion.

In other words, they have yet to win a game under McGeeney they weren’t expected to. And any time they’ve been underdogs, they’ve lost. Cork in 2008, Dublin and Tyrone in ’09, Down in ’10, Dublin in ’11 and Cork last year.

They just haven’t been able to nip one against the head, the sort of momentum builder any emerging team needs.

Through it all, McGeeney has been the lightning rod. As he famously said himself, blamed for everything from the Famine to Fianna Fáil.

There is no question clubs in the county have had better friends in his job over the years and there is certainly a simmering resentment over the county team’s claim on club players.

While Kildare are by no stretch of the imagination unique in this, there is a feeling that McGeeney has defiantly little interest in compromise.

His focus is on his team. Nobody else’s.

“He has dragged Kildare football up by the throat,” says Carew. “Every player in the county wants to play for him. And yet half the supporters probably think they’ve had enough of him. That just comes from his personality. He can’t bring himself to do the political stunt.

“He won’t change for anyone because he’s so driven to get the best out of his team. He can’t plamás the county board or the clubs or whoever.

“If you’re looking for a weakness, that might be it. But I don’t personally think it’s a weakness.

"If Kildare people think they'd be better off without him, I think it would be the greatest mistake they could make. Everything is Kildare for him. There can't be another manager in the country putting as much into their team as he is."

Only seven survivors
As season leads on to season, McGeeney has changed along with his team. The 15 named for tomorrow's semi-final against Dublin shows only seven survivors from the equivalent stage two years ago.

That was the day they cried blue murder over Cormac Reilly’s decision to give Bernard Brogan a last-minute free.

It was part of a trend of key decisions that had gone against them over a short space of time.

Right or wrong, Kildare started feeling they couldn’t all be coincidental. That there must have been something about them, however sub-conscious, influencing referees against them.

Carew is convinced McGeeney made a concerted effort to let refereeing performances pass without comment as a result.

“I know after 2011, he did a lot of soul-searching. The amount of decisions that had gone against Kildare had become a factor in us losing games.

“From not getting a scoreable free against Dublin in 2009 to Benny Coulter’s goal in 2010. Bernard Brogan getting a nothing free to win the game in 2011 and Tomás O’Connor’s square ball that year as well.

“He definitely started to look at these decisions and wondered if it was his fault. You would definitely notice these days he never gives out about a decision that goes against Kildare any more.”

None of this suggests a man with an escape route in mind.

McGeeney possibly over-achieved in 2009 and 2010 and was within a kick of a ball of beating Donegal in 2011.

He has flushed his squad with new blood and laid the first blocks for a new team to build towards the sky over the coming seasons.

Anyone who thinks he did it so that another foreman could come in and finish the job just hasn’t been paying attention.