Inadequate preparation a concern for Tohill

AS FAR from the idyllic image of a hot Australian spring day as could be imagined and beside a window in the team’s hotel framing Melbourne’s grey and rain-lashed streets, Ireland manager Anthony Tohill took stock of his team’s preparations.

They have not, as the former Derry All-Ireland winner accepted, been ideal. Never previously have the county championships at home put so much pressure on players selected to play in an international series.

“I suppose I have to be careful of what I say,” he said. “We’re grateful in the way that clubs and counties have allowed players come away and play with us.

“We need our best players playing this game and we need as much time as we can to prepare for this series. We need our preparations to be as professional as they can be.

“I think something needs to be looked at. County finals used to be played in September so why is it now that county finals are being played in October and at the end of October?

“Fair enough, we understand it for counties that have been in the All-Ireland final, but even from a club player’s point of view why does he start training in January and not be finished by November?

“It’s certainly something that needs to be looked at, probably as part of a wider investigation into how fixtures are structured right across the GAA family.”

One of Tohill’s more controversial decisions has been the choice of Dublin’s Stephen Cluxton as captain – given the goalkeeper’s refusal to engage with media. Confirming Cluxton would not be ameliorating that position either to talk to the media informally or attend pre-match press conferences, Tohill said he doubted if the Irish public would find the silence strange and reiterated his reasons for the appointment.

“I don’t think it will strike the Irish people as odd because of the status he has within the GAA and the season he’s had with Dublin.

“It’s now commonly known that Stephen deals with the media in his own way. They may find it odd here in the AFL that someone would choose to do that, but, as I said before, Stephen’s an amateur footballer and is within his rights to deal with those things in the way that he does.

“As far as we’re concerned we’re very pleased with it and believe he’s the right man to captain the team. He does his talking in the dressingroom, on the training pitch and in game situations. That’s what we want from him. Ability to talk to media wasn’t one of our primary considerations.”

A robust training run at Whitten Oval in Footscray blew the cobwebs away as the bulk of the panel participated in their first session together.

“We’re happy to finally be here,” said Tohill, “and have all of our players in a group and happy that the distractions of the past couple of weeks are now behind us. We’re pleased to have got out on to the pitch and got the ball into our hands – we certainly weren’t expecting the weather we had this morning, but we had a lively session, getting fellas into game mode and getting focused for the weekend.”

Tohill is one of the most experienced operators at international level. Having appeared for Ireland on eight occasions, including the 2001 series when he was captain, he also served as assistant to Seán Boylan in 2006 and ’08 before taking over for last year’s home series.

Ireland’s displays were poor 12 months ago, although the team’s final quarters in both Limerick and Croke Park narrowed the deficit and in Dublin briefly threatened to steal the series, there were some hard lessons learned.

“We learned lots of things,” said Tohill. “I suppose we had loads of possession and loads of scoring chances, but were guilty of poor shooting and poor kicking. That’s something we have to work on.

“It’s difficult because in our game fellas are free to shoot without being touched whereas here you’ve got that threat – even if it’s only an implied threat, it still knocks guys off course. That’s the one big issue from last year.

“We do our best to replicate that in our training, but it’s hard when it’s still alien to our game. It remains to be seen how we perform in that department in two Test games.

“The tackle is the key thing. Although it’s a compromise in terms of the rules they can go and play their game with a round ball. It’s not that we can go and play Gaelic with an AFL ball; we have to adapt to so many different things and subtleties in this game, whereas Australia largely play their own game, albeit largely with a round ball.

“The ball is the biggest transition they have to make but I think the transition’s more difficult technically for our players. Once they moved away from the automatic All Australian selection and started hand-picking players for this, it’s become more and more difficult for us. It’s important that they don’t start heading off on a different journey than we are.”

That lack of competitiveness is one of the spectres that has haunted the series in recent years since coach Kevin Sheedy sent out a team that annihilated Ireland in 2005, racking up 100 points for the first time ever in a Test.

Of course, Sheedy’s tenure is also remembered as coinciding with the worst excesses of violent indiscipline, but the level at which he got the AFL team to play has posed an arguably greater challenge to Ireland.

“What are the risks to the series?” asks Tohill.

“The risks are: that it degenerates down the violence route and if that happens, that’s it done; another risk is that one country gets too good at it. At the minute it doesn’t look like we’re on that journey. Then the third thing is that there’s apathy from players and amongst spectators. Those are the risks to the series.

“Australia last year were as good as I’ve seen them. It used to be that when we played them back in the late 1990s and early 2000s you could give them 60 or 70 per cent of possession because you knew they weren’t going to translate that into scores.

“We have to be mindful of that and make sure that we don’t under our stewardship allow the series to go in one direction so this is a hugely important series,” concluded the Ireland manager.