Progress is Down to McCartan

GAELIC GAMES: SEÁN MORANtalks to the Down manager whose managerial instinct has been assured but cautious

THIS EVENING in Croke Park is ostensibly about Dublin. Top of the Allianz Football League and the only county to date in the four divisions with a 100 per cent return, Pat Gilroy’s team will close out their Spring Series having broken six figures in accumulated attendance this campaign.

Victory will also confirm the team as league finalists for the first time in 12 years. More importantly it will signify meaningful progress at national level. Although prominence in the spring isn’t a cast-iron guarantee of success in September the statistics since the league was shifted to a calendar-year basis 10 years ago make compelling reading. In seven of those 10 years the All-Ireland has been won by one of the league finalists (six times by the winners, once by the runners-up). Dublin’s inability to make an impact in the league has come to be regarded as more and more of a failing, a deduction validated by the 16 long years since the county last reached an All-Ireland.

But tonight is also about the opposition. Just two years ago Down were in Division Three. Now they lie third in Division One, the county best placed to prevent a widely-anticipated Dublin-Cork final. Moreover and in contrast to their opponents, the team drove through last summer’s All-Ireland qualifiers all the way to the final and a one-point defeat by Cork.

James McCartan took over the team in late 2009. By then Down had been promoted to Division Two. The new manager took them straight through to the elite level, topping the table but losing the divisional final to Armagh.

His credentials were sound: a member of the county’s football aristocracy, a stellar performer in his career with two All-Ireland medals from 1991 and ’94 and someone whose coaching talents had emerged during a spell in charge of his alma mater, Queen’s University, Belfast, culminating in Sigerson success in 2007.

By the start of last year’s championship he was randomly burdened with the coincidence of the 50th anniversary of the county’s seismic first All-Ireland but one of the many McCartan relatives who populate the county’s football world Team of the Millennium laureate, Seán O’Neill, who starred in the 1960 campaign, said prophetically of summer prospects: “Down are at the beginning of a process. James McCartan has done a remarkable job of blending them together. Developing individuals into teams is one of his great skills, which I saw when he began to coach at Queen’s. We’re maybe not ready for a major assault this year but momentum builds quickly in Down squads.”

So far McCartan has seen his team compete well in the top division while being forced to operate off an extensive casualty list. After the flamboyance of a playing career as an effervescent forward, the managerial instinct has been assured but cautious. Reminded of the league-championship correlative, he is quick to zero in on the exceptions. “There’s been plenty of teams in the top division that haven’t done it in championship. I’m probably thinking of Derry, who did well at the top for a long time but didn’t manager to get an Ulster championship.”

He could have added Donegal and it’s certain any lessons of the disconnect between that county’s 2007 league success and the following championship have been well preached, as the manager in charge, Brian McIver, is now a Down selector.

Attempts to by-pass the caution are unyielding. Presumably it’s been very useful for team development playing in Division One rather than in the league’s lower reaches? “Yes and no. To be honest, looking at Division Two this year it looks to be a very competitive league. Some of the teams in Division One have been a wee bit off colour due to players being missing. If you take Dublin, Kerry and Cork out of it there wouldn’t be a huge difference between the rest of the teams in Division One and Division Two. I think if Kildare get up to Division One they’ll be able to hold their own; it won’t be like in the (English) Premiership with up-and-down teams.”

Even the impressive progress made is qualified by a reminder Down beat Armagh, managed by friend and former Down captain Paddy O’Rourke, by just a point and had the verdict gone the other way they would now be below their neighbours in the table and in a situation where the loss of absent players would have been more sorely felt. “Your view on injuries is always going to be dictated by results,” he says. “When you’re picking up points with players out injured you’re delighted to take a look around the squad but if you’re losing points you’d have been crying to get your injured back. We’re lucky we’ve picked up enough points to stay in Division One and also blood players so we’ll have a slightly bigger pool this year.”

Down’s decline since winning a second All-Ireland in four years in 1994 (beating Dublin in the final) was at first regarded as natural ebb and flow and then notable in itself before becoming one of the accepted facts of Ulster football, whose new standard bearers Armagh and Tyrone cut a swathe through the last decade.

McCartan points out Down felt they were close to another title in 1996 with a side that lost to Tyrone in the Ulster final and advances the statistic no county won more championship matches in the province during the 1990s.

Down continued to produce at under-age level, winning minor All-Irelands in 1999 and 2005 (beating Mayo in both finals) and lost the under-21 final in 2005. Nonetheless fate hasn’t been kind. The powerful core of the ’99 minors was Liam Doyle, Benny Coulter and Michael Walsh.

Coulter went on to shine even on losing teams and has been one of the great international rules players but Doyle and Walsh have ticked off season after season destroyed by chronic injury.

Both are taking what McCartan calls “baby steps” back towards rehabilitation but it’s too early to say if they’ll get a shot at translating their talents into the county’s biggest challenge at senior level in a decade and a half.

The manager says he’s lucky in that certain things fell into place, such as the return from the AFL of another under-age prodigy Martin Clarke, but he can’t deflect the kudos for the transformation of a player like Danny Hughes, for years a fast-moving if sometimes peripheral forward, into a relentless performer whose work rate hasn’t take the edge of his mobility and who last year won his first All Star as well as a footballer of the year nomination. “The last two games will tell us where we’re at,” says McCartan of tonight and the final fixture away to Kerry. “We think we’re evolving and I certainly believe I’ve a lot of players more comfortable playing against top-quality players.

“Even the opportunity for Down players to get away on All Star trips and rub shoulders with the guys they would have been watching on TV for the last 10 years – let’s face it, apart from Benny Coulter with Ireland teams no Down player would have been seen in those circles – lets them see these are ordinary guys trying to get the best out of themselves. They realise they’re human even though they’ve spent the last 10 years watching them on The Sunday Game.”