Geographically, Declan Darcy has arrived at the place where he began. The Sandymount Gaelic footballer, who went to school in Newpark in Blackrock and ended up playing football for Leitrim and Dublin, landed at the RDS.
More recently a selector under Dublin’s Jim Gavin during the county’s most dominant era in their history of Gaelic games, when they won five All Ireland titles between 2013 and 2019, Darcy has been drafted in as a performance coach to the four-time European champions.
In Leinster the thinking of introducing coaches with a history in other sports is not new, part of the theory being they can, and do, positively add to the cultural DNA.
Darcy begins his tenure after that of Gary Keegan, who was considered the architect of Irish amateur boxing’s high-performance program and also worked with the Cork hurlers as well as Leinster.
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It has been a growing trend in recent years to borrow expertise, not just because of the importation of new ideas but also a belief that change is good in a year-to-year rugby schedule that, despite best efforts, can be in danger of falling into a settled routine and much too familiar to the players.
Ulster did it when last year, they brought in Mikely Kiely, strength & conditioning coach with the successful Limerick hurling team that won All-Ireland championships in 2020 and 2021.
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Kiely has since moved on taking up a contract with Connacht, where over the summer he was appointed head of the province’s athletic performance.
Bernard Dunne, the former WBA super bantamweight champion, worked with Davy Fitzgerald and the Waterford hurlers. In Gaelic football he was with Dublin alongside Darcy and Gavin and this year was part of the Galway football team.
“You can’t go stale, you can’t be the same because players need to be challenged in different ways, coaches need to be challenged in different ways as well,” says Cullen.
“We’ve coaches who have come into the group as well, which is hopefully a good thing because it’s fresh voices and then at the start it’s right, are we all on the same page? And that’s the challenge because everyone’s throwing new ideas in.”
Darcy is a familiar face in Leinster, working with the club at various points throughout last season before being appointed as part of the backroom team. While it is seen as a savvy appointment, Darcy’s route into Gaelic football was far from straightforward and he ended up playing for two county teams, Leitrim and then Dublin.
His relationship with Gavin began as a player with Dublin but, as Darcy described in an interview with The Sunday Tribune in 2011, his career began with a piece of subterfuge.
Although living close to the RDS, as a teenager he used his father’s home address in Leitrim and began playing football with local club side Aughawillian. Both parents came from the county.
He soon found himself on the Leitrim team, having abandoned hockey which he played to a high level at school. He recalls his first inter county match for Leitrim.
“I made my debut against Fermanagh wearing some ridiculous thing on my nose, having broken it just beforehand in a hockey match,” said Darcy.
His early years with Leitrim also coincided with a significant upturn in the county’s fortunes and the arrival of John O’Mahony as manager in the 1994 season.
One of the iconic images of the year was Darcy, as captain of the Connacht champions, holding the Nestor Cup with Tom Gannon, who captained Leitrim to their only previous Connacht title in 1927.
But straight-talking Darcy laid it out at the time when he moved from Leitrim to Dublin, which was far from universally celebrated across the provinces.
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“I wanted to win an All-Ireland, not a popularity contest,” he said. “Part of me had always been curious about whether I would have been good enough to win my place on the Dublin side, particularly when they won the All-Ireland in 1995.”
At the time of the move, he remembers meeting Dublin player, Paul Bealin. “I’ll give you balls for doing it alone,” said Bealin, understanding the risks and objections that accompanied his new teammate.
The All-Ireland with Dublin never materialised for a number of reasons. But the connections remained close through coaching the underage and senior teams. Last season, with Leinster coming desperately close but missing out on winning, the realisation is that some of the small pieces needed to get them over the line were missing.
Darcy arrives with other new backroom faces. Both Sean O’Brien and Andrew Goodman have returned to the club as contact skills coach and assistant coach respectively with Eoghan Hickey joining as senior performance nutritionist.
“I’ve known Declan for a few years now and have followed his coaching journey closely,” said Cullen this week. “He has a wealth of experience working with some hugely successful teams [and] will add hugely to our group in terms of helping develop us all as individuals.”
As Churchill once said: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” There is change in several different departments in Leinster. Darcy brings a winning history and maybe some jewels from Gavin’s clandestine operations for the beginning of a season where Leinster are also back at where they began.
