Something stirring in Roscommon

TOMORROW EVENING Roscommon footballers, a first provincial championship victory in five years over anyone bar London or New York under their belt (they beat Leitrim by four points on May 31st), will head for Castlebar where they haven’t beaten Mayo for 23 years.

They will travel as outsiders but the mood in the county is upbeat. Regardless of how this year progresses, the belief is the future is promising. In his first year manager Fergal O’Donnell has steadied what had become an unhappy ship after a traumatic season, featuring the resignation of John Maughan and the caretaker successions of Paul Earley and Michael Ryan.

O’Donnell is now working with many of the players he managed three years ago to the county’s first All-Ireland minor title since 1951. With just under 59,000 people at the last census, Roscommon doesn’t have the population profile associated with successful counties in the modern game.

The most recent Connacht title – and the only one in 18 years – came in 2001 when Galway man John Tobin, now the Connacht Council’s games development manager, was in charge. He says anything the county has achieved has to be considered impressive.

“Roscommon would have no second-level school in the A division. In fact there are very few secondary schools in the county – six voluntary and two vocational. A lot of these counties are really punching above their weight.

“I realised when I was involved there that they’re very passionate about football . . . It is a football county. Hurling is only played in a very small pocket, there’s little soccer and no rugby – beyond Buccaneers which draws from the whole of the midlands.

“Football is the main game; there’s a huge emphasis on it. Look at the Roscommon papers and the volume of coverage it gets.

“They always seem to have players and anyone who has played them will tell you the same thing; they’re generally awful hard to beat, tenacious and tight – a completely different type of footballer to Mayo.”

Roscommon won back-to-back All-Irelands in 1943-44 and have reached another couple of finals since then. But life is now harder for a county with a small population fighting to break through in a championship structure that’s now far more competitive since the advent of the qualifier system.

Tobin says the development structures have improved this decade and that initiative underpinned the breakthrough at minor level. . .

“I was very interested when they came through because when I was manager the county chair Stephen Banaghan started the development squads and got some very good people involved, Eamonn McManus and Tony McManus, and put in place a great structure. The 2006 minors came through that,” added Tobin.

“Roscommon wouldn’t have had the strength in depth and that can be good and bad. In bigger counties many talented minors just never get a chance at senior but the downside is that bringing very young players in too quickly is a risk. There’s a big difference between a fella in his mid-20s with a serious job and all his travelling around the world behind him and someone in his early 20s, who’s going to find the demands of the modern game very difficult at that age.”

Bigger, more successful counties don’t have to hothouse their underage talent with the same urgency. The pressure of trying to derive maximum yield from a team of All-Ireland minor champions is daunting enough but Tobin says there are additional stresses.

“The ability to handle success is also an issue in counties like Roscommon because with success comes the one thing that Irish teams in general can’t handle and that’s expectation. It’s why I have an interest in training the mind and the cognitive aspect of preparation. It’s something that needs to be addressed.”