I played most of my Galway club football in the 2000s, at a time when players in the full-forward line were not specifically required to do the amount of tracking back that is now second nature for even the laziest of finishers.
So more than once I had the experience of giving the ball away against Corofin, thinking better of following a stray runner from the full-back line and then watching with a sinking feeling as that stray runner became an extra man, who would inevitably make the correct decision on the ball and help his team walk the ball into the net no more than 15 seconds after I’d given the ball away.
My teammates would shout at each other, wonder who was supposed to be picking up the extra man and then heads would slowly turn back up the field in my direction. The verdicts on my pathetic work-rate that reached my ears were abusive...the stuff I couldn’t hear was undoubtedly worse.
Every Corofin team seemed to be wired the same way. Every one of them would make the right decision 95 per cent of the time. To beat them, you had to be nigh-on perfect.
Corofin decimated Dr Crokes and Nemo Rangers in successive All-Ireland club finals in 2018 and 2019 and then ran the gauntlet of Kilcoo and came out the other side for a third All-Ireland in a row. At a time when Dublin’s dominance showed no real signs of ending, when intercounty football was about three-quarters of the way into the hole it’s now in, Corofin’s style of play was a rare shining light.
They played the game with spontaneity, invention and pace. They kicked the damn thing! They were dominant, but they were also almost universally popular. Whatever Corofin were doing, the game needed more of it.
This year they’re coached by a Sligo man teaching in Galway city, Kevin Johnson, who, after Corofin’s win last Sunday against Moycullen in the Galway showpiece, has won his fourth county title in three different counties in the last five years.
He took over from Corofin man Kevin O’Brien, who had been in charge for those three All-Ireland wins. After two unsuccessful years in Galway, maybe Corofin felt an outside voice would be beneficial – because there’s no shortage of coaching ability in the club.
Milltown reached a Galway county semi-final, an exceptional achievement for a club its size, with a Corofin coach. Monivea-Abbeyknockmoy won the intermediate final last Saturday with Mike Farragher in charge, before he came on for Corofin in the senior final 24 hours later.
There were Corofin men in the dugout for Leitir Mór, even one in the opposing dugout last Sunday for Moycullen. Kieran Fitzgerald is managing Garrymore, a couple of miles over the Mayo border.
Joe Canney was with St Brendan’s this summer, before he was drafted into the Mayo senior intercounty set-up – presumably on the recommendation of Stephen Rochford, his erstwhile manager at club level.
In the NFL they call it coaching trees – like the multiple coaches in charge that served their apprenticeship with Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. They learned from Belichick, they take those lessons into their new jobs, their assistants learn from them in turn...and the philosophy sets off on its own journey.
Let’s call these Corofin men part of the Morris coaching tree (after Frank and latterly his son David, who did so much to instil the building blocks of Corofin’s success) and consider what they could do for football at a time when it’s in dire need of new ways of thinking.
It’s an interesting adjunct to the outside manager/outside coach debate. For many people that particular conversation boils down to money. Everyone managing a club that isn’t their own is getting paid and every coach managing a club that isn’t their own is only doing it for the money.
This is a widely-held presumption and there are plenty of managers who look on it as a handy earner. The GAA (and by that I mean the organisation, the people who work in clubs, county boards – basically everyone) has decided that payment of managers is not something they want to tackle. So we might as well leave that to one side.
But the fact remains that there is another cohort for whom coaching itself is a vocation. We can’t all play forever and for many people, training teams is the next best thing. I don’t think we can say that anything close to 100 per cent of people get involved in coaching because they fancy a few extra quid.
In recent weeks, sparked by Mickey Harte’s appointment as Derry manager, Joe Brolly has reiterated the idea that the ‘parish rule’ should count for managers and coaches, as well as players. In one sense, it is a laudable position. But the Galway football championship, and football generally, would be a lot worse off if the Corofin football bible stayed at home.
The fact that they have an outside manager themselves this year – and a hugely talented one – is a sign of the openness to change that the best organisations have. It’s called cross-pollination. Corofin had the freshest ideas in football for a spell, and judging by last Sunday, we might be taking our pencils out, pulling up a chair and learning from them again in the near future.
