GAELIC GAMES: TOM HUMPHRIESon the Kildare boss who has brought to the job the same qualities and standards that marked out his playing days

IN CROKE Park last week the managers were a sideshow. Conor Counihan versus Pat Gilroy was an engagement which carried no frisson or fascination.

Sometimes though the sidelines offer the best theatre. Tomorrow, two of the game’s brightest and most interesting graduates prowl beneath the Hogan’s shadow. Kieran McGeeney and James McCartan. Theatre in the round.

McCartan was born for days like tomorrow. In his pomp as a player he was one of those northern firecrackers whom commentators like to describe

as “the wee man for the big occasion.” McGeeney constructed himself though and made a habit of dragging teams up steep hills by force of his magnetic will.

Tomorrow, a Kildare side who advertised themselves as flatlined no hopers the first time he took them to Croke Park compete for a place in an All-Ireland final. If they get to the promised land McGeeney will praise their fortitude and hunger. If they don’t he will take the blame.

“A manager can lose a game,” he has said, “but he can never win it”.

He’s like that, but nobody who has watched him will doubt that this is a team which has been given everything its manager has to give.

A few years ago Kieran McGeeney agreed to appear at a question-and-answer session in DCU. The event was a fundraiser for a northside GAA club, not his own, and he refused vehemently and adamantly to take any money for his afternoon of work.

There was one snag.

On the following afternoon Armagh were playing their first league game of the year, an excursion which required an overnight stay. The players were gathering at around tea-time on Saturday and travelling by bus to their hotel in the west of Ireland.

The league? Armagh’s most celebrated footballer? Not a problem surely. He could drive or be driven west after the questions and answers and meet his team at the hotel. Couldn’t he? Without being difficult McGeeney declined. He had to travel from A to B with his team. He couldn’t be seen to be different. He wouldn’t be seen to be different. He had no wish to be different.

In the end, a helicopter was procured and McGeeney was quietly dropped off near the liaison point. From each player the same. Even for a league game.

Funny thing about Kieran McGeeney the manager, is that he is still the same. He can’t play the goodfellas game, the big pretend game that is. He can’t fake sincerity. Take a canter around the jumps. Go through the motions. Can’t. Won’t. The same hostility to compromise informs his approach to a national league game as it does to yucking it up with the fourth estate.

Take the last day that Kildare played in Croke Park. McGeeney came into the media room and sat down on the edge of the table that he was supposed to be sitting behind.

The media swarmed around and regretted instantly that McGeeney’s lopsided grin couldn’t be conveyed to readers by means of typeface or GeezerCam.

He spoke about Down’s confidence and how they would come to tomorrow’s semi-final carrying that quality like a weapon. He said that he hoped Kildare could just give it a lash. Lots of managers take that corny tack on things and they do it well.

McGeeney, though, delivered the lines with a quiet, almost embarrassed, grin as if unable to believe that he was actually saying the words at all.

That was a good day. Kildare had just dismantled Meath and had given the most complete performance of the quarter-finals weekend. On bad days McGeeney doesn’t talk at all. No point coming to the press room and smiling on all who smile and pretending that it doesn’t matter.

In that sense he is a misfit in the modern game.

In his 18 years with Armagh he was always straight up about the lengths he went to in order to extract as much from himself as was possible.

The integrity of his commitment to training, to the team ethic, to excellence was never wantonly advertised, but it was never hidden either. In a GAA environment where teams had traditionally played down whatever work they did, each discussion of McGeeney’s commitment to the game raised the stakes for him again.

In the end with Armagh there were those who couldn’t tell whether McGeeney and his colleagues weren’t opening up a new frontier of professionalism within the game. In fact, they were pushing the envelope of amateurism (in the best sense).

Very little about McGeeney is as the populace imagine it to be. His commitment to his parish team in Mullaghbawn was questioned when he moved after studying engineering in Queen’s down to Dublin and joined Na Fianna and there were dark and unpleasant whispers about brown envelopes.

In fact, McGeeney had originally intended joining Na Fianna’s near neighbours St Vincent’s and had asked only football questions when thinking about a move to Marino.

Money was not an issue.

During a lull in proceedings when he had gone back to Belfast to conclude his studies, McGeeney was cornered by Dessie Farrell one night in CopperFace Jacks, the Dublin nightclub which could challenge for an All-Ireland if all its denizens turned out.

Des Mackin was already playing for Na Fianna. Farrell approached McGeeney, knowing that he knew whom he was, but unable to think of the player’s name until he stood right in front of him.

The conversation which followed revealed a shared obsessiveness with football and its possibilities.

McGeeney was smitten.

He called St Vincent’s with sincere apologies and went on to initiate a revolution in the way things were done on Mobhi Road.

His first night at training has an almost mythical quality to it. Na Fianna, a big friendly club with an enduring reputation for softness, were working on shoulder to shoulder contact.

A player would make a zig-zag through a line of braced bodies delivering a shoulder to each. McGeeney hopped and fidgeted as he watched a few players run through and then skipped to the front of the queue.

“Lads, this is how you do it.”

He jagged through like a wrecking ball, knocking over each burly tackler. Things would never be the same again. A while later Na Fianna has a guest trainer down from Monaghan for a session out in Castleknock.

The trainer was brandishing a tackle shield and invited all comers to come at him. McGeeney went at him, knocked him over and went over him. Na Fianna went on to win three back-to- back Dublin titles and to reach an All-Ireland final.

The man who was called a mercenary by the malicious whisperers around the Dublin club scene is still a member of the Mobhi Road club 12 years later.

A good club member too.

And when he went to Kildare?

Another mismatch surely. He could have got a serious county! You know the routine. It was a multiple-choice question, he was either gone for the money, or he was gone to give them a year so he could slip into the Armagh job as soon as a gap opened.

He couldn’t be sincere could he? About Kildare!

And on that day in early May two years ago we thought we had our answer. His Division One Kildare side were beaten comfortably by Mick O’Dwyer’s Division Four Wicklow side in the opening round of the Leinster football championship.

McGeeney wouldn’t be long for the Lilywhite world.

Eight of the team which shared that humiliation with McGeeney are selected to play in tomorrow’s All Ireland semi-final. In the aftermath of that defeat, when he was depicted with unseemly satisfaction in some quarters as a bumbling tyro jousting uselessly against the old master, McGeeney didn’t opt for the bolthole.

It would have suited a lot of people had he cut and run then.

Instead, he immersed himself further in a Kildare team that people held little hope for. He gave them a vote of confidence by deepening his commitment. And he rethought his strategy. Kildare were never going to be Armagh.

Their components and their elements and their tradition was different. And, anyway, that time was gone.

McGeeney’s Kildare, at their best, play an intelligent high- tempo game designed to get their shooters on the ball and to take the ball out of defence as safely and as quickly as possible.

It could be said that they are a more evolved version of Pat Gilroy’s nascent Dublin team, but that would be unfair to McGeeney in that, at the start of the summer, Kildare looked nothing if not worse than Dublin.

They have learned as quickly as the summer has unfolded.

What we will learn tomorrow is how McGeeney has equipped them for handling expectation. How they cope against an outfit with the native confidence of Down and perhaps how they emerge from the last five minutes of a white-hot battle.

McGeeney has spoken since of how as a player a bad defeat can be purged from your system by obsessive hard work,

but management is different. It is thought and cerebration and screwing your face up and clenching your fists that doesn’t deliver either in pure form.

Management is a learning curve. He just continued his journey. Confronted every doubt he had about himself and knocked it down.

It is odd and it is mete that it is Down who stand between McGeeney and a first All-Ireland final as manager. He has spoken of student days in Queen’s and drinking in the Bot listening to the confident burblings of the sons and scions of Mourne as they talked about their resurgence in the early 1990s.

No northern rivalry sizzles quite like that between Down and Armagh and McGeeney pledged that his sacred saffron would not always just make up the numbers.

Armagh would achieve its own revolution.

When McGeeney sat down with Dessie Farrell to talk about football that night in the mid-1990s their talk turned to Down and to Conor Deegan in particular.

The great Down full back had on the night after Down won the 1991 All-Ireland been complimented by a Kerryman that he reminded him of the great John O’Keeffe.

In genuine bafflement, Deegan had said thank you very much and who is John O’Keeffe?

Easy to see why from across the county line Down seemed as nouveau riche and as vulgar as the Beverly Hillbillies.

Anyway, Farrell and McGeeney spoke and Deegan and the Kilmacud team became one of the challenges which attracted McGeeney to Na Fianna.

Now his old friend James McCartan treads the line in Croke Park tomorrow.

In shorthand, you could paint it as GAA royalty versus one of the games perpetual outsiders, but McGeeney isn’t translatable into shorthand.

That’s what makes him compulsive viewing.