Michael McShane was recently appointed as the Antrim senior hurling manager and it getting his plans together for the new role. He spoke with Michael McMullan….

BALLYCASTLE man Michael McShane was offered the Antrim senior manager position in 2018 but felt he wasn’t ready for the role.

He continued on his wildly successful journey with Sleacht Néill and gained experience at county level with Tyrone before taking up the post with Antrim U20s.

Then after Davy Fitzgerald stepped down after two seasons, McShane was recently appointed as the man to steer the Saffrons’ senior hurling fortunes. We caught up with Michael for a chat about the road ahead.

Michael McMullan: Congratulations on the role. What does settling in look like?

Michael McShane: I was appointed on a Thursday night and I had a family holiday booked from months ago to go away on Friday. I’m just back there on Monday night. Having been appointed, I was able to go away and spend a bit of time with family and just do a bit of thinking and planning in my head.

It’s all starting off now, we’ve lots of meetings set up and it’s about planning for the year ahead. We obviously won’t have any contact or meetings with players or anything until probably the back end of October when the club season comes to an end. It’s about planning and making sure that when we get to that time of the year that we can hit the ground running and move things forward.

M McM: Do you have a management team finalised?

M McS: I just need to finalise it. Having been away, I haven’t had a chance to sit down with the people and sort things. That’ll all be sorted in the next few days.

M McM: In terms of playing personnel, are you just going around the club championship games to pick a squad?

M McS: Absolutely, but I would hope to speak with some of the more senior players over the next few weeks, just to get a general chat about where they see things at the moment. They’ve seen things happening over the last couple of years – they’ve been inside that senior bubble so it’d be good to really get a feel for it.

With regards to players, the club championships are up and running – the Intermediate Championship started the weekend past. It’s about seeing as many games as I possibly can across senior, intermediate and junior. Obviously, I know the vast majority of players in Antrim including those who have been involved in the Antrim panels over the last number of years.

Firstly, we need to get players who want to play for Antrim. We need players who want to be there, we need players who are playing at the top of their game. We will be looking to see if we can unearth any rough diamonds that we can work with. Then we’ll pull the panel together over the next couple of months.

M McM: You’re from Ballycastle, you’ve been at loads of games in the county. You’ve been with the U20s and even with Sleacht Néill, you’d have looked deeply at the Antrim clubs. You have a good handle on things so watching this club championship freshens it up.

M McS: I would like to say I know the Antrim club scene very, very well. Irrespective of who I’ve been managing or where I’ve been managing, when the Antrim championship is on, I’ll be going along to as many games as I possibly can because of my love of hurling. You get to know the players and I see a lot of league games involving my own club against the other clubs.

I suppose the real thing is that the experience I’ve gained over the last two years managing the U20s has given me a real insight to what we have in terms of talent in the county coming through. That’s what we’re going to try and build on over the next few years.

I’ve been very excited and that was one of the reasons why I was so keen to be appointed – that I’ve seen the talent that we have. I think if it’s managed properly and that they’re looked after and we get to work into the players that they need, that we have an exciting few years ahead of us in Antrim.

What I found with U20s was we’ve got a lot of talented players. We’ve got a lot of players who have got the right mentality and they’ve got the right dedication and commitment. They really bought into everything we were trying to do in the U20s.

We had success but maybe not as much as we wanted to. The U20 grade is a breeding ground for senior. That was the way I looked at my role – my job was to develop and produce players for the senior management and the senior team.

I know that the players I’ve seen over the last two years, I know that the U20 team that’s coming in 2027 and 2028 are producing real, real top players. If we can get the work into them through those development years and bring them into the senior and keep developing them, by the time they’re 22, 23, 24 we know we should have a very, very strong team.

M McM: You said you were excited about managing Antrim. Whenever you were getting involved in coaching, was it something you felt you would love to do someday?

M McS: When I was setting out in management back in 2007 or 2008, I probably wasn’t thinking of being an Antrim senior hurling manager.

If you’re involved in management, the greatest honour you can have is to manage your own county senior team. As the years passed, it probably became something that I thought a wee bit more about.

I was actually offered the job in 2018. After a lot of soul searching and a lot of hard conversations with people who I trusted, I made the decision not to take the job. I didn’t feel that I was ready to be Antrim senior hurling manager. I felt that I had a whole lot more learning to do, a whole lot more experience to gain

I really did hope, and I said that at the time, that the opportunity would come around again and that when that opportunity would come around, that I would be ready for it.

I feel that that’s now the case. I’ve had great experience being able to continue with Sleacht Néill at that time. We won two more Ulster titles and involved in some fabulous club games, which were real learning curves for me.

I got involved in intercounty with Tyrone at a lower level than Antrim were, but it gave me an insight just to the intercounty scene.

As the years passed by, it became sort of something that I hoped I would get the opportunity to do and thankfully that chance has come along.

M McM: You said your initial plans are finalising your management and looking at players. Have you thought of what success will look like for your time with Antrim?

M McS: My first thought is that success will be getting the best 30 players in Antrim playing for Antrim. That’s what we have to do. I think that’s what any intercounty manager wants to do. They want to get the best players within their county playing for their county.

That probably hasn’t been happening over the last couple of years anyway. My job is to try and get the 30 best players in Antrim playing for Antrim. Those 30 players have to want to play for Antrim. They have to be coming with a real drive and a real determination to be the best version of themselves.

Then we can try and build from that. I’m not talking about what we’re going to do in terms of winning games or winning competitions. That will come further down the line.

There has maybe a wee bit of a general malaise about the Antrim team because results haven’t been what we wanted them to be over the last couple of years. We want to try and get the enthusiasm back. We want to, as I said, try and get the best players out playing for us, everybody buying in and rolling in behind us.  We want to get a team on the pitch that the supporters can get behind.

M McM: You mentioned the supporters. I know it is a different sport but that was something Andy Moran wanted to bring to Mayo, giving the supporters something to get behind. Is that the point you are making?

M McS: You’re using an example that’s a level way above where we’re at at the moment. People will come out and support the team who are giving their all. We need to be winning matches of course because when you’re losing games, there becomes a sort of a malaise about around the county and around the county team. That was what I sensed over the last couple of years.

If we can get the best players out and we get them working hard. There are a lot of fabulous hurling people around Antrim, people who are just wanting Antrim to be the best version of themselves so that they can get behind them.

We want to get kids looking up to the senior players. I see young kids in Antrim going about with jerseys on that belong to other counties with the names of other players on the back.

I understand why that happens but I want our county players to be the kids in Antrim’s heroes. I want them to look up to the lads that we have on our team and I want them to look at them and say that’s who I want to be. We want to try and build that sort of mentality around the team and around the county.

M McM: More generally, do you have an opinion on how Willie Maher in his role as Head of Hurling can help develop hurling in the province?

M McS: There’s lots of work we’re trying to do in Antrim to improve things for hurling within our own county. We’ve a lot of really good people working on that.

I think every county needs those type of people driving it. We don’t have this problem in Antrim. My experience is that you need the county boards to back hurling. That doesn’t happen in a lot of counties, particularly in Ulster.

You need the county boards to give breathing space for hurling whether it be one day or night a week where only hurling fixtures are played. In a lot of counties there’s dual players and dual clubs, hurling kind of gets smothered a bit in that way.

For it to develop I think it needs to be given the room and the space to flourish and develop. That would mean that a lot of work needs to be done in schools as well.

Every county has to look after themselves. There are good hurling people in every county, that’s one thing I’ve found out. In some counties there are more numbers than others, but anybody who’s trying to develop hurling in any county in Ireland should be given every resource and every opportunity to do that.

M McM: Thanks for your time. You have your holiday over so I can guess that the next few weeks and months are going to be busy.

M McS: That’s it, the work begins now. There’s a lot of what you would call pre-season planning to be done. There are just a lot of people I need to talk with. I had a good holiday with the family; it was great to get that time but now it’s just full steam ahead.