Premier League and inter-county players: similar but different

By Niall McCoy

FROM a Premier League match against Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’ to big days at Croke Park, Down physio Francis Quinn has been involved with high-end sport in a number of different disciplines.

The Hilltown man offers an interesting insight into the differences – or lack of – between professional soccer players and GAA players.

Quinn was the Sunderland physio under Peter Reid, Howard Wilkinson and Mick McCarthy while Down managers like Paddy O’Rourke, Ross Carr and Paddy Tally have availed of his services, as have Antrim on a number of occasions.

He has shared dressing rooms with Niall Quinn and Benny Coulter, nodded hello to Arsene Wenger and Kieran McGeeney – but the differences between professional soccer and inter-county players? Minimal (apart from 100 grand a week, of course).

“In reality there is not a lot of difference,” said Quinn.

“Professional players are down to earth people. You’re in among them and even though they’re earning huge amounts of money, a lot of the time they crave a bit of normality.

“They’re in a bubble and they can’t do normal things. If they go and fill up their car with diesel they could be signing autographs or people could be throwing eggs at them depending on how they played the previous Saturday.

“Sunderland were in the Premiership and also the Championship in my time. They would have played League Cup football against teams from lower down the divisions.

“I watched those games and some of those boys they played against were actually quite average in what they do but were still getting around £3,000 a week.

“If you were a central defender who could head the ball, knew how to play the offside rule and kept yourself right you were going to get a place in a club in the second or third tier in English football.

“I always thought about the number of Gaelic players with that high level of fitness that could do that job if they got the break.

“People always asked me about the pre-season at soccer and that it must be very difficult, but the fact is that the Gaelic boys have done harder training in their day.

“The difference in the soccer is that it’s consistent. From academy level, when players come in at 16, the aim in those first three or four months is to get them onto a level where they train every day without picking up any injuries. Can you train every day and recover quickly enough to do the same the next day.

“Gaelic managers will do that but the training goes up and down too much, you have the spikes. In soccer it’s a steady accumulation all year.

“Mickey Gray was a player I worked with and when Sunderland dropped to the Championship he went on loan to Celtic with Martin O’Neill.

“He was away for three months, came down the road, went straight into the manager’s office and asked for three more months.

“I said to him was it not a bit of a nuisance with the driving to Glasgow, but he said it was easy.

“He said that with O’Neill you’d train for 45 minutes a day and O’Neill was sitting in the office for most of it. He’d come out on a Friday, run through the set pieces and line out the team.

“It was just a kick-about but that was the way they had to have it managed. It was about simply maintaining that fitness throughout rather than moving it up and down.”

Players in both sports may have been similar, but Quinn has noticed a bigger difference between managers – particularly the reaction when you tell them that a player is not going to be fit for a big game.

In soccer, the advice was generally accepted without too much fuss. Gaelic managers would find the news harder to digest.

“The big difference between professional sport and Gaelic was that there was less bargaining,” Quinn continued.

“Over with Sunderland when we deemed a player not to be fit he wouldn’t play. In Gaelic, managers would maybe try and push it a bit and would try and talk you around on it.

“You wonder how many players go through a season and when they come to their big game they’re not 100 percent fit.

“There’s no point grilling them with all the best training in the world if ultimately there is something holding them back and you’re only going to get 80 percent.”

That’s not to say that professional managers respect the science all the time.

“I remember one day we had a player who was injured. We said he was ruled out but the manager said he wanted him to play.

“We told him we didn’t think he was fit but we’d do the fitness test to see.

“The manager said that he’d do the fitness test. We asked him how he’d know and he said ‘I’ll look into his eyes and then I’ll know.’

“Ultimately the player went on, kicked two balls and was off after 10 minutes.

“So it does differ a wee bit from manager to manager but ultimately in the professional games those type of risks wouldn’t be taken.”

Quinn also explained just how much of a difference resources can make when dealing with the treatment of professional and amateur players.

“On standby at Sunderland, up in the VIP seats, we would have had a dentist, an orthopedic surgeon, there would have been a podiatrist on standby too.

“These players didn’t clip their own toenails. The podiatrist came in twice a week and was doing routine toenail clipping. That was what was needed, it was the most important part of a footballer’s body.

“We had a player who went over on his ankle in the warm-up and there was a radiologist on standby and we told him we needed an MRI.

“He made the phone call through to Sunderland General, the club driver took the player from the dressing room. He had his MRI and by half-time the player was back down with the MRI film in his hand. We gave the radiologist the nod to come into the dressing room and he read it and we had the scan and diagnosis within an hour.”

It was another hospital trip that Quinn considers to be one of the luckiest days in his professional career.

In August 2008 Wexford eased past Down in an All-Ireland Qualifier at Croke Park. But the result seemed to matter little as midfielder Ambrose Rogers spent a day in intensive care and had his spleen removed after a collision on the pitch.

“If it had happened somewhere else – on the bus back from Clones or somewhere – you mightn’t just have been as quick to get it seen to,” Rogers said – and Quinn emphatically agrees.

“One of the luckiest things for me was that 2008 Qualifier against Wexford at Croke Park. I will never be as lucky in my life again.

“Ambrose was shooting into the Hill and as he opened up his body a defender came in and caught him with a shoulder.

“Ambrose was totally open to it and he went down. I ran out to him, he was on his hands and knees catching his breath. He was winded.

“He gathered his breath and he said he wasn’t too bad and he sprung up onto his feet. I asked again was he okay and he said ‘yeah, fine’ and he finished out the last five minutes or so.

“He came into dressing room after and said that he had a pain in his lower abdomen area. We lay him down and had a wee look and then told him to take a pee and keep an eye on it to see if there was any blood in it.

“He came back and said he couldn’t pee and when he tried to he was in agony.

“Eddie Harney, the Down doctor, and I were there and Eddie had a feel about and within a short space of time we realised something wasn’t right.

“Lucky enough we were in Dublin, got an ambulance and were straight over to the Mater Hospital.

“When he went in Gerry McEntee (two-time All-Ireland winner with Meath) just happened to be on duty and he saw the name and knew there was a game at Croke Park that day.

“He was coming towards the end of the shift but he stuck his head in the door and then stayed on and took on the case and did Ambrose’s surgery.

“They tried to repair the spleen but it didn’t repair fully. During the night it was bleeding more and they had to go back into an emergency situation and take it all out.

“My point is if that game had been away in the Midlands or nowhere near a major hospital, if the ambulance had been delayed or there wasn’t someone with the skill of Gerry McEntee then it could have been a very difficult situation.

“Worse still, if that injury had happened in the first five minutes of the game and played on then he would have pumped a huge volume of blood around his body and could have collapsed on the field.”

Luck has played a part in Quinn’s career, but expertise has too. Like the players he deals with, he didn’t get to work with top sporting teams without being very good.

Concentration is the key word, he believes. Alex Ferguson may have been walking along the touchline in front of him or Clonduff may have rattled the net against rivals Kilcoo, but he has to block all that emotion out in order to be there for the players.

“Full concentration is needed no matter what is going on.

“If you can see the mechanism of injury it helps your diagnosis.

“You have different players who react differently to pain. If you’re concentrating you can see if there was a high level of contact and know if you’re in an iffy situation.

“You may be speaking to the top managers in the corridors before a match and they would have nodded and said hello, but when the game is on you have to be fully focused.

“When Down score a goal you’re off the bench celebrating but you’re very quickly back down to get watching again.

“You have to tune in. There will be a reflex reaction whenever something happens but you can’t let it distract you.”

During the early part of the lockdown, Quinn’s work with The Physio Group had to ease up. It’s getting back to normal now but in those early weeks he had a bit more spare time on his hands than he usually did.

He decided to be proactive and created a poster to assist players and trainers in their preparations for the return to action in a few weeks’ time.

The information was taken from GPS data from several academic sources and aims to provide some key information in an easily digested format.

For example, the information allows the trainer to plan how much of the session should contain runs at top speed versus three-quarter pace. It shows how many top speed runs on average are made per game.

If the information is applied appropriately it means training can be designed to match the specific running demands of a game.

“I have an interest because I think you need to protect the players.

“You have a duty of care to say to people that maybe it doesn’t always have to be the hard slog. Does every training session have to end with people vomiting?

“It’s back to soccer, and they learned this through experience, and managers knowing that their players will be fit if they do this amount of exercise.

“I already spoke about the GAA spikes and you’re asking are they fit or not.

“Measurements are a great thing. Jim McCorry was a great man for that when he was managing Clonduff, he would have regularly measured where his players were at.

“I think managers should do that more often mid-season and I just hope that graphs like this can help in the training.”

n.mccoy@gaeliclife.com