JOHNNY McINTOSH: Davy FItzgerald and a golden opportunity

THE appointment of Davy Fitzgerald as Antrim manager is an exciting one – but only if he is utilised properly.

He’s a fantastic coach and manager in my view and he’ll bring a hell of a lot of enthusiasm, but what’s most important of all is that he use his influence across the board, not just at senior level.

His appointment needs to be part of a bigger picture where Antrim start to pour more energy into underage. It’s becoming very obvious to a lot of people that we are really selling our young hurlers short and we’re not getting any sort of success. A particular low point was to lose our u-20 crown to Derry, and that’s not to take away from what was a top class Derry performance.

My hope is that Davy will come in and take a dual approach whereby he’ll not only maintain the good work of Darren Gleeson, but also take an active approach in improving the fortunes of our underage players.

If you cast your mind back to Kevin Ryan’s tenure in charge around a decade ago, the first thing he did when he came in was link up with Jordanstown and manage them for a few years. He also went in and managed the Antrim u-21s with a view to monitoring the talent that was coming through. You might remember he even led us to an All-Ireland semi-final win over Wexford ten years ago, a huge achievement.

He had a holistic approach, keeping a close eye at university players and the u-21s because he knew it would make it easier when the made the transition into senior intercounty hurlers.

I know Davy has his detractors but his enthusiasm alone is admirable and I think we need more people like him around the Ulster Council.

Ulster GAA has a duty of care in my opinion to enlist passionate hurling men, to create a sense of excitement around Ulster hurling again.

People say the right things about promoting hurling and there’s underage blitzes for all of Ulster but, to me, that’s not really promoting hurling. It’s just preserving it.

Yes, it’s important to keep the game going in areas of Ulster where it’s threatening to die out, but you also need to introduce new competitions and create a sense of enthusiasm for the game and, to me, a lot of that comes down to people.

If you take Antrim as an example, we certainly have a lot of talented coaches – probably 50 or 60 of them that I have a lot of time for. I know so many men who were great players who have learnt the game inside out and are really dedicated coaches.

However, the problem is that a lot of them were involved with county teams but became disenfranchised and fed up. Antrim, at the top level, needs to say to these coaches, ‘keep doing your club coaching, that’s important but go and put something into the county as well’.

On top of that we need to get full-time staff into schools. If you look at Tyrone and Derry, they have top class schools competing for Hogan Cups and invariably it means you’ll also have a steady stream of players coming through to the county teams.

We do have some excellent hurling schools in Antrim and the teachers are doing their level best but there’s nowhere near enough help from Antrim at county level and that has a negative knock-on effect.

Going back to Davy’s appointment, obviously there’s been a lot of talk about expenses but it’s completely exaggerated. I’m my club’s chairperson, which means I attend every county meeting and I can tell you 100 per cent from the horse’s mouth that the county expenditure for Davy and his backroom team will be the exact same as it has been for the last three years.

The budget has been set and it has been fixed. Certainly there was talk that Davy was going to run up this massive bill and leave but it allayed people’s fears when they realised the budget is what it is and won’t increase.

That said, the question about pouring more resources into our underage set-ups remains and I hope the county board understand that he’s not just there as a manager.

Antrim will now be subjected to intense scrutiny with such a big name in charge and it might lead more people from down the county to notice how poorly we’re faring at underage level. We’re struggling in tier two in Leinster and it doesn’t get any better as you go down the grades. Hopefully Davy’s appointment marks a change of approach or else we face a bleak future.