Ladies Triumphant, Shield Progressing

There were two other stories to catch up on from the final weekend in Maastricht two weekends ago.

The first is our Ladies. They were going for their own ‘drive for five’ this year.

The structure of the ladies competitions changed this year, going from six pan-euro rounds to mirror the lads’ structure. The early part of the season was regionalised and the Championship would be played out over three Pan-Euro rounds.

It didn’t really work for Benelux with only Holland and themselves competing in the region. As a result the early part of the season was a bit disjointed and it was also reflected in their training, with attendance dipping.

What they did learn in the first few months was that Holland were becoming a force to be reckoned with. If that needed any confirmation it came in Copenhagen when the girls had to fight tooth and nail for victory. A late Aisling Fenton point won it on the day.

Fortunes were reversed in Vienna when Holland turned them over by a point.

This set-up a winner takes all final weekend in Maastricht. Whilst always appearing in control of the final, the girls couldn’t pull away as Holland burst a gut to dethrone the champions. However, with Ciara and Caragh fairly unmarkable up front, they were not to be denied. Only a point or two separated them in the end.

This was by far the girls’ best win to date as they really had to earn each final win. They also had to play chunks of the season without regulars such as Caragh, Sinead and Ciara.

The quality of the final was the highest I’ve seen in the five years they’ve been in action so that really must make it the sweetest of them all. Well done on their success.

While all that was going on, the Shield team was battling away on another one of Maastricht’s magnificent pitches.

Wins against Amsterdam B, Clermont and Rennes meant they topped a group despite a loss to Dusseldorf. That’s no mean feat and shouldn’t be underestimated.

I’ve said it a million times but to be able to compete as a second team against other club’s first teams is a fantastic achievement in its own right. All those teams will have a sprinkling of players who would grace any side, Shield or Championship.

However, the pick of the Shield is always in danger of a call-up to the Championship panel and that proved the case before this tournament.

Pearce is probably their main man but with a mini injury crisis in the Championship panel, we had no choice but to call him up.

Johnny and Conor Mull have done a fantastic job keeping the lads on the go and topping the group was a good reward. They fell short against a strong Liffre outfit in the quarter final but there was no shame in that.

It’s a big challenge to get a steady commitment out of the lads. A lot play for pure recreation but a lot do everything in their powers to win. It’s a hard balance to strike. This year’s panel definitely has a couple of notches to go up and with a greater amount of application, they will close the gap.

In 2013, the Shield should be looking towards success in Benelux as their priority. A good run there would give a massive confidence boost heading for the Pan-Euros.

With the winter upon us, there’s plenty of time to be chewing on that.

Why was this year different?

1 - Different voices

I knew early in the year that I was likely to be away for 2013. I wanted to enjoy the year and I needed to start planning for when I was gone. That meant getting more guys on board and comfortable with different jobs.

Early in the year, Diarmuid Laffan planned and took a lot of the preseason running.

From May onwards, when Ross got injured, he came on board to help run the sessions. This was probably the single biggest help to me.

Cormac Kirwan, an Irish Army man with a serious pedigree came in to help with the training during the summer. He had a big influence, especially in terms of showing lads what the expectation at training should be in terms of intensity.

Timmy, Mull and Johnny P started to do a lot of Collie B’s (who was also planning to step down) donkey work.

The lads didn’t know we were going to be leaving/stepping down until September but everything we were doing before that had an eye on next year.

It was also about getting them to take ownership of the whole thing. With ownership comes responsibility and with that comes greater care for something. It was bound to be worth something.

On tournament days, mainly towards the end of the year, myself, Ross and Timmy would agree who would talk when, so we could keep things fresh. We also used Laffan a lot.

Different voices, different impacts.

Maybe in summary, it was simpler than that. Maybe it was just that I chilled out a bit, listened more, delegated more and trusted more.

2 - Change of tact

We went from defend, survive, consolidate to a more risky plan of taking on lads man to man and trusting each other to do our jobs.

We went from a plan that gave lads plenty of places to hide. We used get numbers behind the ball and you were rarely in danger of getting skinned as someone was always close by to support. We were going to win shag all like that. There was a limited attacking element to that plan. It wasn't easy for lads to give it up though. They felt comfortable in that system and getting them out of their comfort zone was tough.

We had to make the change though and it was most apparent in Copenhagen. The players couldn't play to the system. It just didn't suit.

There was no great revolution. We simply told guys they needed to man up and be prepared to win the one on one duels on their own. The best example was against Guernsey in the Vienna final. Keary and Crusher were isolated in the full back line, with huge spaces in front of them. They weren't going to get any help and just had to get on with it.

For two months, we geared every single exercise at training towards man-to-man marking. It wasn't easy or comfortable but it was physical and intense. It was repetitive but we intentionally didn’t bring much variation to things.

In the end, if you don't rehearse, you won't perform. We rehearsed to death.

3 - Detailed preparation

For the last two tournaments we distributed a two page document to the players the week of the tournament.

The first laid out our tactics. This was plain and simple. There was one plan with a few minor tweaks to cater for certain situations. There was no plan B and we were up front about that. We had rehearsed one way how to play and to flip it on the day wasn't going to be possible. The lads knew how effective it was and knew if they stuck to it, we had our best chance of getting a reward.

The tweaks were a safety net and available to us if necessary but the principles would not change. Man to man, 1 v 1, win the battle.

There can be a tendency for guys to throw ideas out there when it’s not going your way in tournaments. It’s just noise though and if you think you can just turn one thing off and another thing on at the drop of a hat, you are kidding yourself. We killed those notions.

The second document detailed our opponents’ strengths and weaknesses. It also included how or who we would use to counter/expose them.

Why was this different? Because it spelled out what was expected of everyone.

4 – Buy in

We talked about this a lot.

The lads were very involved in deciding the tactics this year. I took the heat after Copenhagen for getting them wrong but that was just because I thought it would be easier to shake it off and move on. In reality we had decided together but I thought that was the fastest way to kill it.

Everyone got on the same page afterwards. Everyone realised that we had to choose a different, more ambitious direction and back it to its death. It didn’t always come easy. Some guys missed chunks of training and weren’t able to get up to speed as quickly as we would have liked but in the end, we got there.

The final round proved we had that buy in. We trailed in a number of games but not once did someone come into a team talk and try to reinvent the wheel or even slightly panic.

We just stuck to the plan.

5 – Bond

To be fair, it has never been a problem in the club. Leveraging it to its maximum is always the challenge though. I often felt we didn’t get enough value for it on the pitch.

This group (the entire panel, Championship and Shield) is particularly close. A lot of the lads live together or close by. Some work together. Nearly all socialise exclusively together. Lynchy is about the only one with a foot in the ‘alternative Irish’ camp.

That has its downside too. The lads did a fair lash of drinking this year and it contributed to a few fairly lacklustre Monday night training sessions. I bit my tongue more often than not but I had my concerns about the impact on their fitness.

There was something just a little bit tighter this year though. I think the sessions in Copenhagen, Vienna and Bratislava contributed massively to that too.

Did we leverage it in a different way? I guess it’s hard to say. If you saw Laffan’s ankle on Saturday, you would have told him head off to hospital. It was a wreck. He hobbled around most of the day as we battled through. He got strapped and togged again for the final and came on to play a very influential role, maybe not necessarily on the ball but his presence on the pitch was huge.

From my side, I can say for certain that when I was cramped up on the ground in the second half, all that was going through my head was I had to get up and just run, run and run some more and just get through it and make a contribution to the team.

Timmy, as only he could get away with, probably summed up the togetherness in this group best, ending his acceptance speech with a dollop of man love; “I love ye all” he roared! There is serious friendship in this bunch.

In the end, were all of the above so much different to last year? No, probably not. But we did move on and claw a few more inches in all the areas mentioned. In the end, those inches made all the difference.

Amen.

With Timmy's late goal on Saturday, a massive weight lifted from the shoulders.

We won the Championship in 2008, our first year. Pure ecstasy. Once you get a taste of it, you want more. When you don't get it, you become frustrated. We've sunk some amount of time, money and graft into the last four years to do everything we could to get it back.

If ever a man deserved to have the final say in the destination of the Championship, it was our captain Tim Donovan. He had his jaw broken in the first tournament of the season in a fairly horrible incident against The Hague. He struggled with a groin injury mid-summer and broke a finger after Copenhagen.

Every time we've needed him this year though, he has come up trumps. On Saturday he rescued a fairly bleak situation in the final against Guernsey when he went on a solo mission into their defence late in the game to strike gold. It gave us a one point advantage that was enough to win the game and the overall Championship by the same margin.

Jesus, what a day.

We went into the tournament without two of our best players, Cillian and Shaun. We called Pearce up from the Shield panel. I like Pearce a lot but he drives me bonkers because he is so relaxed. Getting him to play within a structure is a near impossible task. I got fairly p1ssed off with him at training a couple of weeks ago and may have suggested he'd be better off not coming training if he wasn't going to buy into the way things were going to be done. Water off a ducks back I feared.

Then he rocked up at the in-house game the following Saturday and took Giller for a tour of the VUB. He ran well, marked well and moved the ball through his hands calmly. He'd put himself in the shop window without even realising.

Amsterdam were first up at the weekend. They were fairly pumped. We were in a bit of a hole in the first half but fought savagely for every ball in the second. Timmy struck for the decisive scores and we grabbed a one point win.

Luxembourg were next. To say it was a sour game is probably an understatement. The first ball I played was a hand pass and as I went to take a return pass I was knocked to the ground. That's where it all started and it rumbled on and on. There were verbals, niggles and sly digs throughout. It boiled over in the second half and hands up, I was lucky not to be sent off. I reacted to some provocation after one of their scores and got in a tangle. I felt it was 50/50 in the sense that the opposition player was as responsible. Fortunately the referee agreed.

Minutes later Lux had a man sent off which considering the previous incident, completely enraged them. I didn't see it but they weren't happy. Everything was going our way. They took a fast free and goaled but the ref called it back as the whistle hadn't gone. We kept our lead and closed the game out.

The rivalry against Lux has intensified since last year. I'm not sure where it has come from on their side. We have a lot of respect for their club but some in theirs don't seem to share that for us. There was the incident in Guernsey last year when we lined up a free and one of their players roared, "we're not going to lose to a sh1t team". Then in Copenhagen, they said in the team talk that they weren't going to lose "to a bunch of prima donnas who never win anything". I don’t know where they take their win/lose stats from.

Up next were The Hague. This is always a weird fixture. Often, we have struggled most when they are missing key players. I much prefer playing them at full strength as a result. They had pretty much everyone on Saturday and took an early lead. I can remember shag all from this game except we again scrapped through by two points.
Compared to Vienna, we were scoring at a miserly rate, maybe an average of 1-6. After 17 goals the last day, it was clear our opponents took the necessary countermeasures.

That result qualified us for the final but we still had a game left against Guernsey. This was an opportunity to knock them out and thus claim the Championship. Also, waiting in the wings were Amsterdam who, if we won the game, would qualify for the final.

Myself, Ross and Timmy discussed how to go at this game. We had lost Laffan in the Lux game to an ankle ligament injury and he could barely walk. I'd picked up Lynchy at the physio that morning and he was struggling. My back and hammers were roaring at me. We both needed a break.

Also, we wanted to keep our cards close to our chest heading into the final, meaning we didn't want to reveal too much of our plan.

With all that said, the team talk was focused on winning the game but at the same time testing one or two things out. Guernsey had put a big man in full forward during the day and our mighty midget defence had no natural counter to it. We decided to put Ger in full back. We gave Karl a man marking job.

In the first couple of minutes, Crusher picked up a nasty hip injury so I had to come on. By half-time the game was getting beyond us. To preserve the legs but keep some energy on the pitch I went in goal and Shane came out. That worked well as he fetched a load of kick-outs. The game was over though.

I felt for Amsterdam but I hope they can understand the approach we had to take.

The lads were fairly down after that result and I'm sure some doubt crept in. My take on it was simple. There was only one way to finish the 2012 Championship and that was to play Guernsey in a winner takes all finale. Winning the Championship in any other way couldn't be the same.

We learned some valuable things from that last group game. Ger was now an option at full back. Karl was more than capable of doing a man marking job. Maybe most crucially, we saw the effectiveness of their keepers’ big kick-out. They used it to by-pass everyone and hit their full forward line directly. It needed thought.

We picked the team to once again counter their key men, with the belief that we could win the other battles.

We made a ballsy enough decision on their kick-outs. Plan B on the opposing teams kick-outs is to 'concede' them. We did this last year when we were getting beaten at midfield. On Saturday, we pulled our full forward line out to cluster the middle of the field. By doing so we were taking a risk - allow them have more possession but in a less dangerous part of the pitch.

Guernsey flew out of the traps and nailed a goal in the opening minutes, adding a point shortly afterwards. We'd been in the same situation before. In Copenhagen, we couldn't come back from it but in Vienna we had. I mentioned in a blog a couple of weeks ago that belief comes from having been there and done it. I wasn't rattled and no-one else seemed to be panicking either.

That wasn't reflected in our shooting as we kicked away a shed load of chances. We were defending well though and managed to get to half-time trailing by just two points, 1-2 to 0-3.

The kick-out plan was working in the sense that they weren't piling ball down on top of us. Once their full back line received the ball, we stepped up immediately to pressure them. They had more possession but were turning over more ball in key areas. I've no idea how the second half scoring went. Someone said we were five points down at one stage and two points down with a couple of minutes on the clock.

Timmy’s moment had arrived. They cleared their lines under pressure. I couldn't get to it before the bounce but managed to get my hands on it. I just about released a hand pass before being clung and then Timmy took off. As he cut in, he lost control slightly but managed to get a hand on the ball and steady it enough to connect with his foot. In she went!

Bodies were falling everywhere with cramp. Guernsey were pouring forward looking for an equaliser.

It's hard to describe to people how your body feels towards the end of a tournament. Standing up is a mission, never mind trying to kick a point. Guersney came at us but tiredness must have been a factor. Their radar was off and time ran out on them.

The whistle finally arrived. Three blows of it with the last one trailing off to bring to game to a finish. A quest that has lasted four seasons coming to an end in the most dramatic fashion possible.

If you could choose how to write the story then that is the only way you would want it.

Of course, one must spare a thought for Guernsey. Given the logistics involved for them to participate, their commitment is insane. Over three tournaments this year, we have fought tooth and nail with them. There have been some big hits along the way but it has been one of the most 'manly' rivalries I've experienced in Europe. I have a huge amount of respect for the way those lads carry themselves, both in victory but more tellingly, in defeat.

One point in the final, one point in the overall standings. After 14 games in the 2012 Pan-European Championship, 5 against Guernsey, that was what separated us in the end.

What a year.

Later in the week....”Why this year was different”.

'Big Year' Reaches Climax

As early as January, I was banging the table about this being a 'big year'. I think it started at a party in Maria and Irene's, downstairs in my apartment building. The lads were all there and we were 'well on it'. I'd done my players in/out forecasting and it was clear we would be at our strongest come September. I had started to beat the drum early.

It became nearly a running joke as the year progressed. We all knew there was something in the logic but there's a big gap between January and September especially when you know you are going to be shipping your share of blows along the way.

Nearly exactly ten months on, we arrive at the day and the goal which gave the 'big year' its meaning.

I'd be lying if I said the last month went fantastically smoothly. Injuries and work commitments have disrupted our preparations. This is the nature of the beast though and every club faces the same issues. We finished off this week with two very good sessions and head into the weekend on a positive note.

One of the challenges the week of a tournament is what and how much to say to lads. The tendency can be to use the opportunity to talk just to release your own tension. The added value of what you say will be minimal though and may have more of a negative effect if it just gets lads wound up i.e. they may not be able to relax/sleep properly.

Our game plan is simple and we work on it every night. Our motivation for the weekend is crystal clear. What really needed to be said?

Timmy brought things together nicely at the end of the session last night and no more was needed.

I expect competition will be tough. I see The Hague have had upwards of ten transfers in the last month. Amsterdam will have lads coming back for the weekend and Lux should be at full strength. Guernsey, on their secluded island off the north of France, will have put in massive preparation I'm sure. Whoever wins this weekend will certainly have to earn it.

The Shield go into battle with a strong panel. This competition has exploded, with around 18 teams competing. It annoys me how so many teams rock up for the last tournament (when they didn't attend any others) and skew the competition. I'd be in favour of creating a third tier competition and placing those teams in that.

Credit to the board though, they did make one change by adding a plate competition to it. It means top two go into Shield QF and 3rd/4th into Plate QF.

The lads will be looking for a big finish. The season has been a real roller coaster and they will be hoping to finish on a high. Key to a good performance will be to keep the goal count down.

On the ladies side, the competition is also set-up for a grand finale. Our ladies are going for five in a row but are deadlocked with Holland ladies after two rounds. If the girls pull this one off it will be the hardest one yet and the most satisfying.

Training finished up last night and it was very hard to get lads off the pitch. This season hasn’t felt as long as others and we haven’t had periods where we got sick of it like we may have had in the past. Leaving last night, we realise there will be a hole in our lives in the next few months. Saturday is all about making sure we have something to talk about to fill in that spare time!