Mick O'Dwyer has vowed to continue in inter-county management but five of our writers have special memories of the mercurial Kerryman.
Terry Reilly
IT was early October 2006.
Micko had just left Laois under a cloud of doubt. The players had accused him of being too old fashioned for their ambitions. The county board had watched a side win a Leinster title in 2003 but only experience sorry days afterwards as the gap between them and Dublin grew. He was seen as the problem and we thought he was finished.
That October Wicklow County Board announced he was going to be their new manager. It seemed crazy, the final desperate moves of a man past his time in the management game.
But having watched Wicklow footballers for years (another story for another time), seeing them combust in style to Liam Hayes-led Carlow earlier that season, 4-9 to 0-12, knowing some of the problems associated with the county and that most of the good players wouldn’t come in... this was a no-win situation.
Micko spent his first week calling players and telling them to make it to a meeting. A friend of mine was one but he broke his leg two weeks before it and needed a lift. I volunteered and, because 117 players went to that meeting, I slipped inside unnoticed. It had to be delayed until more seats could be found.
It was complete parochial Ireland but I could he was building something special.
Sitting beside my injured invitation, a junior B goalie at best, I saw Micko in action. He cajoled the players to give him a commitment and promised them they’d see a reward. No one else could have done it. No one else could have given them the belief after just one night that hard work would be rewarded with success.
Since then he led them to that magical qualifier run in 2009, a first victory in Croke Park and a debut management loss to Kieran McGeeney’s Kildare and this year a close-run call to Armagh.
All that without a decent youth structure to call on. Some achievement.
Brendan O’Brien
WE sought him here, we sought him there.
For a few days there back in October of 2004 the whole country looked for him everywhere but Mick O’Dwyer was nowhere to be found. The cutest of all Kerrymen had gone incommunicado. Done his best Scarlet Pimpernel.
It all started on a Saturday with reports that a low turnout at two training sessions had prompted his resignation as Laois manager. By the Tuesday, rumours of his imminent appointment in the vacant Dublin post were spreading like wildfire.
Bookies slashed odds on the unlikely switch from 6/1 to 5/6, by which time the Laois county board had heard nothing from their man since the Sunday and even a denial by then Dublin chairman John Bailey failed to halt the spiralling speculation.
The drama reached its crescendo on the Tuesday evening when O’Dwyer resurfaced in the passenger seat of Dick Miller’s car as the Laois chairman drove into the car park of The Heath club where the senior team was due to train.
There waiting for him was a motley crew of reporters, TV crews and supporters, all of whom strained to watch the resultant summit with the county’s senior footballers through two tiny cracks in the hastily-drawn curtains.
It was theatre, it was comedy, it was farce. All rolled into one.
It was the next morning before he phoned Miller to say he was staying, which he did for two more years. It hasn’t been the same in Laois since he left. On or off the pitch.
Jim O’Sullivan
MOST of my meetings with Mick O’Dwyer from the mid-’70s up to recent times were directly linked to my work, but we often met socially and had our humorous moments, both at home and abroad.
One of those I recall most vividly was a Dublin press conference in advance of the 2004 Leinster final when he was with Laois. Sitting next to him was Páidí Ó Sé, then managing Westmeath. The pair had again been on opposite sides two years earlier when Micko was nearing the end of his time with Kildare and Páidí likewise with Kerry.
Side by side sat the master and one of his star pupils, swapping stories and experiences from a lifetime involvement in football. I remember remarking to my colleague as we took our seats that we were looking at two of the biggest rogues you could meet.
Páidí was generous in his praise, commenting: “I would say without fear or contradiction that he’s the best man in the business. Anything I know about football — and I’m not too bad myself, although I’m still learning — I learned from him. Hopefully he may have taught me too much.”
As the banter continued before the serious business of discussing the game, he joked that O’Dwyer had given him his P45 (a number 27 jersey) and he didn’t speak with him for three years afterwards.
Micko remembered he hadn’t been going well in training. “We played Cork and they beat us. He said to me afterwards, ‘if I was marking Dinny Allen today he wouldn’t have got all those scores’... and how right he was!”
John Fogarty
THE International Rules job is seen as the one that got away from Micko but the one he caught but then released was Dublin.
The autumn of 2004 was a tumultuous one for the Blues after Tommy Lyons’ three seasons in charge came to an end and Micko was seen as the replacement by then county chairman John Bailey.
Despite his fervent denials. Despite Micko’s claims to the contrary.
O’Dwyer had resigned twice from Laois at the time and I had it on good authority that he had met with Bailey about taking over the reins of a position he had long courted, at least in the media.
The source close to Micko said he had been “tortured by Dublin”.
It was all to come out in the wash in Micko’s second autobiography three years later when he revealed he had turned down Dublin for fear of how his appointment would be greeted in the capital and elected to stay on with Laois.
Since then, I’ve had several warm encounters with the great rogue but nothing to shed any definitive light on his character. But then very few have got close enough to know him.
That’s the way it was, the way it still is with Micko. He puts the “e” in cute, the “b” in subtle.
Diarmuid O’Flynn
GAELIC football’s Robin Hood I’ve described him as, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, taking over formerly struggling teams Kildare, Laois and Wicklow, and turning them in to winners.
“He’s like a father-figure to us all,” said Ross Munnelly of Laois, after another great day, “We all love him down here.”
My own abiding memory of him is in the dressing-room after Kildare’s All-Ireland final loss of 1998, back in the days when there was more tolerance of journalists in the GAA.
He stood in the centre of the dressing-room, called for their attention. He didn’t have to call for quiet. They sat in silence. Not in groups, not even in pairs; side by side, but each alone with his pain.
He started quietly: “Lads, I know ye’re disappointed, but there’s no need to have yere heads down. We had our problems coming into this game but overall, on the day, Galway were just the better team, and we just have to accept that. But there’s no point in having the heads down — I know ye’re disappointed, I’ve been there before, as a player and coach. It’s just part and parcel of football.”
After all he had devoted to them, sounding more like a consoling father than a hardened coach, he tried to encourage them.
“And for you, all of you fellas here today — ye’re all young enough to come back here again. Now we’ll be taking it easy this winter, it won’t be anything like what ye’ve done for the last two years. But we’ll come back in February, and we’ll have one other crack at it.”
Around the room, not a head lifted. They heard what he was saying but the pain was too great.
“There’s no point in being too upset lads — that’s part and parcel of the game. They say you have to lose one before you win, and while I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that myself, keep the faith lads, stay with it. Listen to me lads — don’t be too upset. It’s only a game of football. Ye’re feeling down now, and very down, but yere turn will come!” Not a single flicker on any face — may be true, but not just now.
“Before I finish, I want to thank each and every one of you for the wonderful contribution you have given — people out there don’t realise the amount of hard work ye’ve put in over the last two years. Ye’re disappointed, but people have got great enjoyment out of it, and it would have been a damned sight worse if we had been beaten in the Leinster final!
“That’s one step on the road to the All-Ireland — stay with it lads, keep working on it, and don’t let yourselves get into bad condition.”
They never did come back to win that All-Ireland title, more’s the pity, but those words, those sentiments – that was Micko.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/_LsRVUskvPA/post.aspx
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