THIRD-LEVEL FOOTBALL is close to Paddy Christie’s heart.
The recently-instated Longford senior football manager is still maintaining his role as DCU boss for the Sigerson Cup. The balancing act is already a tricky one, with a potential clash of DCU’s Sigerson opener and his O’Byrne Cup commitments.
Nonetheless, his new role has not changed his perspective on colleges GAA, and he is adamant that there is a myriad of benefits to county managers facilitating their players to pursue third level football.
“People expect this poacher turned gamekeeper sort of thing. I was with DCU, I was pushing college football, and somebody said to me, ‘Now you’re a senior inter-county manager, I bet you will turn around and do the opposite’ – it hasn’t changed at all,” said Christie.
“I’m very much of the opinion that fellas should be playing college football. You can check that out with the Longford footballers. When we met last month, I found out how many fellas were in college and said I wanted every fella to be playing for their college. If that involved missing the odd session for Longford or clashing with certain things, we will work our way around it – that can be managed.
“I cannot understand personally why you’d stop somebody from playing it. I can understand why you can’t have fellas training every night for their college, but I cannot understand how you don’t think that would improve fellas by doing a bit of training with high-calibre players from other counties with high-calibre managements in colleges, playing matches at a very high level.
“I think there’s nothing but positives. And yeah, somebody got injured last year and hadn’t been able to play for their county,” he added, perhaps noting Tommy Conroy’s injury last February that ruled him out of Mayo’s inter-county season.
“I’ve heard of loads of fellas getting injured training for their county. For me, that just is a non-runner [as an excuse].”
Having worked in the sphere, Christie knows that mixing with players from other counties can have major developmental advantages for players.
“I have James Moran in UCD and another lad, Aaron Farrell (from the Longford panel). Both of them are on the UCD senior panel. They played against DCU a while ago in the league. John Divilly is managing them,” Christie outlined.
“If they’re training with UCD, I don’t know how I can argue with that. They’ve a former intercounty player, a fine player and good reputation, would know his stuff, would do the job properly. You have to trust that and say, they’re getting good training there.
“Would I prefer to see those two guys coming to Longford? Of course I want to see them in Longford sometimes, but you have to try and strike a balance. If they’re going to get roughly the same sort of session in UCD which is five minutes from where they’re living, as opposed to spending an hour and a half at this time of year in traffic, for me it’s a no-brainer.
“Further afield, guys from Donegal like Oisin Gallen, hopefully he will be back fairly soon. What would it be, three-hour drive to Donegal? Is there any need for him to always be going to Donegal sessions if the odd session, he can do in Dublin and get the same quality training?
“From a player welfare point of view, which is something that’s popping up all the time, and people have been critical of how much inter-county players are pushed, is that not six hours of your time? Is that required all the time?
“Not only is it good training with good coaches, but also training with other high quality players. So for me, you just need a little bit of trust.
“And maybe I’m naive, and I’ll be proven to be wrong, I’m too easy or generous with things, but as an example with the UCD lads, I’d be perfectly happy for some of those sessions to be done with UCD as opposed to going all the way to Longford, if the quality of the sessions are good.”