GENE Hourihane has seen enough in his first few months in the O’Donovan Rossa hot seat to be highly optimistic for the future of his team and Skibbereen football in general.
While the club may always bask in the glory of their All-Ireland club title in 1993, and live in its shadow as well, they slipped back from premier senior to senior A under the new championship system in 2020.
Their best result since then was reaching the semi-final in 2022 but have failed to get out of the group on three occasions. That was why their Division 2 win over premier senior side Ballincollig meant so much on Friday evening. As manager Hourihane explains, the players themselves have really taken responsibility this season.
‘This is my first year, Shane Crowley is the coach, he does all the training stuff, and we have Liam Hurley and Brendan Walsh as well,’ explained Hourihane, whose son, Dylan Snr., is centre forward on the team.
‘Brendan is the real game changer. We brought him in as a strength and conditioning coach because we felt, and the players themselves felt, that over the last few years they weren’t where they should be for this level of football. The players admitted that themselves. The club backed us and brought in Brendan Walsh and he’s been outstanding. The lads reacted well, the training sessions are very difficult but they’ve bought into it completely.’
O'Donovan Rossa manager Gene Hourihane. (Photo: Paddy Feen)
While many small clubs suffer from migration of players and struggle to get all the players together for training, there is a misconception that larger clubs like O’Donovan Rossa don’t have to cope with that problem. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Hourihane.
‘We’re in a situation where we have only one player living in Skibbereen, the rest are in Cork or up the country. We try to get them together three times a week, they come from Cork, Waterford, Limerick, great commitment but it isn’t easy building a team in those situations. You’re depending a lot on young lads still at home to make up numbers. It’s affecting most clubs now, with very few working in their home areas,’ he said.
While some teams start out the season with notions of winning championships and leagues, Hourihane has no such illusions yet with his new team. He knows the work has to be put in and the squad built up before they can start talking of winning titles. The team is probably in a state of transition right now, a mixture of experience and youth.
‘It’s been a mixed bag in the league so far, this is our fourth win,’ said Hourihane.
‘If you’d offered us that at the start of the season, we’d have been delighted with so many young lads on board. We won the South West U21B last year and we brought in five or six of those lads. We have to be a squad team, we know we’ll ship injuries, every club ships injuries, so we need to build a squad where we can rely on 24 or 25 players.
‘We have a brilliant underage system in the club, there was an U14 training session here before we came out and there were 33 players involved. That’s marvellous for the future of the club but we have to deal with the here and now.
‘What we have at the moment is a fairly tight squad, a young squad mixed with the likes of the experienced Kevin Davis , David Shannon and Thomas Hegarty. They are great leaders and have been for years in this club. It will take time to gel the young players and the experienced guys but we’re working hard on it.’
