Eoghan O’Donnell: When Pat Gilroy left it was like a death in the family (2024)

It is a sign of Eoghan O’Donnell’s standing in the Dublin panel that he was part of the three-man delegation sent to meet the new manager, Mattie Kenny, last Friday night.

Just gone 23, O’Donnell is already preparing for his sixth season as a Dublin defender, though it has been a largely barren period.

When Dublin begin the 2019 season with an early-December Walsh Cup opener, Kenny will be the fourth manager that O’Donnell has worked under.

The 2013 Leinster champions and All-Ireland semi-finalists thought they were finally onto something again this year under Pat Gilroy so the shockwaves from his September departure after only 11 months in the job are still reverberating.

“When Pat left it was like a death in the family almost, it was a shock to everyone,” O’Donnell said. “We had such a good year and [the departure] came out of the blue completely. I was in Croatia on holidays and he phoned me and I was thinking this is him calling me about physio or something like that so it was like a bomb dropped. It was very disappointing and things took a while to settle down.

“Mattie probably was the first choice between the players, his record speaks for itself and Cuala have been such an explosive team for the last few years so players were delighted to get the ball rolling again after a few weeks of not being sure what was happening.”

O’Donnell clearly took Gilroy’s departure hard and admitted that it was a while before he got his head around it.

“I thought it was one of the lads taking the piss out of me, I couldn’t believe it at all, it was a shock but when it came across Pat’s desk that he was to be working in Kenya or somewhere like that he couldn’t turn down the opportunity which is fair enough,” O’Donnell said. “But it doesn’t make it any easier for us because we really did get on well with him. The results maybe didn’t reflect that but the whole hurling population knows that last year was a significant improvement for us.”

Dublin won just three games throughout the National League and championship under Gilroy, beating Antrim, Laois and Offaly. Yet in an odd way they were also one of the forms teams of the Championship despite losing three of their four Leinster games and bowing out of that competition at the earliest possible stage.

“Someone told me a stat that we were leading in the 70th minute of every Championship game this year, if you’d offered us that at the start of the year, results aside, we’d have bitten your hand off for it and used it as progression for the next year,” the Whitehall Colmcille club man said. “It’s pretty obvious how it was a blow to all of Dublin hurling when we heard he was going. I had my gym programme going but I took a break from the gym for two or three weeks and left the hurl in the boot of the car.”

Yet O’Donnell is keen to stress that he does not view the appointment of Kenny as any step backwards. The former Galway selector’s message when he met the three Dublin players at the Clayton Hotel in Liffey Valley last week was that he aims to build on the progress under Gilroy and use it as a springboard towards serious gains.

“He was talking very much about building on from where we were this year,” O’Donnell said. “I think Cuala’s style, and our style this year, are similar. It’s all about how hard you work when you don’t have the ball, it’s all about tackling, work rate, hooks and blocks, which we really did well in the championship in Parnell Park.”

Kenny has a close affinity to the Cuala players whom he guided to back-to-back All-Ireland club titles last March and choked back tears after their surprise Dublin semi-final loss to Kilmacud Crokes last month. The expectation is that he may be able to lure Mark Schutte, the Cuala and former Dublin hurler who has largely sat on the bench for the Dublin footballers for the last two seasons, back into the hurling fold.

Convincing Con O’Callaghan, a two-time All-Ireland club winner, to quit the Dublin footballers is simply not going to happen though.

“A pipe-dream I would say is the word for it,” O’Donnell said. “But we are not looking for Con O’Callaghan. The Dublin players are happy with what we have there. It’s not that we have a wish-list. We are happy with what we have. Con is a fantastic footballer as everybody knows and let him off with that to chase the five-in-a-row of All-Irelands, we are perfectly happy with that.”

Dublin are due to return to duty in the Walsh Cup on December 9 when they play Carlow, an early start to 2019 that O’Donnell cannot fathom.

“That’s one that doesn’t make sense to me, they shortened the year come summertime and just added it on at the end of the winter,” he said. “It’s a bizarre one for me, I don’t understand it. I don’t think anyone enjoys playing hurling in winter or in December, it doesn’t give any credit to the competition that it could be.

“It would be great if they could have it starting mid-way through January and a couple of days before the league, so you could hit the ground running and use it as preparation for the league.”

• Eoghan O’Donnell was speaking at the Castleknock Golf Club where the AIG Skills Challenge featuring Dublin GAA players and All Blacks players took place.