Former Down star Danny Hughes says that it shouldn’t require Conor Laverty’s appointment for Kilcoo players to commit to the county.
Having reportedly been close to taking the job with Jim McGuinness on his management ticket last year, Laverty has now been installed as James McCartan’s successor and will combine it with the role of Down under-20 manager, which he has held for the past two years.
Still highly active as a player, he captained Kilcoo to the All-Ireland title earlier this year but the club’s representation on the county panel was sparse, with only Niall Kane and Ryan McEvoy featuring in the Ulster Championship defeat to Monaghan.
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A few days after that game, Kilcoo’s Eugene Branagan said that he had “no ambition to play for Down” as he picked up the Player of the Year award for the club championship and cited the lack of a “winning mentality” as to why more players from the club weren’t involved with the county.
The assumption will be that Laverty will be able to entice more of his clubmates into the county set-up than his predecessors could manage but Hughes, who played alongside him when Down reached the 2010 All-Ireland final, insists that it shouldn’t matter who the manager is.
“It shouldn’t,” he said. “It really shouldn’t and isolated opinions on people, if they wanted to play in the past or who was committing and who wasn’t committing, are largely irrelevant.
“If you’re asked to play for any manager, no matter who it is - if it’s the devil himself - my love for my county negates anything else and I think personality-wise or clubs-wise or any politics, you always go on and represent your county.
“Conor Laverty is going to find himself in the same boat whether it’s political stuff that he has to deal with or anything else.
“If you’re asked to go and play for your county you should be very honoured and privileged and you should be going no matter who it is.
“If there have been people in the Kilcoo club that decided that they weren’t going to put their lot in with Down, well it’ll be interesting to see if Conor will manage to convince them now to throw their lot in with him.
“If they’re still undecided or they still feel that they cannot commit to the county, well then they’re never going to commit. It doesn’t matter who it is.”
Either way, Hughes doesn’t expect that the team will be peppered with Kilcoo players, citing the fact that Slaughtneil, the previous dominant force in Ulster club football, had just three starters for Derry this year.
“I think it’s too simplistic to say that a raft of Kilcoo players will go into the county. I think it never really works out like that.
“Even the great Armagh team of ‘02, they had a number of Crossmaglen players that came in, super players, but that didn’t mean that anybody that wasn’t part of Crossmaglen didn’t get their place. That wasn’t the case.
“I look at it the same with Kilcoo. I think they’ll definitely have three or four within the starting 15 and then three or four maybe on the wider panel so I would say that would be it. Maybe eight people overall and that’s out of 32, 33.”
And what Laverty gains on the swings, he may well lose on the roundabouts.
“Caolan Mooney’s out with an ACL,” Hughes pointed out. “It remains to be seen whether he’ll want to come back. He’s 31- years of age.
“You will have other players like Darren O’Hagan, who has been a fantastic servant to Down. I think Darren might call it a day because of injuries.
“You’ve got Kevin McKernan who was at that age where he’s done 15 years of fantastic service so you’ll have a natural waning of the squad anyway so they certainly miss some players who’ll be stepping away or maybe their life changes so it’ll be a brand new fresh start.
“It’ll be a brand new squad and Conor Laverty and Marty and Declan Morgan, the team that they have put together, they’ll want a fresh start.
“I know if it was me you’d want a fresh new squad to build on and they’ll be given time now. I would think, to build something fresh.”
Laverty was always on a fast track to the Down manager’s job, says Hughes.
Barely 37, Laverty is particularly young to take on the task of leading his county but Hughes noted his passion for coaching from an early stage.
“I would have got on very well with Conor over the years,” Hughes noted. “We would have talked a lot about football training, stuff like that.
“I was big into my training and stuff and I saw how Conor progressed as a player. He was absolutely fanatic. He knew all the new training techniques and stuff like that.
“I always felt that he was somebody who had so much natural enthusiasm for the game so it doesn’t surprise me (that he’s got the Down job).
“He was coaching and managing within his club at a very young age. I was totally focused on playing. It never really interested me when I was playing to be coaching or doing anything like that but he was different.
“He was not only playing but he was also coaching within the club and he just had this natural enthusiasm to coach and lead a team so it didn’t surprise me that eventually he wound up as Down manager.”
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