Cian O’Neill: ‘I’m physically sick when we lose a game’

Dead time on campus. Cork IT is so quiet you can nearly hear the grass grow on playing pitches out the back. Cian O'Neill sits down in the on-site coffee shop and though normally you might try to find a quiet office for this kind of thing, we look around us and decide that there's no need to move. A college in June means library silence all around.

As CIT's Head of Sport, O'Neill doesn't get the summer off. This week is busy because they have exam boards to complete and the last threads of the semester to tie up. A Leinster semi-final against Meath is ticking away like a watch in his pocket too, the noise getting louder as the week goes by.

For Kildare training, the drive is two hours up the road with traffic and an hour-40 back to Douglas without it. Life and work keep him in Cork and football isn’t a good enough reason to flip the arrangement. And anyway, it suits him far better not to live in Kildare. Managing the county team brings its own claustrophobia.

“Definitely, yeah. Last year was tough when things didn’t go as we wanted them to. And a lot of that was our own fault because we let ourselves down. But even in Division Three, we were winning every match but there was no great satisfaction in it. We were plodding along and then we lost the league final. There was a bit of negativity around that – and understandably so because we should have won it,” says O’Neill.

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“And then in the championship, we were just awful against Wexford. Just awful. And even then not to step up against Westmeath, there was an obvious backlash. That’s tough. It just bloody hurts when you hear that stuff. You do need a thick skin. So it probably helps, not being in Kildare. But all my family are there and all my wife’s family are there. It’s a dark place when things aren’t going well.

“I’m not on social media. I don’t do that side of it. But I have a sister in Spain who takes pleasure in telling me when people are giving out about me. She’s abroad so she’s more into the online stuff as a way to keep connected. And because she’s my sister, she gets a kick out of telling me the negative things people are saying.

“She’s been very quiet lately, so I presume that maybe it’s all a bit nicer this year. But it was nasty last year, no doubt. But that’s working in your own county, isn’t it?”

Listening to him is a reminder that we don’t get it, not really. We go to these games and we sit and watch and then we pack up and go home and flick on the kettle. By the time we see the steam rise, the game is a ghost. Did it happen at all?

Last June, Kildare and Westmeath played out a hairy lemon of a game in the Leinster semi-final. Usual story. Both sides posted an armada in their own half and cancelled shore leave. Neither team could get out of the way of its own nerves. In the end, Kildare threw away a decent lead by only scoring a single point in the closing half-hour. Westmeath went through to the final and we never spoke of it again. We have that luxury.

Physical sickness

Cian O’Neill does not. He had lost games before but they hadn’t made him feel like this. For the first time in his life, defeat caused him to be sick. Not sick, as in gutted. Sick, as in ill. On the Monday after the game, he took to the bed. Stayed for the day. Didn’t get up until evening time. That sort of sick.

“We lost a game we felt we should have won and this was how I felt. It was actual physical sickness. It wasn’t mental. My wife couldn’t understand it and she’s very good with me after defeats.

“She just couldn’t get her head around what it did to me. The day after the match, the Monday, I didn’t get out of my bed until five o’clock. Everything was playing over and over again. What-if this, what-if that.

“I never felt stress in my life, in any shape or form, like I did last year. I was physically sick for five days after that Westmeath game. Sick in my stomach. I had never felt like that before or after a game with any team in any sport. It was tough, it really was. It was failure. That was the feeling – failure.

“For those five days, there was only two periods where it totally left me. And those were Tuesday from seven to nine and Thursday from seven to nine. And I couldn’t explain that. Going to training on Tuesday, I was in knots in my stomach. Training was amazing. But then as soon as training finished and right up until training on Thursday, I felt sick all over again.”

He wasn’t prepared for it, which told him something in itself. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what losing tasted like. O’Neill has been coaching various teams in various sports since he was 13. He was in second year in school when the PE teacher asked him to help out with the first-year basketball team, since all he wanted out of life was to be a PE teacher himself.

So he pounced on the offer and ate it whole. That was the best part of 30 years ago. Doesn’t matter who you are, three decades of coaching means a lot of losing. His father has been the driving force behind the Community Games in Newbridge all his life, still going strong at the age of 74. All that sport, all those years – you lose more than you win. Far more.

But this was different. This was his own county. That stuff lingers. O’Neill grew up playing soccer, basketball and football but by the time he left school, football had won out. He skipped off the summer after his Leaving Cert to go and work in a sports hotel in Spain and liked it so much that he went back every summer for five years.

In between, he did his bit for Moorefield as they rose to the top of the tree in Kildare.  Mick O’Dwyer called him into the county senior panel on a couple of different occasions but he was driving home from training one night when disaster struck. A six-car pile-up left him needing to have two disks removed from his back. His playing career was wiped out.

Coping mechanism

“The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘What a fucking idiot. You could have been playing football for the past five or six years and even if this had happened, at least you would have that under you. Or maybe you wouldn’t have been good enough but you would at least have had that opportunity. But now, look at the position you’re in. You never took the chance.’

“That was tough. I never took a drink in college. After that accident was the first time I ever took a drink. And it was a coping mechanism. Not to a detrimental extent, obviously. But I just felt if I can’t train, if I can’t play anymore, I’m going to start enjoying myself.

“That would have hit me. There were probably only two times in my life that I had a bit of a wobble. That time and when my mother passed in 2007. That would have knocked me too. Apart from that, I’ve been very lucky. It took a while to get over but I think the coaching was the saviour.”

Ever since forever, that’s who he’s been. The list of teams he’s been involved with one capacity or another is well-worn by now. Limerick footballers, Tipp hurlers, Mayo, Kerry. The way he puts it is he had the most fun as a fitness trainer, the most satisfaction as a coach, the most pressure as a manager.

Which brings us neatly up to tonight in Tullamore. Whatever its significance in the wider GAA world, this is a monumental clash for Meath and Kildare.

If and when the great blue wave eventually crashes in on the shore, one of these two will surely come surfing in on top. Whatever the future holds for either side, tonight looks like a significant staging post.

“I would see us as similar in terms of our stage of development,” O’Neill says. “Two very young teams, both in terms of players and what the managers are trying to do. Last year was my first year but I see this year as the team’s first year. Simply because of the amount of young  players we have brought in this year who just weren’t ready last year when a lot of them were just out of minor. I think that year has really stood to them.

"Eoin Doyle is our team captain and a fantastic leader. He's been on the panel for five, six years and he's never been to a Leinster final. He came in in 2012, the year after our last final. It means something to someone like that, as well as some of the young guys who are just hoping to make it to their first Leinster final."

It means plenty to Cian O’Neill too. In all respects, he found that out the hard way.