Football

The fixtures calendar needs shredded to help underage structures: Derry U20 boss Mickey Donnelly

Derry U20 manager Mickey Donnelly says the current slot for the Ulster U20 championship is unworkable Picture: Margaret McLaughlin.
Derry U20 manager Mickey Donnelly says the current slot for the Ulster U20 championship is unworkable Picture: Margaret McLaughlin. Derry U20 manager Mickey Donnelly says the current slot for the Ulster U20 championship is unworkable Picture: Margaret McLaughlin.

DERRY’S U20 football manager Mickey Donnelly says the GAA fixtures calendar should be “shredded” and believes there are too many "battlefields" at underage level for the relatively new football grade to flourish.

With the schools sector and U20 grade effectively pitted against one another over player availability and high-profile fixture clashes, Donnelly says the current template “needs ripped up”.

Due to fixture changes at national level, the Ulster Council was forced to bring forward its U20 Football Championship by a couple of months, to February, but the move has spectacularly collided with ‘A’ and ‘B’ post-primary competitions.

Once the GAA granted Fermanagh special dispensation to call upon their 13 school-tied players to field in order for the Ernemen to field at U20 level, other counties made similar requests.

Derry and Fermanagh get the U20 Football Championship ball rolling at Celtic Park this Saturday but with St Patrick’s, Maghera and St Mary’s, Magherafelt involved in MacRory Cup action next Tuesday and Wednesday, Donnelly won’t be able to call up those players.

“The irony is if you asked me that question: did I think the U20s was working, before Christmas and before the fixtures came out I would have said it’s working.

“We’d a couple of decent years: we won one Ulster title and got to an Ulster final last year and the timing of the competition and that summer window seemed to work well. But, to bring it into the schools [calendar] is just a total disaster. It’s just a maelstrom of in-house fights and wranglings.

“It’s not the calendar needs ‘tweaked’; it needs ripped up, you need to a get shredder from somewhere and to start again because it’s definitely not working.”

Donnelly says it would have been wrong to put players involved in MacRory Cup football under pressure to line out for Derry’s U20 footballers as well.

“Even though the rule [allowing counties to call up school-tied players for U20 duty] is relaxed we haven’t had the schools players simply because we haven’t put the pressure on them.

“It’s difficult to have a player at the end of a barrel of a gun and force that on them… Surely, inter-county football is the pinnacle for anybody and we’re actually depriving these lads of inter-county football.

“I come from a very, very small club [Aghaloo, Co Tyrone] and the pride that we feel when someone from our club, our tribe, goes and represents their county, it’s huge. But now what people are saying is: ‘Let’s make it a development competition, so any Tom, Dick and Harry can play inter-county football.’

“It just diminishes the entire competition.”

Now in his third year with the Derry U20s, Donnelly feels that the now defunct U21 grade was the definitely the lesser of two evils.

“[At U21] You were relying on a very, very good relationship with your senior county manager, which doesn’t exist in every county. But it would definitely be better than this because it’s anarchy.

“I would like to have eight or nine lads available to me on Saturday who are involved in MacRory. If it was U21, you might have one stand-out player. If you go through teams that have won Hogan Cups – Fermanagh teams, Tyrone teams, Derry teams – how many of those lads were playing U21 football? Very few.”

The fact that St Michael’s, Enniskillen exited the MacRory Cup to Holy Trinity, Cookstown at the end of last month means that the Ernemen U20s will have a full deck to choose from in facing Derry this weekend.

Donnelly explained: “A county like Fermanagh might have 11 or 12 St Michael’s Enniskillen boys on the panel. If St Michael’s had beaten Holy Trinity, Fermanagh mightn’t have been able to field [against us].”

The currently education system in the north also has a negative impact on the U20 grade, as Donnelly said: “I think the point that has been missed here is that it really hurts the six counties more than anywhere else. It’s more pronounced, more than say: St Brendan’s Killarney, St Jarlath’s, Tuam, Coláiste Chríost Rí…invariably, those schools don’t enforce transition year, so lads leave schools football at 18-years-of-age; we have them until 19.

“So why would the Galway delegate or the Mayo delegate care about this, or the Donegal delegate for that matter? But it definitely affects us because we have lads that are doing A2 exams at nearly 19-years-of-age who are ready-made U20 footballers. You could argue they are ready-made senior footballers, but because the nature and the timing of the competition we can’t play them.

“Surely to God, U20 was created because it was felt U21 was too big a bridge between 18 to 21.

“We’ve now nothing between 17 and senior because these players can’t play, a lot of my best players can’t play because they’re with their schools, and rightly so. But we’re depriving them the chance of playing inter-county football which is madness.”

“What’s been the clash in the calendar over the last number of years? It’s been club versus county. So, at least if you kept 17s, 20s, and seniors all playing their games in the summer window, then clubs can deal with that because they know when they’re not going to have their players, whereas now schools are flexing, counties are trying to flex. It’s just a battlefield.”