HE had his hip replaced, baby Tomas was born, and he moved house – all within three weeks of each other.
Aidan O’Rourke and timing haven’t exactly been on the same page.
His timing to jump back on the inter-county carousel after several years away was decidedly lousy.
His last two coaching roles were with Down (2022) and Donegal (2023).
Down were a bit of a basket case upon arrival and although Donegal looked a more inviting gig, “the original painting melted very quickly” when Michael Murphy dropped his retirement bombshell.
Once Paddy Tally decided to step away from the Mourne post after three years in charge, having not received sufficient support from the clubs for a one-year extension, the Down senior football squad was immediately on the back foot.
November is no time to be taking on an inter-county job, nevertheless, James McCartan went into the managerial role for a second time “with his eyes wide open”.
O’Rourke, an All-Ireland winner with Armagh in 2002, and McCartan have been firm friends for a long time and indeed the pair worked together during the latter’s first spell in charge of his native county some 11 years earlier.
So, about O’Rourke’s lousy timing…
“I didn’t think of it in those terms because that’s not how I make decisions,” O’Rourke says.
“I make decisions around people.
“I hadn’t been involved in county football in seven or eight years. I was deeply involved in underage football at my club [Dromintee] – that’s where my passion was.
“I’d no interest in getting back involved in county football. I was writing some articles for RTE online and was happy enough.
“Then James answered the call for Down. They were in dire straits, obviously. James knew exactly what he was getting into. He knew there may not be a good outcome. But the Down in him, he decided to step in for a year.
“Why did I get involved with Down? I went in because James helped me in life and football way more times than I’ve helped him. That was my motivation.
“I certainly wasn’t thinking: ‘Jesus, I want to get back into county football’.
“From a life point of view, that’s not where I was at, but I was still at the cutting edge in terms of I was writing analysis pieces for RTE where I had to look very closely at what the top teams were doing, I was doing commentary which I had to prepare for, I knew all the teams and players.
“So, I was still right on the edge of it without having done the labour of it. I never thought: ‘Jesus, maybe I can’t do this anymore.’ That’s not how it was.”
Given the general upheaval and discord within the Mourne county, the desperate lateness of a managerial appointment, and the knock-on effect it had on player availability, Division Two was going to be a struggle.
Sitting in the lobby of the Armagh City Hotel on a damp Friday afternoon, O’Rourke rues some of those NFL losses Down suffered in 2022.
He’s still miffed by how they only came away with a point against Meath in Navan and narrowly lost to Offaly in Pairc Esler.
“There was a lot of gallows humour during that season,” O’Rourke smiles.
“James is a funny man. We knew we were up against a lot of things. Very small margins got them relegated…
“And then the players went into the Championship with confidence in their boots and everybody telling them they were rubbish. Listen, it was a bit of mad year.
“What was different since the last time I was involved [a year as assistant to Armagh boss Kieran McGeeney in 2016] was social media and the pressure pressing down on the players.
“They were constantly being bombarded. I don’t necessarily think the average club person in Down felt that way and they certainly weren’t shouting over the fence at them, but they were weighed down by the constant shit.
“There were good lads in that group, trying to drive it on and asking us constantly, ‘how do we make this better?’
“The way the GAA has gone now, it’s almost as if there’s a narrative dictated for a time, social media reinforces it, players find it so difficult to break out of it and that becomes the story until next season - and the same applies on the other side, when there’s a positive narrative.”
He adds: “Since then, Down have made brilliant strides in rectifying a lot of stuff. Conor Laverty is a great leader, he’s charismatic, brings people with him.
“And back to your timing question, I think Down had to bottom out first, which allowed ‘Lav’ to get more buy-in. They’ve still a lot to do but they’ve good people in place going forward.”
O’Rourke was glad to see the back of the 2022 inter-county season and was ready to throw himself back into Dromintee’s U16s.
But with Declan Bonner vacating the Donegal post at the end of the same season, O’Rourke was offered a coaching role and effectively joint stewardship alongside native Paddy Carr.
“The motivation to go to Donegal was coming off the Down thing. I was thinking: ‘F*** me, what a car crash that was.
“Did I want to leave it at that? I thought to myself: ‘Right, this is a Division One team, a really good group of players – driven, motivated… So, I said f*** it, I’m going to sacrifice a year to do this.”
But things started to go awry before a football stud touched the training pitch when the totemic Murphy decided in November that he was finished with inter-county football.
Absenteeism began to climb too with 10 players who’d featured in the Ulster final defeat to Derry the previous summer were either injured or unavailable for the 2023 campaign.
Carr, O’Rourke and Paddy Bradley were fighting a losing battle from the get-go.
Only five months into the job, Carr departed with Donegal already condemned to Division Two.
O’Rourke and Bradley were persuaded to stay on in a largely fire-fighting capacity.
Shorn of the injured Patrick McBrearty for a chunk of the season, Donegal crashed and burned in the Ulster Championship to, of all teams, Down.
The bloodletting at Academy level was also making a terrible racket and the county executive were under the cosh.
Still, the Donegal players showed considerable resilience in the subsequent All-Ireland series before they bowed out to Tyrone in Ballybofey.
“When we came in, we thought all those players [of the previous season] would have been available and when Michael, for his own, very credible reasons, decided he was coming to an end, that maybe made it easier for others not to commit and maybe saw it as a transitional year. But that’s certainly not on Michael.
“But once he retired it was drip, drip… The original painting melted very quickly.”
Despite everything, O’Rourke has no regrets from the turbulent season he spent in the north-west.
He learned loads about himself as a coach and the cultural nuances of how Gaelic football is played in the county.
“I really did enjoy coaching the Donegal players, but there was so much stuff going on that had nothing to do with coaching, which just polluted the whole thing.
“But the opportunity to work with some of those lads was priceless and I’ve taken a lot from it. Not all of that was positive, some of it was learning or educational.
“But it shaped me. Donegal play a different way to how I coach, and I had to think about the game very differently, I had to figure a way to coach that way of playing, which was really interesting from my point of view.
“But because of the academy thing a lot of animosity built up in and around the county executive.
“For some people, the inter-county team is seen as a tool with which to beat the county executive with and, disappointingly, some people attacked the county team as a way of getting at the county executive.
“I would have seen only a small bit of it because I was getting into my car and driving up and down, whereas the players were getting it constantly – ex-team-mates, press, social media – they’re getting the same messaging all the time.
“Even if the stuff doesn’t matter to them or isn’t true, this constant drip, drip of negativity has an impact.
“But, again, there are some unbelievably resilient characters in that group. Patrick McBrearty is probably the epitome of that.
“He picked up a bad injury and it probably should have finished his season in the normal timeframe.
“He was driving the thing. I went into that environment thinking that Patrick was the cherry-on-top-of-the-cake kind of player – but he was so much more than that.”
At this stage, I’ve known Aidan O’Rourke for over 20 years.
From the days of Armagh winning the All-Ireland in ’02 to him stepping off the inter-county stage in '09, to his shared passions for Sigerson football and Dromintee, O’Rourke is one of the most erudite GAA figures you’ll encounter.
Both knowledgeable and self-critical, if you sit long enough in his company you will come away informed about the game on some level.
He doesn’t reflect much on his playing days – but if you prompt him, he’ll tell you that Armagh should have won a second All-Ireland in 2008 and that he should’ve quit then rather than staying on for the following season.
“Peter McDonnell came in, a lot of the older guys had retired, but there was a cohort of young ones that came in - Charlie Vernon, Ciaran McKeever, Finn (Moriarty), Brian Mallon, Stephen and Aaron (Kernan) - were already bedded in at that stage, while the earlier successes were probably too soon for them to make a meaningful contribution, but they were ready to go.
“And [Paul] McGrane was still firing on all cylinders.
“As far as the age profile goes, we were perfect, and Peter had brought an extra bit to it as well. Peter was a brilliant guy. He had his own way of doing things. No back doors. If you needed to be told something, you were told it.
“He thought deeply about the game, tactically. I liked Peter a lot.”
Armagh won the Anglo-Celt that year – the last time they managed such a feat – beating Malachy O’Rourke’s Fermanagh in Clones after a replay.
But Jason Ryan’s Wexford caught them in the All-Ireland quarter-finals at Croke Park. Coasting for 50 minutes, the Orchard men started to struggle to convert a host of chances and the Leinster underdogs came back and nipped them at the death.
“I just think there wasn’t enough belief in the group in ’08 and the Wexford game probably bore that out. We should have breezed into a semi-final.”
The following season turned out to be his last in an Armagh jersey – and it was one campaign too long with injuries catching up on him.
“I remember apologising to Peter and saying, ‘I wish I was younger when you came in’. My body just wasn’t there at that stage, and I wanted to walk away just before the Championship because of injuries I’d picked up.”
O’Rourke was coaching at Queen’s and his club long before he bid farewell to Armagh, and no sooner had he retired that he found himself down in Kildare assisting his former county team-mate Kieran McGeeney.
He also had sideline spells with Down, Louth and Armagh in the first half of the last decade. Even though he stepped away from the inter-county circuit for several seasons, O’Rourke has been constantly immersed in high performance sport through his work at Queen’s University.
You ask what he’s learned from all his years of coaching, O’Rourke quietly repeats the question to himself.
“I was probably more dictatorial at the start, where I’d have a very clear, definite outlook of the game. Maybe headstrong too and I felt that this is the best way to play the game. I’m going to coach it this way – if you’ve a different idea, you’re wrong and I’ll explain why you’re wrong. That’s the way I would have coached the game the first four or five years.”
He adds: “I never wanted to be a manager, I always wanted to be a coach. The reason I went into management was because I wanted to create a coaching environment that was pure, that was undisturbed by management issues because I was in control of the management.
“I started looking at the broader picture, looking at things more holistically and the needs of the players. Then I started to take on board alternative views… the game changes but I still have a core belief in how the game should be played or the most effective way of playing the game.
“I still believe the most effective way to play is to get the ball back to front as quickly as possible. That’s not a revelation.
“There is a lot more room for kicking the ball in what teams are finding at the minute. And that’s through fear. The safest way to do that is, possession, through the hands. Any team can get to 80 per cent of their capacity by doing that really well; but how do you get to 90, 95, 96 per cent? That’s not how players were brought up playing the game, but in my world kicking the ball is very important and very effective but teams don’t utilise that.”
In coaching terms, Aidan O’Rourke has never quite timed his runs. It doesn’t bother him in the slightest. But that narrative could well change after accepting the Armagh minor job only a few weeks ago.
“The big thing I’ve taken out of the last two years is if it’s not part of your DNA…. What I mean is, you can take ownership of a team, fully commit to it, embed yourself in it and that can be any team, but I felt there was something missing in my coaching over the last few years.
“I was in Down helping out but it wasn’t my team. It was great to get the opportunity to work with the players in Donegal but it wasn’t my team.
“I didn’t sell anybody short… When I’m coaching Dromintee U16s, these lads represent me. I’ve coached them how to play, their attitude, their discipline, they’re an extension of me. I’m invested in them; I f***ing can’t sleep three nights before a championship match. Likewise, Armagh is a big part of my life.
“I was an Armagh minor, went onto senior, I've helped any number of players over the past few years trying to make them into county minors.
“I went to see Armagh minors last year and I was totally invested in them even though I’d nothing to do with the team. So, I think there are extra percentage points when you’re totally invested in the team and maybe that's what has been missing for me.”
