Hurling & Camogie

"We’ve changed. We all had to change in a certain way." - Dominic McKinley on adapting with the game

The Antrim management team has had to adapt to the changing nature of hurling, says Dominic McKinley (second from left).
The Antrim management team has had to adapt to the changing nature of hurling, says Dominic McKinley (second from left). The Antrim management team has had to adapt to the changing nature of hurling, says Dominic McKinley (second from left).

OLD dogs can learn new tricks. They just have to want to.

Dominic McKinley isn’t the type to get offended by being lumped into the ‘old dog’ category, and is fresh enough to argue that he perhaps shouldn't be.

Hurling has been a lifelong venture, his managerial career nearly at the point of being counted in decades rather than years.

The naked eye would propose that hurling remains a simple game but there’s a reason the world invented glasses.

Those that see the 2018 version in simplistic terms need to look a bit closer at the Waterfords, Clares and even Galways of the world.

“The days are gone of us going 15-to-15, shoulder-to-shoulder, you’re going to win your own ball and score more than the other team - that’s gone. Gone,” says McKinley.

If lament exists in his soul because of it, it’s absent from his voice. In its place, a simple recognition that the world turns and whoever doesn’t go with it falls off the edge.

So much has changed since he played through very different times in the 1980s and ‘90s, when Antrim would have been regular visitors to the All-Ireland series under the old system.

“Even dealing with players now. Would we, 20 years ago, have accepted some of the things that go on? Naw, you’d have walked over and said ‘here, away you go’.

“We’ve changed. We all had to change in a certain way. Even our training methods.

“The job I’m involved in (Antrim Hurling Development Officer), we’re always looking at ideas and open to new ideas. That’s including talking to players about the way we play the game.

“Tactically the game has changed so much. Every day we go out nearly, there’s a different way of playing and we have to adapt very quickly.

“I felt that was letting us down the past few years, we seemed like a one-trick pony. If you go with just one plan, you end up with egg on your face.

“We’re trying to adapt tactically to matches. There’s no one ideal solution. Hindsight’s a great thing, everyone can adapt afterwards, but on that particular day, someone comes up with a way, you have to counteract it and look at a way to get scores for your own team. We’ve been working on that type of stuff in training.

“You train a team to deal with the game as best they can when they go on the field.

”When different things arise, you’d expect leaders on the team to be able to communicate and sort the thing out themselves, or else come to the side and say ‘I think this is happening, how do we deal with it?’”

McKinley turns up to Jordanstown every Tuesday and Thursday night to share duties with Terence McNaughton, Gary O’Kane and Neal Peden. They look after the hurling end.

When they took over as a stopgap after PJ O’Mullan stepped down in the middle of 2016, they inherited a squad badly out of shape.

Almost two years on, that physical evolution remains one of the key focuses. Former Armagh strength and conditioning coach Tommy Stevenson looks after his end of it and for the management team, the changing training methods have taken some adapting to as well.

”The two performances - we need to make sure we don’t get carried away with them. You need to measure them and Laois will be the next measurement.

“We’ll see on Saturday evening how far along we are. Our training last year, it was well documented that we did a tough pre-season.

“The players came back in a better frame with a better fitness level and conditioning level. We started to top up on that again and move that forward.

“We cut down the running we did and we’re trying to do more running during our hurling training, and there are different ways of doing that.

“It’s proven that our players are fitter now than they were last year, and they came back fitter – it’s all analysed and so on, the GPS and so on.

“I’m not into it in a great way but I think they do help the mind of the player. I think they’ve helped our players.

“They’ve performed very well over the last two matches and that’s given them great heart. It makes them believe that the tough, hard work we’re putting in at training is reflected by the performance on the field.

“We need to perform to our best on Saturday evening – where that takes us, I don’t know. I don’t know at this minute in time.

“But winning or losing this weekend, we’ll still have to go back into that changing room with those players and everything has to continue. It’s not the end of the world either way.

“We’d love to be winning but irrespective, we still need to stick together and move forward, to believe in what we’re doing. We honestly believe we have improved.”

You can always improve, if you want to.