GARY O’Kane doesn’t have to dip too far into the recesses of his memory bank to pull out reminders of the bad old days.
December 2018, nine days before Christmas, and the opening game of the Kehoe Cup against Wicklow in Abbotstown. A health scare had forced then boss Neal Peden to step back temporarily, leaving O’Kane to try and pull together a panel for the pre-season competition.
Across a playing and coaching career spanning three decades, the Dunloy stalwart thought he had seen it all.
“On the Friday evening I had 13 players,” he says, shock still in his voice two years on.
“I was phoning players that evening, trying to gather anybody up. I actually went back to my own club and three young lads who played senior for us came and helped us out.
“We’d two young boys from Cushendall who were in a house in Dublin, they were at university there, and they came out just to do sub, to take the bad look off it. That’s no word of a lie.
“Even the Tuesday before that Wicklow game, Ciaran McCavana was just in as chairman and he came out to Jordanstown to meet the players. When he got there I said ‘Ciaran, there’s only nine players here…’”
Terence McNaughton and Dominic McKinley had stepped away months earlier. O’Kane and Peden - who formed the rest of that management team - stayed on, but many of the same problems that had dogged the county for years persisted.
“Not everybody in Antrim wanted to play for Antrim… not that they didn’t want to play for Antrim, they didn’t want to do the hard work. They didn’t want to do the training, the gym work. That was a problem for years.
“There was a myth about this gym work, a lot of the players thought it was only a lot of old codswallop, but all the top counties are doing it and have been for a long time.
“Me and Neal stayed on because there was a lot of young talent coming through – the James McNaughtons, the likes of Keelan [Molloy].
“We’d come a bit, we’d tried to change the mindset, tried to get boys out, but if we’d stepped away and a completely new management team came in, you’re starting again in a sense.
“Where does that leave Antrim? That’s not what we were about. We lost two Christy Rings, we could’ve walked away, but we saw the young boys coming through and we didn’t want to put it back to where it was.”
On Sunday Antrim’s class of 2020 will run out at Croke Park on All-Ireland final day for the first time since a teenage O’Kane took the field to face Tipperary in 1989. They’re not going for the big one this time around, but building blocks are falling into place for generations to come.
Darren Gleeson’s Saffrons will start as favourites against Kerry in the Joe McDonagh final and victory would not only secure some well-earned silverware, as well as a crack at the Leinster Championship in 2021, it would also round off a 12 months when confidence and pride has been restored.
Undefeated since a one point loss to Offaly in the Kehoe Cup final back in January and promotion to Division 1B already in the bag, Antrim have shown all the qualities of a team on the up en route to Sunday’s McDonagh decider.
From two years ago to now – how did it come to this?
“F**k,” says O’Kane, puffing out his cheeks, “that’s a big one.
“Well look, after Christmas [in 2018] Neal came back in, Darren had come up a time or two with Liam Sheedy, and I needed a hand. I phoned Darren, told him the craic, that I was struggling, that we had 13 players that Friday… there wasn’t much point in telling him different and then he comes up here and sees for himself what was happening.
“I told him all that, and then said ‘would you be interested?’ Some sales pitch wasn’t it? But in fairness to him, he was interested. He wanted to have look at things - he never once says no.
“He was up those couple of times with Liam and he’d built up a rapport. He went and met players face to face and they all came in - gradually got better and better, and bigger and bigger.
“Now the results are starting to prove that all the hard work has been worth it.”
The work put in through the first Covid-19 enforced lockdown, and during the summer when competitive county action remained on hold, showed O’Kane how far Antrim’s mindset had progressed in a relatively short space of time.
Players have been quick to talk up the impact of strength and conditioning coach Brendan Murphy and other aspects of the management set-up. The county board has got behind Gleeson and the rewards are there to see.
“I didn’t know a pile about it,” says O’Kane.
“There was no S&C in my day but for the new generation of young players, right from club level, this is massive. This is all they know. This man came in with experience, and he’s been unbelievable.
“The boys have bought into it in a big way, and they need their credit. We were doing meetings on Zoom, every Tuesday and Thursday night. Now I wouldn’t be a wile hi-tech boy, but we were able to see them doing their sessions out in the back yard; you wouldn’t have got that last year.
“Two years ago they’d have said ‘sure we’ll wait until this is all over, gather up then and play a match’. We did S&C sessions right the way through lockdown and you can see the difference physically, and in terms of the fitness levels
“Antrim hurling has went up and dipped over the years, but now there’s a chance to set things the way they should be set, right through the different age groups.
“We have young boys in the U20s doing their own work, they’re not part of our squad, but they’re doing nights on their own so they’re ready next year.
“That’s the way other counties are doing it, the likes of Carlow, Kildare, Westmeath, and you see the strides they’ve made as a result. Antrim’s slow at catching up but thankfully we seem to be setting out our stall that that’s what we’re going to do.”
