Archive News
Dooley planning ex-boss’s downfall
Date Published: 18-Jun-2010
IT was in the early 1980s. A young John McIntyre, current Galway team manager, was hurling for his native Tipperary in a league match against Offaly and was being marked by the current Faithful County boss, Joe Dooley.
At one stage in the duel, as both men challenged for the sliotar, McIntyre came out worse for wear – requiring 15 stitches to his head. “I think he probably hit himself,” laughs Dooley. “There was no video evidence in those days!”
“Seriously though, it was accidental really. I think it was his own hurl that hit him but my hurl connected with his. There’re no hard feelings about it”.
There may be no hard feeling about the incident or about McIntyre’s two stints as hurling Offaly manager – “John still has friends in Offaly, I played for him … nobody has a bad word to say about him … he did his best for Offaly and I don’t think that’s an issue,” insists McIntyre’s successor in Offaly who hurled under the Lorrha man’s first Offaly tenure in 1997 – but there’ll be no room for sentimentality either when the two managers’ teams square off in the Leinster semi-final at Croke Park on Sunday.
Dooley insists that if his charges are to have any hope of toppling Galway, the overwhelming bookies’ favourites, then a massive improvement is needed from an Offaly side that were almost beaten in the Leinster quarter-final by a plucky Antrim outfit who made all the running before eventually wilting in extra-time.
“Jaysus, we’ll have to improve all right!” he says.
“We probably should have been beaten in normal time that day to be honest. We used our get out of jail card. Everybody thought it was curtains, we never really got going. We had Derek Molloy sent off for a second yellow card and it wasn’t looking good but we got two points in injury time and pulled through in extra-time. We kept playing away and tagging over points and I suppose our bit of fitness probably showed through in the end in extra-time, but we were very lucky not to lose that game.
“Relief was the main feeling afterwards. We conceded an awful lot that day and we were slow up front; everybody felt we had done everything right (preparing for Antrim) and people probably expected us to beat them but in fairness to Antrim they had prepared well and they had their homework done on us.”
For more of this interview see page 51 of this week’s City Tribune
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