By Brian Murphy
It was in September 2011, months after he was appointed as Cork hurling manager for the second time, that Jimmy Barry-Murphy happened to be reading an interview with David Matthews in the Irish Times when he realised he had, by chance, found his missing link.
In the build-up to the All-Ireland football final, Matthews, a double Olympian and still (just) the Irish 800 metre record holder, stated that the perfect level of fitness for a modern Gaelic footballer was that of an 800 metre runner.
Those words chimed with Barry-Murphy, who was pre-occupied with developing a philosophy for Cork hurling that would allow his side to break into what at the time looked like a closed shop. He didn’t have the materials to compete with Kilkenny and Tipperary in the savage version of the game they had played in the previous three All-Ireland finals, and so he had to find another way.
Matthews’ words got him thinking, though. As he would memorably describe in an interview with GAA.ie, Barry-Murphy’s vision for Cork was of an athletic, skillful brand of hurling executed by players more like greyhounds than elephants.
“We identified players we saw as key to our team and our kind of hurling,” Barry-Murphy said at the time. “The kind of hurling that we play is a very skillful game, very quick and very athletic.
“Maybe in time we might be proved wrong and that it can’t be successful. I remain to be convinced. We want them playing a brand of hurling that suits Cork players and that’s what we are trying to work towards.”
Barry-Murphy gave that interview six days before Cork were mauled by Kilkenny in last year’s Allianz League final, and he admitted in the weeks after the 3-21 to 0-16 defeat that the experience had unnerved him. JBM and Cork recovered. His instincts were proved right and his young side, playing the brand of hurling he had conceived, tormented Kilkenny in the All-Ireland quarter-final and probably killed off the greatest hurling team ever. The vision was finally made real.
Matthews, a fizzing ball of energy and anecdotes whose GAA experience amounted to a few years playing junior football in Kildare after his running career had come to an end, has played a key role in the transformation as the team’s physical trainer. He rolled down the motorway from Kildare twice a week and helped give expression to the philosophy. What might have seemed like an unlikely alliance at the time has since been hailed as yet another stroke of Barry-Murphy’s seemingly magic brush.
“I’ve served the quickest apprenticeship in history in this sport and now I might still make the Kildare Junior B team over-40s this year,” Matthews jokes. “But Jimmy is the man with the vision of how the game is to be played and all I am trying to do is marry that from a physical point of view as best I can.
“I have to be honest, I don’t have any secret potions or notions or anything like that. The methodology of training is all out there in the public domain. I don’t have anything different to the next guy, but what I do have is 30 years of experience of reaching a peak at the right time from my athletics background.
“That’s something that people in the GAA are used to too, but I might have a few extra years on most people on that. I would be fairly confident about getting things right for a specific date.”
From the start of the season, that date was June 23, when Cork faced Clare in the semi-final of the Munster Championship. After an up and down Allianz League campaign, Cork lost to Clare in the relegation play-off and dropped down to the second tier of the Allianz League for the first time since 1997.
Given the structure of the season – six Allianz League games in a relatively short burst before a 10-week break leading in to the Clare game – Matthews was presented with the difficult challenge of getting the team’s preparations just right.
“At the start of the year, Jimmy myself and Ger (Cunningham, selector) set our stall out. Ger is an integral part of the whole system. Without Ger and I working hand in glove it doesn’t work – that’s the first and foremost thing. We work exceptionally well together and there is a great synergy there with his technical knowledge and my athletics background it seems to work very well. We are very lucky in that sense.
“We set our stall out that June 23 was the time that we wanted to be in good shape for. The league, yes we wanted to have a decent showing, but at the end of the day we will be remembered this year for what we do in the championship rather than the league, I feel.
“We trained quite hard through the league and that was probably evident in some of the showings. We were still doing a lot of gym work and heavy work. Also, the ground conditions weren’t conducive to fast hurling in the winter and early spring months.
“The break between the league and the start of the championship was perfect for us. It was just what the doctor ordered. I was happier with the long break than going to the league final, honest to God. Purists would say you’d rather the silverware but from a coaching and training point of view it allowed us to get back down to basics. We had nine to 10 weeks to prepare for the Clare game and we got back to some of the stuff we had been doing nearly in November – endurance work and speed work to sharpen up.”
In the 70-day period between competitive games, Cork effectively completed a second pre-season. Matthews devised a training plan, borrowing heavily from his background in athletics, which he felt would yield the results Barry-Murphy was after, and tied it in with the skills-based work Cunningham is responsible for.
“We trained them like sprinters, 400m runners, and you would also want an element of a 5k runner in him,” he says. “Naturally, they have to have all the skills to go with that. If you look at us, Cork, lots of the lines and running is done off the ball and none of it is done from a static start. We would never practice anything from a static start – very rarely.
“If you look at most coaches and trainers they line guys up and blow a whistle. In hurling and football, the whistle is actually to stop the play not to start it. Most coaches line guys up and blow the whistle, so we would use a signal rather than a whistle to get the guys to move.
“If you look at all the plays in hurling and football it’s all done from motion, be it a jog a walk or at match pace. For example, if Daniel Kearney is striding down through the middle of the park and he comes off the shoulder of Lorcán McLoughlin he takes a pass at pace. Very few coaches will work off that pace.”
It’s the kind of talk that piqued Barry-Murphy’s interest that first day. Matthews cites Mark English, the 20-year-old Donegal man who came within two hundredths of a second of breaking his own national 800m record in London recently, as an example of the fitness he is hoping to replicate in the Cork players. English occupies a unique world between sprinter and endurance athlete.
“He nearly broke my 800m Irish record but he can also run 47 seconds for the 400 metres. This guy has a serious set of wheels, and I would have been like that too. In other words, that guy would be very quick over 20-30 metres but he can also run a decent five miles.
“When you look at the kind of distances hurlers are covering in games – around 10k – the likes of Mark English would mop everyone over 10k, but he would also be as quick as most of them over 30 metres too.
“The key to it is that 800 metre runners have a massive lactate tolerance threshold and they have an ability to operate with lactate acid in their system. In order to have that you have to do lactate tolerance training. We are talking about getting the heart-rate up and short interval type stuff as well.
“We do a lot of straight line running during the year and we change it then to multi-directional stuff because at the end of the day unless you are Jack McCaffrey (Dublin footballer) or Cathal Naughton you are not going to get a 40-50 metre run at goals.”
To some, Matthews’ methods may seem slightly off-the-wall, and there are others who will – and already have - argue that creating hurler/athletes is a dangerous road to go down. But the results give lie to those theories. As well as being one of the fittest sides in the country, Cork are arguably the most skillful too. Barry-Murphy simply refused to accept that Cork didn't belong in a world dominated by Kilkenny, innovated and beat them at a different game.
“Tactically Jimmy got it right (against Kilkenny),” he says. “I’ll be honest, I made some mistakes last year but I learned from them. We weren’t physically strong enough last year. But as amateur sportspeople – and this is where people mix up amateurism and professionalism – they only have four or five days a week to train. There is a diminishing return when it comes to training and it gets to a point where the more you train the less you get out of it.
“You have to find out what the optimum training level is for your particular guys and where they have come from previously. Our lads only train four/five days a week and we don’t do any of these crazy 6am sessions because I have yet to go to a championship game at 6am, have you? Until they start having early morning games, we won’t be doing early morning sessions.”
Nobody ever believed that Kilkenny could be matched for work-rate or intensity, the two calling cards of Brian Cody’s great side, but in Thurles at the end of July, Cork upped the stakes, their brand of perpetual motion hurling executed to perfection from 1-15.
“A guy - Seán O’Donnell - does our video analysis and stats and he comes up with some savage stats. There’s a point where if a tackle rate drops below a specific point we struggle. It’s important the intensity stays constant. It’s important the players believe that they have it in the tank in order to do it. If you have a question over your fitness, human nature, being as it is, you might say, ‘Sure, I could blow up after 60 minutes so I have to save a bit’.
“There’s an air of confidence now with the players that their fitness levels are at a stage that they can go out there and stick in the 17-18 tackles per game, to close down opponents and to execute the type of game Jimmy wants to play. Jimmy wants to play a particular type of game and style and all I can do is try to facilitate that in the sense that their work-rate is up there and they have a turn of pace.
“I have a saying, ‘It’s not the top speed that matters, it’s how quick you get to the top speed that matters’. Even if you are not the fastest player – and yes we are blessed with fast players – we try to develop their acceleration over the first two or three strides.”
Given the results Cork have achieved it’s easy to understand why Matthews’ methods would be accepted by the players; most elite sports people, after all, are obsessed foremost by success and only then with the methods of achieving it. But coming from a totally different sport must have been daunting nonetheless.
“I think the fact that I came in with Jimmy’s endorsement was a massive help. It was like a stamp of approval. I have to be honest, the players trust me implicitly. You have to gain trust and we were lucky enough we had a great winter ahead of the 2012 season. It worked well and we built up a great team spirit.
“I try to be approachable to the players. I understand how hard they work and once you understand the commitment they put in and then respect it there is a mutual respect. I idolise these players. They are extremely athletic, they are gifted and they sacrifice so much for their county.”
Matthews may be a relative newcomer to the elite level of the game – he played in two Kildare Junior Championship finals for Robertstown between 2007 and 2010 – but he has long been aware of the level of sacrifice required to make it as a top inter-county player. When he was at the height of his own running career in UCD, he lived beside former Meath forward Trevor Giles.
“I saw him every second night – if not every night – with a bag of balls place-kicking. People wondered why he was such a good place-kicker, and the reason why is that he practiced. It wasn’t a case of practicing until he got it right; he practiced it until he couldn’t get it wrong. That’s what Trevor would do. That gave me an appreciation in the mid 1990s of what he had to do to get to the top.”
Given his remarkable enthusiasm, it almost seems like a moot question, but has he ever once doubted if he was taking Cork down the right path?
“I’ve never driven out under the Jack Lynch Tunnel with an ounce of doubt in my mind. I swear on my life. I never came out of the Jack Lynch Tunnel feeling down except when we were beaten by Tipperary in Páirc Uí Chaoimh last year. June 22 last year. I was bitterly disappointed that time and when we were beaten by Limerick in the Munster final. We just didn’t perform on the day.
“But I have never doubted this. This is not a solo job. We discuss everything, myself Ger and Jimmy, and we are constantly evolving and trying to make things better. We have always believed that the path we chose to go down was the right one.”
David Matthews
Career Highlights
2 Olympic Games
7 World Championships
4 European Championships
Olympic semi-final in Atlanta 1996
National 1,000m Record (2.17.58)
National 800m Record (1.44.82)