At the end of 2013 Nicholas Walsh sat down with Leon Cameron, the coach of the GWS Giants in Sydney, for a talk. Walsh had been at the club since its birth a couple years before, working in the strength and conditioning wing of the team’s coaching structure, but he wasn’t really feeling it like before.
He told Campbell about his time stripping down the coaching and games system in Cavan to its bones and rebuilding the games-rich, player-driven machine that generated the footballers that won Cavan multiple Ulster minor and under-21 titles from nothing. He talked about working in Croke Park as national games manager overseeing big, complicated structures and big numbers. It was stuff that transferred between every sport: getting the most from a little, handling and improving precociously talented young players, marrying talent to hard work and getting players to buy in. He wanted to get back into the business of developing players. He wanted to coach.
“His initial reaction was I don’t think you’d be able to coach,” says Walsh. “You’re from Ireland. You don’t know the game. You haven’t played the game at the highest level here. I said ‘if you believe that, fine.’”
It inadvertently snagged on every jagged part of Walsh’s story in Australia. He first landed in Melbourne in 2000 as a gifted footballer airlifted out of Cavan before he turned 18 and was home again in three years, his body broken by the demands of competing and his own expectations of himself. That ending was reworded into trash talk and thrown at him for years during games with Cavan. Didn’t bother him then. Didn’t bother him now.
“It’s being Irish, I think. You grow a thick skin. There’s a bit of ignorance as well, proving people wrong. How do I get the best out of myself? By doing things people don’t expect out of you. It’s how I live my life. It’s the values instilled in me of hard work. I get my head down and go about my business. I earn respect from the group like that.”
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“Being Irish, you grow a thick skin. You want to prove people wrong too
Cameron came back to him a few days later with a job as a development coach and responsibility for the reserve team’s backline. As a doping scandal that began at Essendon seeped into different clubs through former players and coaches, Giants assistant Mark McVeigh was suspended for a year at the beginning of last season. Walsh was bumped up to backline coach.
“I loved the challenge. I loved that I had to fast track my own knowledge of the game to get up to speed with the rest of them. I still do. If Lenny Hayes, our midfield coach who played nearly 300 games for St Kilda, watches recordings of matches four times and it takes him six hours I make sure it takes me eight hours. I need to make sure come Monday morning my stuff is spot on. My work ethic oversees that I’m on the right track.” The results were exceptional. The Giants lost the AFL equivalent of the All-Ireland semi-final to the Western Bulldogs by six points. They were losing games by 200 points a few years before, starting out with a squad that didn’t include a single player over 20, all landed into a club lost in a rough part of western Sydney called Blacktown, charged with growing the game from nearly nothing.
The Giants needed to create their own identity and culture. The players shared apartments in one small area. They carpooled out to Blacktown for training and back. For two years they lived and worked in each other’s pockets. “We tried to create that culture and hopefully sell the message of getting better. There were a lot of times we were selling hope as well. As a coach, there were times you were beating your head against the wall wondering what am I doing? Is it going to improve?”
Walsh brought something of his own story to the team. When he landed in Melbourne first he went back to school and played well enough to make the Victoria state team and win best and fairest awards in school. He was conceding height and size to everyone at Melbourne Demons, but still had the highest vertical leap at the club.
But he was pushing too hard, too soon. He loaded on nearly 10kg in the first few months. Injuries followed, all based on a chronic groin injury. In time, his body gave way. “It was like putting a porcelain floor on a wooden base. It’s going to collapse.”
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The same problems followed him home. So did the same expectation. “It probably was a pressure. Did I give the best of myself in terms of a Cavan career? I probably didn’t allow myself because I tried to stay training like a professional along the way. Was I an overtrainer? I probably was. I sort of got it right around 2007-09 when I was 24/25. I only ran and trained when Cavan did. I took up other things like swimming and boxing. Before that I was doing about 12 spinning classes a week. I was fit but I was breaking down.”
The end came suddenly. Val Andrews came in for 2011 and persuaded Walsh to pump weights. Every ache in his body grumbled stop, but Walsh drove on. “That really wrecked me. I was driving up and down to Dublin for work. I’d stop into Blanchardstown IT and do weights with Val, but I just didn’t do my body justice.”
He stepped away and won a county title with Cavan Gaels. The job in Sydney came up that summer. His time with Cavan was over before he turned 30. “Would I have played with Cavan the following year? Would my body let me? I don’t know, but it took a good 18 months of rehab to get it right. I still have two ligament tears in my hip and a full groin reconstruction 18 months ago.”
He never stopped long enough for anything to ever eat away at him. He misses people, not places. That kept him visiting Australia from Cavan every December for four years, visiting old friends and AFL clubs to learn about their training methods for the kids at home, and made it easier to split this time.
His father Tom was like that, too, working for different radio stations from Cork to Monaghan and rearing a family as he went. He also thrived on big, impossible looking challenges. When they eventually settled in Cavan in 1990, Tom searched for traces of hurling. He took on the Monaghan hurlers and made something of them. He nurtured a team after that from rocks and stones in Cavan.
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“As a 15-year-old I played hurling for Cavan,” says Walsh. “My brother played and I remember himself and Joe Hayes (Tipperary All-Ireland medal winner) had a massive battle one day against Monaghan. Obviously, Joe was beyond his time, but he was a centre-back. It was like Ronaldo coming up to play for Cavan Town.
“My father moved around Ireland and worked in a number of places. My mum just retired after 25 years working the same job in a bakery in Cavan. That in its own right is a characteristic. That’s what she loved. It’s about getting on with things.”
With McVeigh returning this season Walsh will take overall charge of the Giants’ team defence. More change, no problem. He was back in Dublin for last weekend’s GAA coaching conference, talking about coaching concepts and building a set of values that guide a team. He talked about teams and players always standing tall, but not just to make themselves look big.
Walsh meant how they carry and represent themselves. At the Giants they encouraged players to ask after the guy next to them in the dressing room and use the most basic social tools to build the bonds that support teams through games. Work ceaselessly to perfect the smallest brushstrokes and the big picture will take its own, pleasing shape.
It’s worked in Cavan and Sydney. Always worked for him.
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Tyrone game rearranged
Last night’s Dr McKenna Cup game between Tyrone and Ulster University was called off due to a snow-covered Healy Park pitch.
But the game will take place today at Carrickmore, with a 2pm throw-in.
A pitch inspection declared the Omagh pitch unplayable at midday. Tyrone, having lost their opening tie to Cavan, need to win their remaining two games to stand any chance of retaining the title they have held for the past five years.