O'Neill seeks bright start and promises a change in team shape for league opener against Meath

So here we go. Kildare are back in the second tier of the National League and will be mixing it with the likes of Cork, Galway, Derry and, most immediately, Meath. It seemed odd to witness the Lilywhites in Division 3 last year, but successive relegations under Jason Ryan left the team languishing in the bottom half of the 32 team system, hardly an ideal place to be for a county that was so close to an All-Ireland final in 2010.

Promotion back to Division 2 was achieved with minimum fuss, losses to Sligo in the regular rounds of the league and a final loss to Clare aside, and the agenda for this year is to solidify their position in the second tier.

Seeking a bright start

So there’s no better place to start than Navan, a derby clash with local rivals under a new management team that are looking to improve the fortunes of the Royals after some underwhelming years. Andy McEntee is the man entrusted with addressing the issues that has dogged Meath’s progress in recent years, and they have been in the headlines for a number of reasons so far in 2017.

Former full-forward Joe Sheridan, at 33, made his debut between the sticks for the county in the O’Byrne Cup, while McEntee has also drafted two Dublin natives into his panel to increase the competition. Their more defensive approach in their opening games of the year has also raised eyebrows, something Cian O’Neill discussed when he sat down with the local media on Sunday.

“I can see next Sunday being a hugely defensive game having been at the Laois match. That’s going to pose a challenge for us, and it’s a nice challenge, especially up in Navan,” he said.

So how important is it to get a win in their first game of the league? O’Neill will tell you it’s just as important as getting a win in any other match, but the competitive nature of Division 2 means that wins will need to be tallied up in as quick a fashion as possible.

“Obviously you want to get a win in your first match, and if it’s away from home it’s a bonus. Will it be the end of the world if we lose next week? Of course it won’t, but it certainly won’t set the tone that we want to set for the league. So we’ll place a huge amount of value on it.

“Our motto will be, and this came from the players this morning, that we’ll take every match at a time. I know managers and management teams who identify matches to take two points there and two points here. To me that’s rubbish because if you’re doing that you’re actually taking your eye off the next match that’s in front of you. We’re taking one match at a time and we’re going to give it everything.”

Educational training

O’Neill met with the media following an ‘education day’ in Hawkfield last weekend, where the players were at Kildare’s training base for over six hours to run through a variety of issues, and one of those was the loss to Dublin in the O’Byrne Cup semi-final seven days previous. Nobody wants to put too much weight on a match that is more or less meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but there were worrying signs of bad habits coming back to bite the Lilywhites as a sizeable lead was surrendered to a Dublin team that was effectively third string.

“Were we happy with the performance last week? No we weren’t. We were in a position where we could have and should have won that game, and won it handsomely really. There were aspects of our game that we need to look at and we did that today. The whole purpose of today is that we have time together where lads aren’t rushing from work to training and back home today. That’s the value of a day like today, and we spent a lot of time looking at that and looking to improve on it,” said O’Neill.

“It’s never ideal to lose a match, but I think it has been blown a little out of proportion in the whole scheme of things. It was a match in the third week of January. We had six 19 or 20 year olds on the pitch and we made nine substitutions, we had a perfectly legitimate goal disallowed. We still should have won the match, we still accept that and nobody is hiding away from that fact.

“Dublin last week was our first real challenge, coming off the back of three relatively superficial challenges. So from that perspective it was exactly what we needed, and listen, it would have been great to have still got that lesson and held out by a point or two, but then again, that being said, we wouldn’t have been here today having a superb day with the players if we were playing tomorrow.”

A failure to punish sides when they are on top will have greater ramifications in Division 2 than it would have in last year’s league campaign, and with the quality of opposition much higher, Kildare’s performance will need to reach new levels too. That fact isn’t lost on O’Neill, who spoke about the current deficiencies in the team at present.

“I think the key thing about last week is that some of the issues that dogged our performances last year were on show again. You try and put the season gone behind you when you meet back up. Pre season, early Christmas you say you’re going to move on, and you do move on. But last Sunday you saw some of those same things again.

“Not being ruthless when we have a commanding lead, game management when we’re controlling a match to not give the ball away, simple turnovers and shot selection. Those type of things we would have put behind us coming into the new year up to that point. So it was a cruel reminder, because it wasn’t nice walking off that pitch, it was a cruel reminder coming off it that lads, these things haven’t gone away and we really need to work on it in the next number of sessions before the league starts,” he said.

Change in shape

So what kind of Kildare will we see this year? There was plenty of ire drawn from supporters when management decided to adopt a safety first approach in last year’s championship by playing a defensive system that featured two sweepers, leading to the Lilywhites scoring just 1-20 across two games against Wexford and Westmeath. It was something that Kildare supporters had not been used to, but O’Neill insists that it was done out of necessity and that he won’t be doing that again this year if he manages to keep his panel fit.

There has been no sign of a sweeper in the early weeks of 2017, and Kildare look to be focusing on moving the ball forward quicker and more potently.

“We’ve played a slightly different shape this year,” explains O’Neill.

“I’d love to have played it last year but we couldn’t. We talked about it last year as a group, but basically any tactical setup is dependent on the players you have available. With the amount of injuries we had last year, the type of players we had to fit into the roles we were looking at just weren’t available to us.”