Little wins. By leading Wicklow to the knock-out stage of the Tailteann Cup, Oisín McConville has matched one of Mick O’Dwyer’s most significant achievements with the county.
The Kerry man was the last Wicklow manager to preside over six championship games in the one campaign, 15 years ago during their 2009 ramble through the All-Ireland qualifiers.
In neighbouring Dublin, they’d struggle to see the achievement in such a stat but then they have contested 141 championship games since the qualifiers were introduced in 2001, averaging out at just shy of six games per summer.
Wicklow, meanwhile, have only managed 62 games in that same time frame. Throw in their Tommy Murphy Cup and Tailteann Cup outings and that figure still only rises to 79, just over three championship games a season.
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Johnny Magee was almost blue in the face complaining about the situation when he managed Wicklow. He once said that a few of his players jacked it in and told him, “What’s the point with only two games in summer?”
McConville could yet step out on his own as the first ever Wicklow manager to lead his team out seven times in a championship campaign if they beat Leitrim this Saturday evening in Longford in their preliminary quarter-final encounter.
The really positive thing from the Armagh man’s perspective is that Wicklow, who beat 2022 Tailteann Cup winners Westmeath in the Leinster championship, have shown enough form this year to believe they can go quite a bit further.
“I still don’t think . . . like, apart from the teams that went directly into the quarter-finals, I don’t think there’s anything that we should be afraid of,” said McConville. “There’s nothing that we haven’t come across before so we have to view it like that.”
McConville’s issue is that he can’t be fully sure what to expect from his team. Immediately after beating Westmeath in their provincial opener, only weeks after being relegated from Division Three, he painted the picture of a slightly schizophrenic group.
He agreed at the time that a Tailteann Cup title tilt wasn’t out of the question but acknowledged: “There’s another side to us and we’ve seen that earlier on in the year, we don’t want to go back to that”.
They should have beaten Kildare in their next game but then failed to show up against Fermanagh in their Tailteann Cup opener, losing by 16 points.
“You turn up the Tuesday night after that and you just wonder, how could we have put in a performance like that?” reflected McConville. “The Laois game after it was different because we should have won that game, we had enough chances to probably win two games that day.
“The two Leinster championship games we played, that’s probably the most efficient we’ve been, two or three wides in each game. The better the opposition gets, you’ll not get away with all the wides. It’s something we need to brush up on but we’re thankful we have the opportunity.”
Wicklow were wasteful again last weekend against Carlow, hitting 17 wides, but, crucially, found a way to win, finishing strongly with the last four points of the game. Crossmaglen man McConville had quickly come to realise that losing to Carlow, Wicklow’s neighbours and rivals, wasn’t an option.
“There’s large rivalry there and, I’ll tell you the truth, we played them a few times last year as well and I didn’t have a clue about the rivalry until you actually go down there into it and get a sense of it,” he said.
The 2002 All-Ireland winner’s feeling that there is still more in this Wicklow team comes from watching them, at times, baulk at the prospect of dominating other teams. If they could just kick on.
“I still think we’re playing within ourselves, I still think we get to a point . . . like, we looked really good at the start of the second half against Carlow, I thought the energy we had, some of the scores we got, brilliant. Then all of a sudden it’s put the brakes on,” he explained. “But we came good in the end. I thought our bench worked really well for us and we’re still there, still alive.”
