A ferocious competitor on the pitch, he’s now a prowling presence on the Kildare sideline.
We are all now accustomed to the modern GAA player template. Focussed like a laser, chiselled out of granite and prepared to do what it takes to win at the cost of all else, the 21st century Gaelic footballer and hurler is a breed apart.
And while lots of others had some of those traits in the 1980s and 90s, it was when Kieran McGeeney hit the inter-county scene that the mould was perfected.
In the beginning he was toiling in isolation. Making his Armagh debut in 1993 he already had a formidable reputation from his college days. An excellent Denis Walsh profile of McGeeney from almost a decade ago recall a tale Joe Brolly tells about playing Sigerson with him in Queens in 1992.
“After training,” says Brolly, “while the rest of us were going off to look at women McGeeney was going to the gym to do weights. He was a very serious lad, very quiet. There was no chatty-chatty with him. He was serious, intense. My memory of him at the time is of a particularly ordinary footballer. But he was totally obsessed with bettering himself. He made the most of very limited gifts.”
That’s the key to the man they call Geezer. He wasn’t Stevie McDonnell, he wasn’t Stephen O’Neill, he wasn’t Gooch. He didn’t have the natural ability, or a patch of it to be honest, compared to those lads. But he bettered all of them on the pitch at times because of his work-rate, intensity and preparation.
By the mid-1990s he was still largely unknown outside of Ulster but that would soon change. By 1999 he had moved from his home town club of Mullabawn to play for Na Fianna in Dublin. He would soon have a Leinster Club title to his name and in the same year Armagh won their first Ulster title in 17 years.
To put the Orchard over the top though took the arrival of Joe Kernan as inter-county boss in 2001. McGeeney was already captain, a position he wielded with a zeal unknown in GAA at the time.
“He was the catalyst,” says Cathal O’Rourke, an Armagh teammate, in the same Walsh piece. “He was the dynamo. He was very good at talking to players, one on one. Boys he knew we needed, who could have slipped through the net, were cajoled and kept. If you missed a training session it was Kieran McGeeney lifting the phone to ask why — not Brian Canavan (former joint manager) or Joe Kernan.”
With McGeeney the rock on and off the field, Amagh went and won their first All-Ireland in 2002 and in the same year McGeeney collected his third All-Star, his third Ulster title and his only Texaco Player of the Year gong.
All the years of work paid off and that insatiable hunger for preparation led him to be compared to Roy Keane and held up as both a shining light, and a distress flare by some, for the way the GAA had gone.
Now we know he was just the trailblazer. He retired from playing in 2007 and was soon back in action as manager of Kildare. He has brought the same intensity, fitness levels and ethos to the Lilywhites and while has yet to win any silverware of note there, he has established them as a top eight side and a serious threat to any team on their day.
At just 41 he still looks like he could do a job on the pitch and his recent attainment of a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu shows he’s not done learning and improving himself yet. As someone once said, a lot done, more to do…
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