Laverty fully invested in Down passion project

By John Harrington

Anecdotal stories probably only give a flavour of the commitment that Conor Laverty is currently giving to Down football, but they tell a tale nonetheless.

The day-to-day business of managing the county’s senior footballers must be onerous enough, and yet the grapevine hums with sightings of Laverty at countless club and school games inside and outside of the county, coaching initiatives, breakfast mornings, sponsor engagements...the list goes on.

Before he took charge of the senior footballers the county’s once-proud reputation as a traditional power of Gaelic football was somewhat tattered, and when you hear of Laverty’s efforts in a variety of spheres can you almost picture him in your mind’s eye with a needle in hand, working assiduously to stitch it back together.

The man is all in, and he’s not going to stop until Down football is once again delivering on its full potential.

“I'm investing in it now, I really am,” says Laverty. “I don't like being part of something and it not going well, or being part of something where there's this perception out there that we're not dining at the top table.

“When you have a passion for something and a desire to be the best you can be, you'll leave no stone unturned on that journey and I think that's very important.

“I think that's very important that there's a lot of good men and women in Down who are putting a lot of time and effort into coaching. I think the standard of underage in Down is really coming to the fore now.

“There's a lot of good teams and I can see even from early stages in secondary school right through now that we're starting to compete again with the likes of the Derry and Tyrone schools.

“That's always a good guide. You can say schools football, probably even more so for me, whenever I took the U20s job I felt that I had a handle every young player in Ulster coming, be that through club or through school.

“If we were playing somebody I had a knowledge of who we were coming up against, who they were. I thought maybe even I had taken my eye off that ball whenever I took the U20s job so I spent a lot of time this year going to school games all throughout the province.

“I just felt I needed to get my edge back and needed to get my knowledge back so if I was coming up against somebody there would be no surprises.

“The first year of the U20s I felt I knew every U20 player that was coming up against us. I knew every good player in Ireland from my work with St. Michael's Enniskillen that year to Kilcoo being in an U16 Paul McGirr and Ulster minor competition.

“I think whenever you're coming up to this level you need to have that kind of knowledge, there can't be any surprises. I think there's a good confidence even for your team if the know that their management team is fully invested in it."

You might think that one person can do so much, but if you have someone in Laverty’s position setting standards then you’ll bring other people with you.

Down football went through a significant period of recession, but at all levels of the game it’s starting to bounce back again.

“I think we probably just took our eye off the ball a wee bit,” says Laverty. “Listen, like every county there's always different issues and things that go on. I think they've really started to gel together, the work going on in our schools is fantastic.

“We've a lot of good coaches in there, we've a lot of good footballing minded coaches who are teachers in schools and they're working really hard, the Abbey and St Colman's College are apparently in the process of employing a GAA development officer in the schools, so that's good.

“St Malachy's getting to the Markey Cup final last year, and even the county board have been great in relation to me. They've allowed me during the day to go into some schools and do some coaching and that, so I think that's been beneficial.

“And I think just even the feelgood factor is there. We had a breakfast morning last Friday morning and there were over 550 people at it. On Saturday past we had a coaching day where the Down senior men’s and ladies came together and had an open invite to any of the children of Down who wanted to come.

“I'm not sure but there could have been 700 or 800 people at it. So there is a feelgood factor there at the minute. Winning helps that but I think for it to go to the next level, it would be a case where imagine, in the group stages of the Sam Maguire next year, there was a Dublin or a Kerry or a Galway or a Mayo coming to Newry.

“That's really where I think it would jump another level, that would catch everybody's eye. The Tailteann Cup has been brilliant but there's still always that side of it that there's another level to go and that's where we aspire to be.”

They’re in a rush for the summit, but they’ve already climbed a fair distance.

Back in 2022 Down failed to win a single match in Division 2 of the Allianz League, the Ulster Championship, and the Tailteann Cup, so the team was in a fairly sorry mess when Laverty took charge.

“I think a culture had crept in, that losing was acceptable, players not conducting themselves the best off the field, issues around their lifestyle,” he says.

“I don't think it was down to management as much as what people made it out to be.

“James (McCartan) was with Down when were in Division 1 for four or five seasons and he had taken them to an All-Ireland final. I think players got into a mindset where football wasn't first for them in their lives.

“Winning didn't mean as much to them. They got to a stage where they were accepting the level they were at and they were comfortable in that.

“The key to it was a culture change and a demanding of certain standards, pushing them hard and pushing them to places where they would come out of that comfort zone. And that wasn't easy. We lost lads who could not commit and could not get to the required level.

“I think this bunch of players have thrived off that; they've excelled at being driven, to having standards demanded of them, not going through the motions in training, but that high standards are expected.

“That has brought them to a different level. They take a lot of ownership now and would lead it. A lot of the heavy lifting from the management side of things has been done; this is very much a player-driven group now and that is great to see. We had good standards last year and got to the pitch of where we wanted to go.

“The addition of adding Ciaran (Meenagh) gave us another injection of an insight into a team who had been at the top level; a person who had come from Division 4 right through to taking a team to an Ulster title.

“That knowledge that he brought and also the edge that he brought. We have been friends for quite a long time and there are very few people that I would trust and look at to say that they are at the pitch of what I would expect.”

Down go into Saturday’s Tailteann Cup Final against Laois as warm favourites considering they beat the same opposition comfortably in the semi-final of last year’s competition, but there are no sure things in sport.

The Midlanders look like a much-improved team this year under Justin McNulty, and the burden of expectancy may weigh on Laverty’s young team.

The fact they’ve lost the last two finals they’ve played in Croke Park (last year’s Tailteann Cup final and this year’s Allianz Football League Division 2 Final) might add to the pressure, but Laverty hopes those experiences will strengthen their resolve rather than weaken it.

“We'd have been disappointed with those two performances,” he says. “I think that's what maybe...I don't think we got to the level of performance against Sligo than we could have.

“I was probably more proud of the fact that whenever they were down three points, in the 61st minute, and look, the sending off had a massive bearing on it, but to show that character and to grind out that result, it's a very, very young Down team and like, we've looked at different teams throughout Ireland and their age profile and we'd be significantly lower than a lot of them.

“But people say to me, 'Ah, you can't get over the line'. But I've been in experiences, particularly at club level, where you were there or thereabouts but you just couldn't get over the line.

“And the only way you can better, the only way you experience how to deal with those moments, is by being there and playing in them time after time. Sometimes you learn more in defeat than anything and I think the lads have learned from those previous two disappointments, coming down the straight and going into extra-time.

“I think the confidence and the benefits that will give this Down group of players, hopefully that will stand to them in the future.”