Kieran Shannon: There's progress and then there's Jim McGuinness progress

Cork’s has been how it is for most people: incremental, not always linear or apparent to the casual observer or even the more clinical kind.

Last year they made the All Ireland quarter-finals. Hardly a monumental achievement as they’d also reached the last-eight of the championship the previous four years but this particular run featured a consistency of performance as well as a couple of Division One scalps – Mayo and Roscommon – that hadn’t been there in any of those other campaigns or any by the county since 2012.

This year they failed again to qualify for a Munster final, losing to Kerry in Killarney, but again they’d failed better. In 2021, in Ronan McCarthy’s last game in charge, they’d been ahead of the old enemy at the first-quarter mark only to be five down at halftime and end up getting hammered by 21. In 2022 in Cleary’s first championship game in charge they were only a point behind on 50 minutes before losing by 12. In 2023 they were never ahead of Kerry in their Sam Maguire group game but by the end only trailed by two. In 2024 they led at halftime in Killarney and were only overtaken after 50 minutes before eventually losing by just three. Still no victory but still more progress.

Then there’s been the league.

When Cleary went from mere team coach to de facto team manager after Keith Ricken took ill in early 2022, Cork just about avoided relegation.

In 2023, in his first full season in charge, they finished fourth in their division on seven points: three wins, a draw, three losses.

In 2024, they got off to a slower start but ultimately finished joint third, again on seven points: three wins, a draw, three losses.

Enough to make them believe they’re getting there and that some year soon they’ll finally return to Division One for the first time since 2016.

Donegal under McGuinness also operated in Division Two this season but on totally different timelines.

With him there is no standing still or two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back, one step forward again. He only knows and does quantum leaps.

At the first time of asking with a group of players he’d only inherited a few months earlier, he managed to do something he also instantly pulled off in 2011 but Cleary in more than 24 months over Cork or any of Cleary’s three predecessors wasn’t able to do: win promotion from Division Two. They could easily have been stuck there for years, just like the purgatory Cork are in or the Limerick hurlers were before the first of two breakthroughs they had in 2018, but instead they hit the ground running, smashing Cleary’s Cork by 11 points in the opening day.

In the championship there has equally been no requests or tendency for patience from McGuinness. In both his previous stint as county manager and now in his current one, he immediately masterminded the defeat of the province’s standard-bearers, Tyrone in ’11, Derry this year, the pair of them having won a second consecutive Anglo-Celt the previous season.

We are not yet privy to his inner workings in this particular tenure; clearly from his petty and renewed boycotting of Declan Bogue, he wouldn’t approve of any This Is Our Year project this year. But from that terrific book which Kevin Cassidy contributed to, along with McGuinness’s excellent memoir and Rory Kavanagh’s insightful Winning, also published a year after McGuinness stepped down, we have a good idea of the immediacy and intensity he brings. ‘SNIP THE TIES NOW!’ ‘Defend that zone with your f****ing life!’ ‘Contact, contact – THUMP HIM, THUMP HIM!’ ‘There will be goals in this game!’ 

Standing in his way to winning an Anglo-Celt though is another obsessive, charismatic figure, only one whose patience far more resembles Job’s than Jim’s.

The great NBA figurehead Pat Riley used to speak of the Principle of the Painful Progression but whatever rites of passage he felt his Lakers had to endure against the Boston Celtics or Michael Jordan’s Bulls would undergo against the Detroit Pistons were significantly shorter than what Kieran McGeeney and his Armagh team have to had suffer.

In McGuinness’s first year as Donegal manager he won an epic All Ireland quarter-final over McGeeney’s Kildare by a point. In his last season in that tenure – 2014 – he also won an All-Ireland quarter-final by a point over a side McGeeney was coaching though not yet managing. McGeeney, having come of a successful but trophyless stint as Kildare manager, had been wisely brought into the Armagh management by his old mentor Paul Grimley.

Grimley would depart the Armagh setup with his reputation intact and his successor in place. McGeeney has been their manager since. And yet in those 10 years that he has been there and McGuinness has been gone, Armagh have yet to win even an Ulster title.

Few boards have been so patient with a manager. Cork gave Larry Tompkins seven years to win the same Sam Maguire that he had lifted as a player before turning again to Billy Morgan. Colm Collins managed Clare for 10 years without winning any championship silverware but was retained for winning something even more precious than the Munster title David Power won in Tipp: sustained respect for his county.

Those who have played and worked with McGeeney though swear by the work he has done with this team. The culture he and the leaders of 1999-2006 had established had been eroded, much like how Cork lost theirs in the wake of Canty & Co departing. Under his management, those values and standards have been returned, bit by bit, year by year.

He is working with players that didn’t win any Ulster at minor or U20, a counterpoint to the cynics who’ll point out they haven’t won any Ulster at senior either with him at their helm.

In the space of 12 months Armagh lost three key championship games on penalties. Last month they lost to McGuinness again by a point in the league final.

His playing career was a case study in the value of persistence; 13 years on from his debut he lifted the big one. To win something after managing inter-county teams for 16 seasons though ‘would be just as rewarding.

Maybe not on McGuinness’s kind of schedule but all the sweeter and more impressive for being on his watch.