Kildare stalwart raring to go under his 'last manager' at county level
It's likely that Brian Flanagan’s reign will outlast his county playing days with success having been scarce and the team now back in Division Three - where he started out with them in 2016
Kevin Feely recently turned 32 and Brian Flanagan has just been handed a four-year term as Kildare manager. “It definitely will be my last Kildare manager,” the Athy man admits.
Feely was knocking around the Kildare panel as a teenager and overlapped with Flanagan’s playing days somewhat before signing for Charlton Athletic in 2012 and by the time he called time on his cross-channel career after further spells at Carlisle United, AFC Wimbledon and Newport County, the Johnstownbridge man had been forced into retirement through injury.
Feely finally made his Kildare debut in 2016, by which time Flanagan was a Kildare selector under Cian O’Neill. Prior to that, he had managed the county juniors and has since had a successful spell in charge of the under-20s, so his reach extends far across Kildare football.
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“He’s just a very familiar person in Kildare to pretty much all of us on the panel either through him managing Johnstownbridge or knowing him personally,” says Feely.
“A lot of our younger lads would have had him as under-20 manager so he’s someone that’s pretty well known to a lot of us so we’re pretty excited about him getting the job.”
As Feely alluded to, it’s likely that Flanagan’s reign will outlast his playing days with Kildare and with success having been scarce and the team now back in Division Three - where he started out with them in 2016 - he doesn’t have a specific target for what he wants to achieve by the time he finishes up.
“It’s not something I have thought about in great detail but I have certainly thought about where I’d like to be, where I’d like us to be this time next year and that would be out of Division Three hopefully having been competitive in the Leinster Championship.
“Kildare have always wanted to be getting to Leinster finals and I think if we could be in a position that we’re doing that again, that’d be brilliant.
“It may or may not be within our control to be in the Sam Maguire. I know that winning Division Three doesn’t guarantee you being there but hopefully we can reach a [Leinster] final and be in Sam Maguire again.
“The goals are very obvious and very simple but that’s certainly where I’d like us to be next year and hopefully will have established a bit more of a winning culture and a better mindset and a more together group that are ready for the long haul over the next four years to try and get us back to where we feel like Kildare football should be which, ultimately, in the long-term is competing in Division One and competing for Leinster Championships and hopefully going on from that, to be getting back into All-Ireland semi-finals.”
The 2024 season under Glenn Ryan was particularly torrid as Kildare lost all of their League games, narrowly avoided defeat to Wicklow in Leinster before Louth sent them packing and then were dumped out of the Tailteann Cup by Laois.
While there may be a feeling that the only way is up, Feely insists that they must first be humble enough to accept where they are firstly.
“There were definitely times last season where we were losing games thinking that, ‘Surely this is the bottom of the barrel here, we can’t get any worse’ and then we did. So we can’t be telling ourselves, ‘We can’t go any worse than this’.
“Next year we’ll have to prove ourselves to be worthy of getting promoted out of Division Three. That’ll be a big challenge in itself given where the confidence levels are at after the team just continually going from bad to worse last year so that’ll be a big enough challenge.
“We are absolutely in the position that we deserve to be. There’s no doubt about that. We don’t really have a foundation to base any confidence on at the moment.
“That’s where pre-season is going to be so important for us and the management team to get the right culture in place to get a bit of belief back into the squad to do what’s needed to be done to get us back where we want to be.”
Given Flanagan’s track record, there is a level of optimism around what he can achieve in the coming years, but Ryan’s appointment was greeted with great excitement locally three years ago, largely due to his status as a player, with a number of other heroes from Mick O’Dwyer’s era also coming in alongside him.
But it just didn’t work out and Ryan quickly stepped down following the Laois defeat this year, admitting that he had failed to get the best out of the players.
“Personnel-wise, we suffered in the last three years,” Feely explains. “It seemed like at the end of each year, you’d think you had some bit of hope to build on from the last game of the previous season but then 10 or 11 lads would be stepping off the panel and they’d be a variety of lads, it could be a couple of starters, a couple of subs.
“It felt like we were bringing together a new squad because of all the changes that were happening with player personnel more so than anything else and it was hard to get any continuity when that was happening and then as a result of that, our strength in depth and our playing profile just got a little bit worse for each year that went by and we weren’t able to turn things around.
“It’s hard to put your finger on anything in particular but maybe we just weren’t the right squad for the right management team at the right time and it’s just something that just seemed to go from bad to worse in each season. It’s hard to know why it went so badly.”
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