Conor McDonald: Full Q&A at The Oxford Union
Interviewer: Well, thank you for being here today. We were just saying upstairs that you were in Ireland last week but back over here for a few days but on Wednesday you are flying back?
McDonald: Going back to the beautiful County Cork. I would recommend the Irish south coast to anyone, definitely. It’s a beautiful place. I know sometimes you don’t know about places before you go but trust me, a great place with so much to explore.
Interviewer: Absolutely, and we will touch on your time in County Cork just a little bit later. Starting off, you’re from a sporting family, wouldn’t you say? Your parents were involved in football, your grandad was a footballer. What got you into football yourself?
McDonald: Good question. I think my father wanted to be a football player, but for things that happened in his own life that period of his life went past. He became involved in marketing and he picked up a job at a football club from there. My grandad, on the other hand, was a football player in Northern Ireland, a great player for Glenavon. He was offered the opportunity to play in England with the likes of Boston United and Halifax Town but it never came to fruition.
Myself, I wanted to become a football player all the way through my life, I played at a few Merseyside teams in my youth with a couple of trials at Liverpool along the way but it never really came off. My father really pushed me to looking into football-
Interviewer: So your father didn’t look back on his attempts and try you to look elsewhere?
McDonald: No, no, the opposite really. I admire my dad’s job and he is fantastic at what he does but he was definitely more keen on having his son as a football player!
Interviewer: So, growing up who was the person that you looked up to the most? The person that at that time you really wanted to be like?
McDonald: I would say - well, have we any Liverpool fans here? Yes, well it was a player from the team that I supported, Steven Gerrard. I think really, he speaks for himself with what he did throughout his career with football. He’s a man that everyone really likes whether it be for his footballing ability or his personality. I’d sometimes go to Anfield with my father and watch him, just only him sometimes! You know, there’s twenty-two players and I’m just looking at him, how he ran, how he was getting back, how he was getting in the box. He was incredible.
Interviewer: Well, moving on to where you have made your name at Cobh Ramblers in Ireland, I’ll start it off with a simple question: How have Cobh become so dominant now?
McDonald: We have good players. I mean, the players we have had recently have been amazing, it’s nearly been five years since I landed over there with Cobh and I think the potential in the team now - it’s a very young group of player, with outstanding senior players - I’ve just tried to keep it as simple as we possibly can and I think the energy that has resulted has brought together the players and the fans as one and they’ve done really well.
Interviewer: Would you say that it comes down to practical things like training, for example or maybe is it more psychological with team spirit coming into things?
McDonald: I think it’s all of those. I think when you go into a club for the first time, if you’re going to have success at that club then you need to have spirit in there and any good team, inside football or outside of football a spirit is a key thing. Then you need ability, ability is important. From there you need to fill those abilities with confidence and belief so it’s a bit of everything.
Interviewer: But if you had to narrow down your success at Cobh Ramblers to one specific strategy that you have taken, what would that be?
McDonald: I think it’s about giving people confidence. I’m a strength-based coach, you know, I like to see what players are good at before developing that side even more, then giving them the belief of what they can achieve. I think that was most apparent in my teams in the First Division and beyond. When I came in, Cobh were pretty much just your average mid-table second tier side and then suddenly 2020 comes around and we’re flying high at the top. Unfortunately, nothing came of that but the season after we won the First Division title. We got pretty much a whole new team in for the Premier League the next season and we won that at the first time of asking with the same strategy.
Interviewer: Do you ever find it difficult to balance managing some of the Irish league’s biggest stars such as Kern Hernandez or Adrian Granger and balancing that out with lifting up the rest of the team?
McDonald: I don’t let any of my players feel secondary in my teams. I’ve never seen them as secondary or less important players. With footballers there’s a perception around them and you know, there’s the ones scoring all the goals and all the glory and obviously they get all the headlines. But I only see them as football players, as good people and if I can help them achieve what it is that they want to - you know, I always ask them for commitment and every player I’ll talk to, I’ll go through a plan with them of what they want to achieve in the game and then allow them the responsibility and create an environment for that to happen.
So for me it doesn’t matter where you sit in the hierarchy, whether you’re the best player or whether you’re working in the kitchen, it’s about everyone coming together and having a role to play in the club succeeding.
Interviewer: How do you think that compares to managers who have spent longer on the playing side than on the management side, because obviously you didn’t have much of a playing career, you studied youth development and football business. Do you think that’s given you a particular type of insight that has allowed you to become so successful?
McDonald: Yeah, I think for any manager there is a different pathway for everyone. There’s no one path to become a successful football manager or a coach. Most weeks I’ll be stood beside somebody like Jon Daly who has played at a good level of football, I wasn’t able to do that so my path was different, I had to choose a different route and that was an incredible experience because from a young ago, I got the chance to learn about coaching, about people and what helps people improve. Then, as you gain experience, you’re on that curve and the more you learn, the better you become.
Interviewer: And on the other side, what do you think is your biggest threat right now as a team?
McDonald: I’m one where I’m no good if I’m in an environment that is just about maintaining. I have to be constantly developing and improving so the trap that you’re always looking to avoid is the complacency. When a team does well, sometimes you can soften up just like in real life as well so it’s important that you stay aggressive, you stay strong and you’re constantly looking to create that mentality every day.
Interviewer: Sure, but when you go into the Champions League and you have teams in there like in your group last season with teams like Benfica, Celtic, Chelsea, how do you keep a mentality of ‘we can beat this’?
McDonald: It’s very simple really, you go back to when you started. We have a set of goals that we set at the beginning of the season. Then obviously you begin to measure those goals as you go through the season. So you know, if we get into the knockout rounds in Europe, we can measure that as a fantastic season, just as we did when we made it to the Group Stages. We set the bar from where we left off last time.
Interviewer: On a similar note to the Champions League, obviously a contentious issue in football is the money in the game. Compared at least to Chelsea and Benfica who you played against last season, how do you feel money holds you back and do you feel like you can compete when the club’s means are completely different?
McDonald: Of course it is different, I mean we are leading the way in the league on spending, wages because of our successes last season domestically but coming up in the Champions League, it just depends what your challenge is.
When I left Tranmere to come to Cobh, my idea was to come into a club outside of the Premier League and to elevate that club into the Premier League and Europe. Money will allow you to do things and do stuff that other club’s can’t and it has its advantages but I’m happy to coach. I mean our owners are great, including the owner we had when I came in. They know we can’t go and spend sixty, seventy, eighty million on a player, that’s just not what Irish football is about. But can we bring in a talent, develop and grow them and see if that can take us to the next level competitively, sure, and that’s what is important.
Interviewer: So how does that change your strategy as a team, knowing that you can’t just go out and spend to achieve success in Europe?
McDonald: Well, it means you have to work even harder because you have to develop each and every player, whether they are twenty years old or thirty-three years old. Can you maximise the talent? But that brings joy to me, that’s why I do this. It’s why I studied youth development at university and why I moved into coaching generally. So, strategically you can’t just handpick the best players, you have to be clever in other ways, coaching, managing, recruitment of talent and try and bring them altogether.
Interviewer: Do you ever worry that that just can’t do as much as money in terms of getting you up there?
McDonald: I think as long as you’re doing your best. When I retire I’m not going to look back at how many cheques I signed for tens of millions of euros, pounds, whatever. I’m going to be looking back on when I worked with an individual player or a team and made them the best that I possibly could with the resources that I had. It’s where you can find happiness and for me, happiness is developing talent, no matter what age they are, to help them progress.
Interviewer: You’ve obviously been at three clubs, Burnley, Tranmere Rovers and Cobh Ramblers but you have only managed one club in five years. However, do you think that manager’s frequent moves across the board are just about people wanting to move up, move to different clubs, get different experience or maybe there was too much pressure to deliver trophies in a short space, moving on to avoid that?
McDonald: I think it works two ways: you can get sacked and the other is the expectations of the club. Although you also have professional goals and professional ambitions so there are many reasons why. I think it’s eighteen months in the current climate is the timeline of a manager of a club which is no time at all and I think that I have been lucky that my chairmen have been liberal with me over expectations, allowing me the time to do what I needed whilst also giving them no reason to sack me.
For me, I would love a trophy in Europe as a professional ambition - will I achieve it at Cobh? I’m not sure, it depends where we are at the end of my current contract and my own professional ambitions might get in the way of that.
On a broader basis, it just depends how managerial successes are measured. I know that in Ireland, Dundalk won four Premier League titles in a row before he left for Sheffield Wednesday and since they haven’t been able to win a title since, they are on their second manager since Vinny Perth with their most recent manager not even lasting a year in the job, it’s a tricky subject because circumstances are different everywhere you look.
Interviewer: Just as a final question from myself before I hand over the Q&A over to the audience: where do you see the team at the end of the season?
McDonald: Well, hopefully we can retain the title for the third year running, picking up as many domestic cups as possible but I know that my ambition now lies in Europe. I want to take this team further in any of the three continental competitions. We made the Group Stages of the Champions League last time around, I want to maybe get some points on the board there or possibly even get our chance into the Europa League.
Audience: After looking back at some reports in the club’s First Division dates, I know that you were so close to winning the title in 2020, how did you feel when it didn’t fully work out and how did that affect you in your professional career?
McDonald: Of course there was disappointment at that time, I was very privileged to be at the club to be given the opportunity to stay there. I took over a club that was in sixth position. We had to cut the budget, bring down the age of the squad and lose a lot of players within that. Our idea was to see if we could grow the club whilst losing some very good players and we brought in some fantastic players.
We were amazing that year but you finish where you deserved to finish, we just weren’t quite good enough over the course of the twenty-seven games to win it. We went so close, everyone talks about the pressure of it all but I think when the pressure was really on in those last few games, we did quite well. I look back on it and I learned from it, winning promotion the next year but the memories of that year were also incredible, we were a team escaping the mid-table mediocrity and everybody was up for it. It was a good time for me in all honesty and it’s helped me as a manager deal with those kinds of situations.
Audience: Has there been one particular person that has taught you the most as a coach?
McDonald: I’ve had lots of mentors that have really helped me. I’ve always been one to learn from every coach I’ve ever worked with, I’ve always taken something away from them.
I think definitely the one that stands out at the time was Ian Woan from Burnley when I was still doing my studies at UCFB. I was working in academy football and I had a way of how I wanted to coach the young players but I also had - off the pitch - standards that I felt were important in order to maximise talent.
His organisation, his detail, how he was, how he sort of captured the group and the spirit as well as his mentality. I learnt so much from him in that period - our ideas of football were slightly different but that’s the way it is - but I’ll never forget the sheer professionalism of him and the work ethic that always stuck with me as a young coach. He was well renowned as revitalising Burnley’s youth system with the likes of Dwight McNeil and Chris Conn-Clarke and to see him first-hand was a priceless experience.
Audience: We’ve heard quite a bit of conversation about mental health in football over the past few years. It seems to me like managers must feel the most isolated in football, I just want to hear your thoughts on mental health among managers and if there is any conversation between managers and your own experience of it?
McDonald: Rightly so, not just in football but also in life around mental health. I suppose my experience of it personally is that I’m much better now at dealing with it. There’s always pressure there of course but I handle pressure well. What I struggled with was being a young lad, fresh from university myself and landing myself in Ireland.
I grew up in Liverpool as a kid, went to university in Lancashire so my life pretty much revolved around the English North-West at the time and then suddenly I was on my way to Ireland with no friends, nobody knowing who I was, the local press slaughtering me for the club giving me the job having had no experience. I struggled in my first year-and-a-half with that and I only confided this in my chairman, Michael O’Donovan and actually the club captain Jamie O’Hara but I struggled with a gambling addiction in the first part of my managerial career at Cobh Ramblers. The club dealt with it magnificently well, sending me in the right directions to therapists, psychologists, everything.
I think in the broader sense across managers, it’s about filtering the pressure on them. I never get too carried away when we win, never too disappointed when we lose and dealing with that pressure is important in my line of work. I tend to want to help the players with the social media that is tapping into the game, there’s a focus on them that has never been before, there’s a greater pressure on them to succeed as well.
But no, in my line of work we’re always asking the guys to never feel it as a weakness to talk. I was brought up in an area where men didn’t speak so much and with the older generations putting their heads down and getting on with it and then they dealt with it. But now it’s much more of an open society and there’s still a way to go but it’s certainly not a weakness to talk and if you can lift that burden from you in general then you will feel better for it, there’s always a solution. If people know that there is a hand there to help then we can all get there.
Interviewer: That’s great, thank you so much for coming to speak with us today Conor.
McDonald: Thank you.
Tango: Indeed, we'll have to wait until July for the Champions League games to restart!
James:
Darnell Fisher is a solid player for most teams at our level of football and that shows with his career to date but Hernandez really is the signing of the season for me.Scott: Well, we have the money, might as well splash out now!
tedbro20: Our window with raiding Dundalk has caused a ruckus in the league for a few years to come I think
It's a common thing with men around the world as Conor said, particularly around the older end of life. Nice to see a little bit of change in the period since.
