Offaly

Sport:	Football
Irish:	Uíbh Fhailí
Nickname(s):	The Faithful County
County board:	Offaly GAA
Captain:	Niall Darby
Home venue(s):	O'Connor Park, Tullamore
Recent competitive record
Current All-Ireland status:	Leinster (PR) in 2022
Last championship title:	1982
Current NFL Division:	2 (7th in 2022; relegated to Division 3)
Last league title:	1998
First colours Second colours

The Offaly county football team represents Offaly in men's Gaelic football and is governed by Offaly GAA, the county board of the Gaelic Athletic Association. The team competes in the three major annual inter-county competitions; the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, the Leinster Senior Football Championship and the National Football League.

Offaly's home ground is O'Connor Park, Tullamore. Currently there is no team manager following the death of Liam Kearns.

The team last won the Leinster Senior Championship in 1997, the All-Ireland Senior Championship in 1982 and the National League in 1998.

History

Perhaps the most famous moment in football history came in the 1982 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final when Offaly played Kerry. The match was a repeat of the previous year's final; however, not only that but a win for Kerry would give them an unprecedented fifth consecutive All-Ireland SFC title. Kerry were winning by two points with two minutes to go when Séamus Darby came on as a substitute and scored one of the most famous goals of all time in football.^[1] Kerry fumbled the counterattack which allowed Offaly to win by one single point with a score of 1–15 to 0–17.

The Offaly vocational schools' team have made it to six All-Ireland finals but lost all six, including the first final when they were beaten by the Cork City team in 1961.

Support

Professional golfer Shane Lowry said in 2021: "But any time I get the chance to go to O'Connor Park and watch Offaly play, I do and I am the first to give out if they lose and I am sitting in the stand."^[2]

Current panel

Team as per Offaly vs Longford in the NFL Division 3 Round 5, 5 March 2023

Current management team

• Manager: Vacant
• Selectors: Martin Murphy,^[3][4] John Rouse^[5]
• Coach: Alan Flynn^[6]
• Backroom: Brendan Egan, Paul Fitzgerald^[7]
• Strength and conditioning coach: Keith Carr^[8]

Managerial history

Offaly have a history of appointing "foreign" managers, doing so on several occasions since taking Eugene McGee from Longford in late 1976. Emmet McDonnell became the tenth foreigner to manage the team when he was appointed in 2012. Only Tommy Lyons was a successful appointment though; Lyons led Offaly to the 1997 Leinster SFC (a first in 15 years) and then to a first National Football League Division 1 title the following year.^[9] According to Colm Keys, writing in the Irish Independent after the Offaly County Board sacked Stephen Wallace in May 2018: "In the quest for perfection, Offaly have repeatedly left themselves in a right old mess when it has come to choosing and retaining managers... No county has experienced such managerial upheaval as Offaly since the turn of the century".^[10]

Players

Records

• Tony McTague is the team's top scorer in National Football League history, finishing his career with 9–360 (387) in that competition.^[52]
• Cillian O'Connor of Mayo became the highest scoring player in the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, surpassing the record of Kerry's Colm Cooper, a feat O'Connor achieved against Kerry during a defeat in Killarney in 2019.^[53] He had done this by scoring in all of his previous 51 previous championship matches prior to the record breaking match, except for one game against London in 2013 when he had been black carded, a rate of scoring in the competition only previously seen from Offaly's Matt Connor.^[54]

Most appearances

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (June 2021)

• The following are among those to have made the highest number of appearances for the senior team:

All Stars

Offaly has 30 All Stars, as of 1997. 19 different players have won, as of 1997. Martin Furlong won four All Stars, while Matt Connor won three. No one else won more than two.