MARKED MAN
Déise star Gleeson can now cope with close attention of opposition
AUSTIN Gleeson must have been tempted to check if his 2016 player of the year awards had been fitted with a tracking device.
He would have been justified for thinking so last summer, when the attention that accompanied being named hurler and young hurler of the year proved difficult to shake off.
That was never more obvious than in last September’s All-Ireland final, when Galway’s Gearóid McInerney stuck impressively to his security detail.
‘He followed me everywhere,’ revealed Gleeson at a Littlewoods Go Games press event yesterday.
‘At one stage we had a sideline on one side of the field and I was on the other side and he literally followed me until I put the ball down on the ground.
‘I knew at that stage he was just not going to leave me alone. I think I read in the programme he was 16 stone so it takes a lot to get away from him,’ joked the 22-year-old.
But, for the most part, last year was no laughing matter for Gleeson, whose intercounty season ended with that All-Ireland final defeat to Galway.
It was the expectation, though, cranked up by those player-of-the-year awards which thieved so much joy from Gleeson’s own game.
‘It was not pressure coming from other players or management, it was pressure coming from myself, which I was putting on myself.
‘I don’t know why I was doing it but it was just that I wanted to go out and prove why I was given those awards and it just did not go for me. ‘Everything I tried seemed to not come off. There was a couple of moments in games where I was starting to think “it is turning now” but then I would fumble a ball or something. I suppose I was trying too hard,’ he confessed. But on the basis that such adversity will stand to him, the Mount Sion clubman has vowed to bounce back stronger this season by delivering on a pledge to ‘enjoy’ his hurling once more. ‘You learn from your mistakes. I looked back over winter on a lot of the games last year and you could see that it was something that I was walking around with my head in my boots as if I had no kind of confidence. ‘I don’t know why it was like that but this year, if I’m getting man marked, I just need to get into the game. ‘It doesn’t matter if I don’t get a ball for the game, but if I get three or four hooks, that’s something I’ve got to do for the team. I’m not putting that pressure on myself, just try to do the simple things and keep that pressure off myself. ‘Last year the pressure was on me but this year I am determined to go out and do what I did as a 16-year-old and just enjoy it. ‘I am not saying that I was not enjoying myself last year but everything I did wrong I was kicking myself and everything I did right I was thinking I could do better. I just want to go Focus: Austin Gleeson ignores a flying hurl back, enjoy it and play hurling as I did in previous years.
‘Having the awards off my back is a release I suppose, in a way, that you can go out and there’s no pressure.
‘You don’t have the title of the awards on your back this year. Just go out and play free-flowing hurling again and see how it goes,’ added the Waterford star.
However it goes, it promises to be a final spin around the managerial track for Gleeson’s manager Derek McGrath.
‘He has a contract with the county board until the end of 2019 so hopefully he sees out that contract, but it might be his last year.
‘I do know it was hard for him to come back after the All-Ireland final. He took that loss tough. Everyone took it tough, getting so close, but he came back and we’re training hard.’
‘He brought me in in 2014 so I don’t know what it’s like to play for Waterford underneath anyone else. So, I wouldn’t really like to know, going into our last Championship together, if it was the case that it is his last year.’
This year’s Championship will march to a more hectic beat as Gleeson and his Waterford teammates face into a four-round Munster campaign which will be played out in as many weeks.
For a player who sustained a hamstring injury playing for his club at the weekend that could present a challenge, and Gleeson conceded that players may have to take time off in order to recover.
‘It’s a Munster Championship game and it usually takes four or five days to get over it, and four in four weeks is going to be tough,’ he said
‘I know a lot of lads work Monday to Friday; there’s some teachers on the panel who’ll have it easier. But, if it comes to it, maybe getting Mondays off could be something you have to look at in a few weeks.
‘It will be tough but we will have to be as fit as we ever were and we have the squad now that we hope can go on and qualify.’