GAVIN ON THE BRINK OF GREATNESS:
Vincent Hogan profiles the ice-cool Dublin manager
HE stands sentinel today, not just over a team, but over a city’s gift from its past, guardian of an heirloom almost.
When Jim Gavin talks about “the Dublin way”, there’s nothing remote or cryptic about his message. His style might, broadly, be to remain personable but distant in football conversation, maintaining the gentle detachment of a banker fobbing off loan applicants. But mention 1950s Dublin and that perfunctory tone begins to melt.
He talks about the team that begat Kevin Heffernan with the animation of someone, momentarily, forgetting themselves. Gavin was still 13 years away from coming into this world when Heffernan finally won a Celtic Cross in 1958. He was aged three when ‘Heffo’s Army’ came from nowhere to win an All-Ireland in ‘74.
Yet his view of the game today is franked by a conviction that Heffernan’s philosophy on the creation and manipulation of space, on pass and move in other words, adheres to – as he puts it – “a bigger style” of football that is worth protecting.
When Dublin moved away from catch-and-kick, they did far more than forge a different personality for the game in the city. The success of Heffernan’s teams changed its demographic, its social position. They adhered to what Gavin calls “a bigger style of football” that took Dublin from almost morbid, self-mocking stagnation to contesting six consecutive All-Ireland finals in the 1970s.
The January day in 2013 that they were laying Heffernan to rest, Pat Gilroy spoke at his funeral Mass. “He was very humble,” Gilroy said of his old St Vincent’s clubmate and close friend of his own father, Jackie.
“He never sought the limelight or accolades. For him, it was always about the team.”
Words that carry a strong echo in the Dublin management of today.
MOMENTOUS
Heffernan managed Dublin to three All-Ireland wins (‘74, ‘76 and ‘83) across a momentous decade and it would, naturally, have been his template that Tony Hanahoe followed for the win of ‘77 after Heffo’s, to-this-day, mysterious resignation.
But, tomorrow, Gavin seeks the fourth All-Ireland win of his fiveyear reign and the first three-ina-row for Dublin since 1923. His prodigious success continues to fly in the face of a deportment that makes it simply impossible to assess how much heat, if any, spreads under the collar of his shirt on big football days. There is a famous image of Gavin, on his knees, hands in the air, at the end of the ‘95 All-Ireland final against Tyrone that seems a portrayal of somebody virtually unknowable to us today.
So guarded, emotionally, has he become as Dublin manager that that snapshot of euphoria has an almost renegade quality in the public’s understanding of Jim Gavin.
If Dublin win tomorrow, the photographers swarming around him at the final whistle will do so knowing that, beyond a raised index finger, there’ll be no big money-shot. Gavin, who has committed for two more seasons at least, may be rewriting the record books. But his approximation of Paradise at such moments is the dressing-room, not the field.
It was Tommy Lyons who first deployed Gavin and Declan Darcy as neophyte coaches with the county’s U-21s in ‘03, a team that won Dublin’s first All-Ireland in the grade. A decade and a half on, Lyons suggests that their body of work today is “phenomenal”. “I just think that they (Dublin’s management) are good people,” says Lyons now. “They’re decent people and I think that decency in them comes out in what they do.”
And the comparisons with Heffernan?
“I’m not into this comparison nonsense because they’re all different eras,” suggests the Kilmacud Crokes man. “Kevin Heffernan took Dublin from the floor to win an All-Ireland and become a swashbuckling team that created a new impetus for the GAA in Dublin in the Seventies. How many All-Irelands he won is irrelevant.
“Because he was responsible for the rebirth of the GAA in Dublin.
RETICENCE
“So counting the All-Irelands that Heffernan or Tony Hanahoe or any of that era won... what they did was totally different. I don’t think that achievement is comparable to what Jim is doing. What Jim’s doing is a hell of a job in developing good footballers to become really good footballers. You only have to see the way some Dublin players have developed.
“No question, I think he’s improved most players under his watch by 20-25 per cent. And that’s a phenomenal achievement.”
Maybe the Gavin cliché is that his public reticence, his care with language, his appetite for Army jargon, all simply reflect 20 years spent in the military before a spell piloting the Government jet became the prelude to his appointment as a flight operations inspector for the Irish Aviation Authority. Everything achieved in his professional life will have been predicated on an obligation to keep emotion at arm’s length.
But those who knew him through those military years touch on an inner toughness and self-sufficiency too that maybe goes to the heart of what he now asks of a Dublin footballer. In these pages two years ago, Sean Finnegan recalled his eight years working an Army dressing-room during which time Gavin was a virtual constant as his captain.
Famously, they travelled to play two games against New York in April of ‘99, the second of which became a brutal physical ordeal for Gavin especially. Their hosts had a championship game looming against Mayo and were determined, it seemed, to make a statement.
“On the tight pitch of Gaelic Park and in front of a baying crowd, they gave Jimmy Gavin an absolutely horrendous time at centre-forward,” recalled Finnegan. “Now Jim was a hard buck, but they targeted him and were really giving it to him. Kevin McStay, a selector with me, said afterwards, ‘Anyone else would have said ‘Look, I’ve enough of this .... ’ They’d lash out’.
“But Jimmy just wanted more of the ball. He was all but inviting them on to him. ‘C’mon, the more ye hit me, the more I’m going to hurt ya!’ I’ll never forget after the game. He was destroyed.”
That hardness gets overlooked in the almost exaggeratedly abstract way he communicates with the outside world. That self-sufficiency under pressure, a pig-headedness if you like. Gavin was ten years a Dublin footballer (1992-’02), never the best, never the hardest, certainly never the biggest, yet nobody ever mistook him for a soft touch. The
THAT’S WHAT’S MAKING THIS GROUP SUCH HIGH ACHIEVERS. IT’S THEIR MATURITY AND CHARACTER, BOTH ON AND OFF THE PITCH
steel might have been subtle, yet it was always self-evident.
By and large today, he makes clear his indifference to rhetoric, regarding communication with media as no more than an obligatory adherence to protocol. We do not reach him; we expect we never will. His only one-to-one newspaper interview as Dublin manager was granted only on the basis that it wouldn’t be perceived “as promoting anything other than the air-show” he was flying in that weekend. And yet and yet... This summer drew a spark of something unfamiliar, Dublin refusing to do individual broadcast interviews after a 31-point annihilation of Westmeath in response to what their manager considered unfair TV commentary on Diarmuid Connolly’s push on linesman Ciarán Branagan, during their previous defeat of Carlow.
That seemed almost perverse given Gavin’s understanding of how every fire needs oxygen to survive.
Three weeks had passed, Connolly having accepted a 12-week suspension. In disinterring the story and taking issue with what he viewed as the “bile and malevolent attitude” of certain TV pundits, Gavin seemed to be simply recycling toxic air. Acknowledging freedom of expression as “one of the rights in the Republic”, he even seemed to argue that pundits should desist from commenting on any incident until all due process within the disciplinary system had been exhausted.
It was, arguably, the first time in his management of Dublin that rationality seemed to elude him.
And yet, broadly speaking, his leadership continues to be exemplary. Dublin’s National League final defeat to Kerry ended a 36-match unbeaten run, stretching all the way back to March 2015. Their progress since has been utterly serene, winning the five championship games it took to reach tomorrow’s showdown with Mayo by an average of just over 14 points.
FORENSIC
If Gavin shares anything with the departed Heffernan, apart from an obvious suspicion of media scrutiny, it is surely the microscopic focus on detail, the willingness to give any issue time. In Heffernan’s era, that taste for forensic would be serviced in a small Parnell Park shed with corrugated roof and wooden floor into which anything up to 30 men would squeeze for a sometimes marathon exploration of ambition and tactic.
That was a profoundly different world, of course, post-training refuelling amounting to tea and a choice of Goldgrain or Marietta biscuits. The Dublin of today is a miracle of refinement and micro-management, players educated not simply on good dietary habits, but professionally trained on how to cook the right food at home. A recurring bugbear of other counties is the amount of money the GAA continues to invest in the city at a time when its footballers threaten to put distance between themselves and the rest of the game.
But Dublin’s success has as much to do with a sharp understanding of lineage and succession as it has to do with finance.
And in Gavin, they appear to have identified a spiritual leader cut from, maybe not the same hard, taciturn bark for which Heffernan is remembered, but certainly someone who shares the same concept of man-management and leadership. For the higher this Dublin team flies, the more palpable Gavin’s authority over them becomes.
Tommy Carr, Dublin manager between 1999 and ‘01 and a former army colleague of the Round Towers man, believes that Gavin has managed to rein in a native excitability that, previously, tended to get in the way of city teams. And Carr admits that during his time at the helm, he could never have envisaged the strength in depth now at Dublin’s disposal.
“Even if they did have that strength in depth, what I felt Dublin always lacked was a maturity,” he suggests now. “A maturity in terms of character and personality. There was a tendency to get swallowed up in the limelight, people seeing themselves as famous because they were Dublin footballers, not because they won anything.
“That’s not the case with this team. This team, I believe, is a bit like the Seventies team in terms of their mentality. And that’s where I would credit Jim. He’s created this environment where he can tell anybody at any time that they’re not playing. That’s a powerful, powerful tool. At the end of the day, there isn’t one single player in the county of Dublin who wouldn’t give their left testicle to be on that panel.
“And that’s what’s making this group such high-achievers. It’s in their maturity and their character, in their personality both on and off the pitch. Yes they’re super footballers, but it’s because of their character that they’re achieving things.”
It was Heffernan who lit the modern Dublin fuse, turning the Hill into a virtual shrine and changing the grey, parochial face of GAA in the city. Gay O’Driscoll once remarked that there was a time in the Sixties when he would not tell people that he played for Dublin. By the Seventies, it had become “very sexy” to wear that jersey.
CREDIT
Today football gusts through the city’s lungs and Gavin has no doubt as to where the credit for that belongs. “Our heritage and the type of football that we play goes back to that team that was beaten in the ‘53 and ‘55 All-Ireland finals,” he said recently.
Tomorrow, Dublin’s manager will expect his team to honour that heritage. But he will do so with the quiet self-containment of a librarian, clutching that familiar black book, directing matters without fuss or animation.
Heffernan, you have to suspect, would like that. The sense of a man with little interest in his own reflection. Someone who is congenitally resilient and, largely, immune to stage-fright. A man whose personality is so subsumed by his team’s.
As Lyons says of Gavin: “Remember, he was an Air Corps pilot, those guys don’t panic. If they’re panicking, you know the plane’s going down!”