How virus drained the life out of Sligo’s 2020 from those who were there
The pandemic stalled promotion hopes and caused a walkover in both codes. For Yeats County diehards, a terrible beauty was born
RETRACE your steps to New Year’s Day, 2020. As Sligo GAA looked forward to a new season – with hopeful plans jumbled up with some inevitable fear and trepidation – safe to say you would not have heard any of the following predictions . . . ∂Adrian Marren, Sligo football’s most enduring servant, would retire on the same day as Diarmuid Connolly – September 30, before the championship had even started.
∂In-demand dual star Gerard O’Kelly-Lynch would play for the Sligo footballers on October 24, on the same weekend that his county hurling comrades forfeited a game; and two weekends later he would amass 12 points for the hurlers a day after the footballers failed to field a team.
∂Sligo football boss Paul Taylor would resign after a season that entailed zero championship outings.
Back in the ‘old normal’ when none of us had heard of super-spreader events or flattening the curve, all of this would have sounded too preposterous for words. Welcome to Sligo’s lost year of Covid . . .
*****
NO one expected Sligo to actually beat Galway last November. They were a down-on-their-luck Division 4 outfit, facing rivals operating in the upper echelons of Division 1.
Despite brave resistance in a low-quality contest the previous year, they had eventually succumbed to the Tribesmen by 13 points. Heading for Pearse Stadium, even a deserted one, was not exactly an opportunity replete with endless possibilities.
Now remove a chunk of your starters, and a significant minority of the overall panel, either because they had tested positive for Covid-19 or were close contacts. Mission Improbable has just turned impossible.
Against this backdrop, the Sligo GAA executive met on the evening of Tuesday, November 3 and reached what they deemed the only viable solution. With throw-in less than four days away, they forfeited that Connacht semi-final. Sligo wouldn’t kick a ball, angrily or otherwise, in the 2020 championship.
Stress
That difficult decision came after several days of stress, mass testing and positive results, amid lots of talking between county board officials, team management and players.
But when the players collectively convened via Zoom that Tuesday night, coming after the county board management committee had already met, the die was cast.
It’s reasonable to speculate that not every player was happy. Players, after all, want to play; and a statement from the panel that Friday night rubbished the perception that they didn’t want to fulfil the fixture.
Could Sligo have cobbled together a team, even if it meant veering outside their panel of 32? Quite likely.
Some observers, within and outside the county, think they should have, if only for the integrity of the Championship. But that’s easier said when you’re not in a bubble so badly compromised by Covid. Could the GAA have granted Sligo a one-week stay of execution? Given that the Connacht decider was fixed for a week before the three other provincial deciders, you could argue there was just enough wiggle room.
But Connacht Council CEO John Prenty begged to differ that week, highlighting that there wasn’t 13 days between Connacht semi-final and final, as required under Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) regulations to allow for a delay.
“They didn’t look for a postponement because close contacts are out of action for 14 days, so a postponement wouldn’t have helped,” he maintained.
Either way, Sligo’s year ended in total anti-climax and Taylor stepped down the following week.
Contacted by the Irish Independent, Taylor didn’t wish to revisit the saga now that he’s no longer manager, but he clarified that his resignation had nothing to do with Covid.
Current players were likewise pretty elusive in the past week . . . perhaps they feel 2020 is a year best parked as they await a collective return under new boss Tony McEntee.
But the reminders are everywhere: another year dawns and we’re still in lockdown, mired in virus fatigue and fixture uncertainty. ***** MARREN had no such concerns at the start of 2020. He wasn’t worried about Covid because he didn’t know of its existence. He would be 36 that August and knew the clock was ticking, but he had signed up for one more year and wanted to try and drag Sligo straight out of Division 4 after a grim 2019 which bequeathed nine straight defeats.
Marren (below) had made his NFL debut in Wexford Park, in 2004, lining out alongside Taylor in the full-forward line. The two went way back. The Curry clubman came off the bench in London as Sligo began last year’s league by ending their losing streak. He made another appearance, late on against Antrim, as they made it two wins on the spin. But he didn’t see any game-time as they lost to Wicklow and Waterford. Sligo’s next outing in Wexford was critical. “I didn’t make the squad. Not that we’d a fallout, but we just had a couple of words,” Marren recalls. “Like, I would have played with Paul . . . the two of us are two straight talkers. I felt I should be getting a bit more game-time – not an argument. “They got a great result away to Wexford, and promotion was in our hands then. We’d a weekend off before going to Carlow. We’d a trial game in Markievicz (Park) and I remember moving well. We trained again on the Wednesday night in Athlone, and that was the last night of training.”
The following day, Leo Varadkar addressed the nation from Washington and everything stopped.
In fairness, lockdown wasn’t a bolt from the blue. The virus was already here, the foreboding palpable. Marren recalls that last training session in Athlone (a weekly staple to facilitate their Dublin-based players) and the jokes that they’d have to stop all the end-ofsession high-fiving.
But as the lockdown morphed from weeks into months, the notion of a ‘quick fix’ disappeared. And, perhaps for the first time, Marren realised he’d been on the treadmill for 16 years without even stopping to think.
Selfishness
He was no longer the young buck who started out: his son Tadhg is now five, his daughter Sadie 19 months, while his wife Fiona runs a beautician’s business. Yet family commitments and the selfishness of an inter-county calling don’t always tally.
“For me it probably hadn’t changed. I was probably going around living a single man’s life, doing whatever you have to do to get to training. That’s the way it was for me. It was madness when I think of it,” he now reflects.
“Up to that, with Sligo, we nearly had a manager every two or three years. And every manager rang to say we were going back training . . . you’d never really think about it, it was just straight back into it.
“I’d be gone to work early. I’d be home, pick (the kids) up, drop them off at another house, head for Athlone on a Wednesday evening or the gym on a Tuesday evening. It was just pure running and racing. And then that had just completely gone in March, April and May.”
Marren still tore into training when the club season reopened.
“It was probably the freshest I’ve felt and the best shape I’ve been in for a long time,” he says, recounting how Curry won the Sligo IFC title to regain their senior status.
Taylor phoned after the final to ascertain his thinking on a county return.
“He kind of said that I was well down the pecking order,” Marren recounts.
But even though Sligo still had a shot at promotion, the thoughts of going back for three or four nights a week left him cold.
“It was hard to walk away, but I was a different man afterwards. The weight was just lifted completely.”
As it happened, his short retirement statement was eclipsed that day by official confirmation that a Dublin icon’s days in blue were over.
“My phone never stopped for twothree days,” he says, “and I was thinking to myself, ‘I can only imagine what Diarmuid Connolly’s phone is like!’”
***** MID-OCTOBER brought the resumption of inter-county games, and an abrupt unravelling of promotion dreams: Sligo were pipped at the post by Carlow in a high-scoring thriller. O’Kelly-Lynch played wing-back that Saturday; the next day he bagged 3-4 to seal promotion for the Sligo hurlers in their Division 3B final against Leitrim.
That should have been the perfect springboard for their Christy Ring Cup opener in Derry the following Sunday. But, on the Wednesday before, one of the panel returned a positive Covid test, forcing a number of close contacts into isolation while the entire squad was tested. On the Friday, Sligo issued a
statement expressing regret that they would not be able to fulfil the fixture.
At least the Ring Cup format afforded Sligo a second chance. No such luck awaited the footballers.
Having received the all-clear after the hurlers were tested, O’Kelly-Lynch came off the bench as the Yeats County’s NFL campaign ended in a twopoint defeat to a promoted Limerick.
His next code-hopping venture was on November 8, when his freetaking exploits couldn’t save the Sligo stickmen from a three-point loss to Roscommon. Ideally he would have been in Pearse Stadium the previous afternoon. Except that, a week before Sligo’s Connacht SFC semi-final, their world started falling apart.
“We became aware that one person was symptomatic,” explains Seán Carroll, the football team’s Covid officer, and later elected county board chairman in December. Reflecting on how the next week played out, he admits: “I never want to see anything like that again.”
Once the problem was realised that Saturday morning, a call went out for rapid testing of the entire group; this was carried out on Sunday and the results came back on Monday.
As Taylor told local radio station Ocean FM that week: “It was without really any warning. We’ve always acted within the guidelines.”
According to Carroll’s recall, that blanket squad test revealed seven positives and some “inconclusives” that required retesting. A further four players were deemed close contacts.
Straight away they were down to 21. A couple more were injured; others were hoping to be fit but hadn’t played county football in some time.
“Later in the week there were extra positive tests which generated more close contacts,” the chairman elaborates.
Carroll makes it clear that the ultimate decision to withdraw came from the county board’s management committee that Tuesday night. The players also convened remotely that night, but this conference call came afterwards, he confirms.
“I suppose the decision was never going to be theirs. It is a decision for the county board. And, like, the players were consulted – maybe not as a group but individually. I think the management had a good sense of how the players felt.”
As fans digested the news, Taylor explained the rationale on Ocean FM: “Our numbers just don’t add up to fulfil the fixture. Really, from a football point of view, it’s not a case that we’re not going – we can’t go.”
He said his players were “gutted”; they thought a refixture would have been an option and felt the situation had been forced on them.
“We’ve a panel of 32 available to us, according to the guidelines, and that’s probably too few for a smaller county when something like this happens. As I said before, this is the youngest panel in the country and it’s heart-breaking for them.”
Integrity
Not everyone, though, was rushing to sympathise.
“I’d love to know the exact situation that has led to this. Is it 11 players or more?” Tomás Ó Sé, the RTÉ and Irish Independent analyst, wondered aloud on Twitter that Wednesday. Suggesting the integrity of the competition was now being questioned, he added: “Why is it all weaker counties that seem to be in bother with this? Does it suit them?”
Carroll still remembers the Kerry legend’s tweet and was “disappointed in it. I felt he didn’t understand our situation”.
He found the weaker counties line “hurtful”, insisting: “there was no motivation for us to not play the match”.
Another former Sligo player offers a more jaundiced perspective.
“Tomás was 100 per cent right with his comments,” he claims. “The game should have been played.”
Even if this meant bringing in club players to beef up numbers and ensure Sligo would “at least honour the fixture.”
At the time, Marren harboured similar thoughts that the fixture should have been fulfilled. He had been talking to a few of his former team-mates that Tuesday evening.
“I think their mind was made up for them before the Zoom meeting even started,” he surmises.
Marren appreciates that, with a sizeable number of regulars ruled out, Salthill could have been a painful experience for Sligo.
“And it did nothing for Galway either,” he concludes, “because in the Connacht final (against Mayo) they were just dead.”
Looking back, Carroll still reckons the right call was made.
“It ran the risk of potentially ending the game with not the full complement on the field, because I don’t think we would have had enough subs,” he says. “Clearly players want to play . . . they’re brave and courageous, and they don’t believe anything is beyond their capabilities. But when you stand back slightly, it wasn’t going to serve anyone well to try and fulfil the fixture with a really depleted side.”
Thus ended both the longest year and the shortest championship for Sligo. They weren’t able to do their talking on the pitch; instead, on the Friday before, they issued this statement: “The perception that Sligo senior footballers did not want to fulfil this weekend’s fixture is incorrect.
“All players who could feasibly make themselves available wanted to play the game. The players are disappointed the game could not proceed for reasons outside their control.”
The following week, Taylor called time on his ill-fated two-year tenure, citing “family commitments, work commitments and the current health crisis” as primary factors.
Former Sligo All-Star Eamonn O’Hara was the top homegrown contender but, on November 26, came confirmation that Tony McEntee, of Armagh and Crossmaglen fame, had been installed on a three-year term. McEntee’s assistant manager and head coach will be Crossmolina native Joe Keane, providing a direct link to the Taylor regime.
The following month, Carroll, who had been Sligo’s CCC secretary, was elected county board chairman, having outpolled the incumbent, Brendan Leonard, 55-40.
Even amid the current uncertainty, there is more to be gained by looking forward, not back. Carroll’s wish for 2021?
“Hopefully this lockdown is the last one, and that we can move on and as the vaccines become more available, that transmission rates keep low and that we can get back to having something like what the old normal was. I’m hopeful that we can be successful in Division 4 and go into the championship and be a match for whoever we’re up against.”
Where it counts: on the field.