Just reward for keeping the faith
Second choice in mid-summer, David Clarke refused to abandon hope
IF THERE is a poster boy for this group of Mayo footballers, no one fits the frame quite as neatly as David Clarke. He has been knocked down time and again, but each time he has found a way to get back up, refusing to let go when his time appeared spent.
By mid-summer his chances of starting in the biggest game of the season hovered between slim and none. He was the 32-year-old sub goalkeeper on a team that some believed were all washed up.
He had come back lured by the prospect that a new manager in Stephen Rochford represented a fresh start, but found himself in an old position – playing back-up to Robbie Hennelly.
He had managed to regain his place as Mayo’s number one last summer but, in keeping with the rhythm of his career, when opportunity arrived, his fitness departed.
Injuries have been a constant. At the tender age of 17, he was on the 2001 National League winning panel, but a ruptured cruciate ligament the following season thieved a few years.
Even when the good times came calling under James Horan, his body refused to let him make the most of it. It was his late save against Bernard Brogan that booked Mayo a place in the 2012 final but 12 months later, when the team was primed to deliver against the same opponents, he could only watch on from the dug-out.
He tore his hamstring off the bone that summer against Roscommon, and refusing to exercise care, he damaged it a second time when he returned to training prematurely in a bid to be fit for that year’s Connacht final.
Throw in last year’s break-down after the quarter-final win over Donegal, which handed Hennelly back his place and the wonder is why he pressed on.
Clarke admits that in mid-summer he did not see his fortune changing.
‘On the law of averages if you are a substitute for five of the League matches and the first two Championship games you are not going to get your shout that season,’ he says.
‘But then if you are seeing things coming you are probably not seeing things at all,’ suggests the Tubbercurrybased Garda.
His promotion to the team was sourced in the aftermath of the Connacht semifinal defeat to Galway, where Hennelly’s turned-over kick-out in the final quarter led to Thomas Flynn’s result-defining goal.
The irony is that it was Hennelly’s kicking game – his restarts in spring were consistently good – which displaced Clarke in the first instance.
In terms of ball-handling – a long perceived weakness in Hennelly’s game – and shot-stopping, Clarke always appeared to have the more developed skill-set.
BUT then keeping goal was always his game since he was knee-high which might explain why he is such a fine shot-stopper; skills honed as a kid by a hero-worship of Manchester United’s great Dane Peter Schmeichel and a youth spent wearing the living room carpet threadbare plucking cushions from the air.
Those instincts remain razor sharp and have helped Mayo plot their way through an unfamiliar pathway.
Lost in the whirlwind of debate that Aidan O’Shea’s fall to the ground ignited against Fermanagh was the crucial stop which Clarke made to deny Paul McCusker when that contest was in the balance.
There have been others, some spectacular as with his intervention to get in the way of Emmet Bolton’s bullet against Kildare. Others modest but crucial, smothering Colm McCullagh’s feebly struck effort and getting all the angles right when advancing on Tipperary’s Josh Keane in the semi-final.
Clarke will openly concede that he cannot match the two-footed Hennelly when it comes to kicking, or that he could attempt to ape the masters of the species, Stephen Cluxton, who has reinvented their trade.
He has worked hard on his own kicking game, but argues that those who are obsessed with measuring a keeper’s kicking competence are often guilty of not setting the tape in the right place.
‘Stats are thrown out in the media but some of them can be very false. Do you want to win 20 kick-outs on your own 13metre line or do you want to win 15 on the 55-metre line?
‘It looks like with the 15 you have a lower percentage but you might get more scores from those than you will get from the 20 short ones. When the stats are fleshed out and you see how many scores you actually got from the kick-outs it might be a more true reflection of what the stat actually is.’
That said, he has long-accepted that, these days, the onus is on the goalkeeper to work the percentages, but argues that instead of reading from a quarter-back’s play-book, the key is to trust your football smarts.
‘Look, it has changed hugely. When I started who ever could kick it longest would play,’ he laughs.
‘It’s new to me in the sense that in the last five or six years it has become more and more prevalent but at the same time as a group of players, as goalkeepers, you play it as you see it.
‘You are not tied to an actual script. You know, you are not a quarter-back, you play it as you see it and you take the best option.’
That’s how he will approach it today. It may well represent his final chance in what is his third final to start – he was also there in 2006 and ’12 – although he is not biting on that.
‘You need to be kind of innocent, treat it as a new year, a fresh start, as if we’ve never been beaten in an All-Ireland final. Some lads might draw on that, everyone is different.
‘I try to not think too much about the past. It is a new year, a new opportunity.
‘The best opportunity? At the moment, anyway.’