GOOCH MADE ME A BETTER PLAYER
The Kerry sides I played on owed a lot of their success to Colm Cooper’s brilliance
THIS is what it would look like if the Coen brothers ever get around to putting a Nancy Drew mystery on film.
It is New Year 2003; we are on tour in South Africa and Gooch and I are chilling in our room when there is a rap on the door. It’s Páidí and he is all business. ‘Jesus Christ, Gooch, lay low will you and I will sort this,’ he bellows.
This is what he is going to sort. We are not the only Irish guests at the Cullinane Hotel, the Dublin footballers and the Kilkenny hurlers are also putting their heads down there.
And the previous night there has been an incident in the foyer which culminated with one member of a boisterous group accidentally reducing an expensive glass ornament to smithereens.
There is just the one eyewitness; the night porter who can’t tell the Killiney dialect from the Killarney one but he is adamant that from his rear-view the culprit is ginger-mopped and so the mystery of the red-haired man who went bump in the night is scripted.
The hotel is up in arms, demanding the equivalent of about €500 in damages.
Páidí has done the numbers and is eager to cut a deal. Dublin have Peadar Andrews, Kilkenny have Henry Shefflin but we have got a fourpiece flame-haired boy band – Liam Hassett, Séamus Scanlon, Noel Kennelly and the Gooch.
From there, this is how Páidi’s version goes. He meets with Tommy Lyons, the then Dublin manager, and Brian Cody, the ever present Kilkenny one, and proposes collective responsibility by means of a three-way split
Lyons is happy to settle, Cody less so, insisting his man was tucked up in bed, but Páidí has the edge with his reputation of being a night-time animal and is not shy in using it.
‘Now, Brian, I did not want to be saying it but I saw Shefflin coming through the door and he taking both sides of the wall.’
Naturally, there was not a word of truth in it, but Cody decided that the best way out of this unholy mess was to pay up for peace sake.
The down side of Páidí’s great Rumpole of the Bailey act – apart from never finding out who it was and I can certainly vouch it was not the Gooch – is that we were denied the greatest GAA identity parade of all time.
After this week, they are both off the park for good and the pain they felt in Kilkenny back in 2015, we are feeling now.
I really got to know Gooch during that trip where he made himself feel so much at home that we did not share just a room but he also helped himself to my clothes.
I spent most of the time running into my own shirts in nightclubs, but always ended up laughing.
I know it is the way that the reportage on a week like this comes sugared, but there were no lies written about him. What the rest of the outside world sees is pretty much how he is. He is engaging, genuine and modest. If he played without an ego, it merely mirrored the way he carried himself off the field.
I am good friends with him – we all are – but at the same time he is a very private person.
I only ever really saw him hurt over football once, and that was when he was dropped for taking a pint during the 2009 Championship, and what cut him deepest was the manner it was broken.
It made front page news and the embarrassment he felt for his family – of which he is very protective of – was acute. He deserved better than that.
Otherwise, he wore the weight of being who he was lightly, even though he was shouldering expectation since he was knee-high.
The first I heard of him was through my clubmate Conall Ó Cruadhlaoich, who spent three years with the minors when Gooch was passing through and every time he came back through the gap, he had some different jaw-dropping tale about this young fellow from Crokes.
HE WAS just ridiculously good. He came into the panel at 19 and walked straight into the Kerry team, taking out Johnny Crowley in the process. Séamus Moynihan is the only other teenager I can recall doing that and you might have heard that he was kind of handy, too.
I shared a dressing room with truly great players but yet there was never any doubt in my mind, or anyone else’s, that he was on an entirely different level.
I have this memory of travelling in the car with Páidí after a game, saying: ‘I am telling you he is the best I have ever seen.’
Gooch only spent two years playing under him and yet in that short space of time Páidí had already seen enough to put him ahead of Sheehy, Spillane, Egan and everyone else he had played with, which said it all.
He made us, too. We all knew he put medals into our pockets; I am not saying that we would not have won without him, but we would not have won as much. And we certainly would not have done so with the same style.
More than anyone, he made me a better player.
I used to have to pick him up in training and there were nights when I would go home beating myself up
‘WE HAD NO DOUBT THAT HE WAS ON ANOTHER LEVEL’
because he had taken me for 1-5.
In the end, Darragh told me to cop myself on.
‘Do you realise that you are marking probably the best forward of all time, no other back in the country is getting that kind of training.’
And he was right. What made him so good? I can’t even tell you that despite all the torment he put me through.
He wasn’t particularly fast, but he was just so subtle, that he brought space once he got on the ball and you just knew you were in trouble.
All this week, I have had his career highlights playing in a loop inside my head and it has left me dizzy – a bit like when I was marking him.
That pop pass he gave to Donncadh Walsh in 2013 has been referenced time and again this week and it was truly a thing of beauty, but I can recall an even better one.
When he got that terrible knee injury in 2014, he worked like a demon to get himself back and in the run-up to the All-Ireland final, he played in a practice match.
I remember being nervous for him when he togged out for the B’s and the first ball he gets in over eight months, he drops a solo, pops this beautifully disguised left-foot pass over Shane Enright’s head into Barry John Keane for a goal.
And you are just thinking, how did he do that when he has not kicked a ball for the bones of a year.
He never did see game-time that year, but he was with us all the way.
One thing stood out for me; the night before the final I was really nervous about marking Colm McFadden and I had these video clips on a tablet which I kept going over.
He came over to me, went through the whole package and talked me through it.
In the end, he just said ‘don’t worry, you will be fine tomorrow.’
If it came from anyone else, I would have binned it as a wooly good luck sentiment, but coming from him it meant everything because I knew he believed in me.
As we all did in him. We will roll on as a county and I have no doubt we will produce great players again.
But we will never produce anything like him. He was – and he is – simply the greatest.
‘MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE, HE MADE ME A BETTER PLAYER’