STUCK IN A HOLDING PATTERN
London manager Michael Maher is resigned to being cut adrift from the inter-county scene and believes only the lifting of travel restrictions will end their limbo
WHEN Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote London Calling, one of the Clash’s signature tunes on an album that would come to be hailed as a punkish classic, it was just one song that carried an apocalyptic air amidst the sprawling themes.
The title itself alludes to the identification used by the BBC World Service – ‘This is London calling...’ – in broadcasts to occupied countries during wartime. Strummer told Melody Maker the song was inspired after he’d read ‘about 10 news reports in one day calling down all variety of plagues on us’.
The song would tail off with Jones playing the Morse Code signal for ‘SOS’ on his guitar pick-up.
That was 1979 when even the diverse apocalyptic themes addressed on the double album didn’t cover a global pandemic – or a political scene where the seat of American democracy could be stormed by protesters whipped into a frenzy by a president who built his public profile via a reality television show.
When London senior football manager Michael Maher takes a call that invariably stretches beyond Gaelic games into the realm of lockdown and the political and scientific debate that entangles all matters these days, including sport, it’s the afternoon of Joe Biden’s inauguration. The world is in a state of flux
‘FOR OUR PLAYERS, THE VACCINE IS A LONG WAY OFF’
that even Strummer’s creative mind might have struggled to predict.
London GAA has been cut off since the pandemic struck. Maher remembers vividly the impact of the St Patrick’s Day address by then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. The flights that had been booked for the London team’s Allianz Football League trip to Ireland for a fixture against Waterford were one of the first things to go. Due to quarantine restrictions, his squad were the one team across the four divisions who weren’t included in any re-fixtures in October when inter-county returned. The Connacht Championship rolled on without them, Sligo the only home team ruled out by Covid-19 after New York’s participation in Connacht was unfeasible too due to travel restrictions.
As Maher outlines, the forecast for 2021 is wholly uncertain for London. The odds look stacked right now against National League or even Championship participation again due to the spiralling public health crisis, on both sides of the water.
He was a member of Ciarán Deely’s backroom team in 2019 before taking over as the first London-born manager for the 2020 season aged just 32, the second youngest manager in inter-county senior football behind Wicklow’s Davy Burke.
Growing up in south London with the rich pedigree of Kilkenny and Kerry heritage, he played Gaelic football for Round Towers and hurling for Sean Treacy’s before his career took him down the route of PE teaching and coaching, where he got his soccer badges and a UEFA ‘A’ licence.
First, he describes his day-to-day and the situation right now in London.
‘I live in Surrey. I’m in every day in school. Glad to be working with the kids that are coming in on site. I’m glad to have that routine and the distraction because I’m not a person who’d be good sitting around the house – that wouldn’t be good for me or the house. I work as a PE specialist for the borough of Greenwich.
‘It’s completely different to the first lockdown. When the lockdown initially happened back in March everything was shut except schools, supermarkets and then building sites. Everything was closed down. There was no garden centres, B&Qs, none of that. Now when I’m going to work in the morning, the traffic isn’t as heavy as normal but it’s a lot heavier than it was in the first lockdown.
‘The number of cases I’ve seen today is coming down but the number of deaths is astonishingly high. The virus is still rampant over here.’
Has it given hope to see the rapid rollout of the vaccine over there? How has that framed the mood for 2021? ‘It’s all relative because there are so many people living in the country. I saw a thing in the paper saying if you’re in the 18-40 category you’re looking at August still before you’re getting the vaccine.
‘Like, for our players and any footballers in London the vaccine is still a long way off. The hope is that they get all the vulnerable categories vaccinated and then they can start to get things back to normal and younger people can start playing sport and living their lives again.
‘It is a tough situation, there’s no two ways about it. I’m a great believer that sport is a great tonic, pandemic or no pandemic. Having the release of sport in your life – as player, as coach, as a volunteer, as an administrator – it’s great to get away from whatever might be going on in your life at any given time for a couple of hours a night a few times a week. You just don’t think about anything else for those few hours you are training or playing a game. You’re just wrapped up in it.’
Given his squad would all fit into that 18-40 bracket, how does he see the season unfolding for London? Is the Allianz League impractical, the Championship a vain hope?
‘I guess it depends on when they position the League. The League obviously is not now going to start in February like they initially hoped for – we’d be totally ruled out for that. If they start it at the end of March, there’s still very little chance of us being involved.
‘The Connacht Championship is down for April 16 which is only a couple of weeks after so that’s unlikely. I guess a Tailteann Cup fixture in May would be our best hope.
‘I don’t think it’s going to come down to vaccinations, I think it’s going to come down to travel legislation more than anything else. Because if there is still a period of isolation required, anything longer than 24 hours, then I’d say there is no chance of us being able to travel and play a game in Ireland as we would usually do. If it’s five days, seven days, 10 days, 14 days – we simply can’t travel that long in advance of a game.’
That’s the nub of it, that any quarantine period makes everything logistically and practically impossible for amateur players who have jobs and everything else going on in their lives.
How to plan then for 2021? Maher says he can’t. Right now, it’s like they’re like a plane stuck in a holding pattern. ‘There would be no point in us getting the lads to train to the level that the teams in Ireland would need to be training at this moment in time preparing for a National League because the teams in Ireland know they will be involved – it’s only a matter of when. Might be a two-to-four week difference in timeframe.
‘For us, we could ask the lads to invest time in training three or four times a week remotely, and they get themselves in great shape, and it all be for nothing.
‘I think that would actually be worse for them. We’ve been up front, been honest, had a chat and have given them as much advice – we can provide programmes if they want to keep themselves in good shape. But the reality is we can’t plan for something when we don’t know what we’re planning for. That’s how black and white it is to me.’
The home-grown element to the squad though is significant. ‘From last year’s panel, there’s only one of the lads who moved home – and that was for a very good teaching opportunity. If we were to get up and running next week, all of the lads bar one would be available to us again which is probably one of the first times that has happened for a London football team. We do have a stable group there. We have 13 or 14 home-grown lads.’
The Olympics is billed as ‘the biggest show on earth’. Even something of that magnitude is heading for a critical mass moment in terms of the virus, with IOC member Dick Pound speculating that athletes could be vaccinated to enable it to go ahead this summer. The idea then of a similar argument being applied to inter-county participation is not something to be entertained, says Maher.
‘I don’t think it is. I admire every inter-county player that played in the Championship last year but I don’t think there would be too
many of those same players crying out to get the vaccine ahead of older people who might need it more than them.
‘I think everyone who is involved in football, at club or inter-county level, is just glad to be involved and be fit and healthy. You’d never deny someone who is older than you and who might need it more.
‘I don’t think it’s a viable option and I don’t think there would be too many players – it wouldn’t sit comfortably with me taking a vaccine because I’m privileged to be involved with a county team, ahead of someone who is 40 years older than me and more vulnerable to suffering from the virus.’
Rewind to St Patrick’s Day and he has clear recollection of when the first serious alarm bells went off. ‘It was a bolt from the blue. I remember it vividly, the Thursday morning. We were due to go to Waterford on the Saturday and at 10.30am we had named our flights to Aer Lingus.
‘There was Covid in the background, which was starting to cause problems and by midday, everything was off. So in the space of a couple of hours that day – the emotions you went through…
‘Getting ready to have a real crack at a team we felt we had a real chance of beating. We felt we were in the best position we had been all of last year – to go from that to being in completely unknown territory. More so for us obviously than the counties in Ireland because once it unfolded we always knew travel might be an issue and prevent us from taking part.
‘It was a very, very frustrating situation for all of us involved, the footballers and hurlers of London. I guess at the end of the day we were grateful we got a club season out of it.
‘When it first erupted no one knew what way it would go. There was hope that maybe a few months down the line that everything would get back up and running. I don’t think anyone foresaw the seriousness of the situation and how long it is still turning out to be.’
No more than New York, it was tough to watch a unique Championship unfold without them.
‘We all accepted that our
League games weren’t going to be played but we all clung to the hope of Championship. That if the game went ahead it would be in Ireland where things were looking a bit better. Then all of a sudden the intercounty teams were granted elite status. But that came with periods then of isolation and when the twoweek period was brought in and stuck to, that was the nail in our coffin. There was no way they were going to go from a two-week isolation period to a no-isolation period in quick enough time for us to compete.’
That, he admits, was tough for all involved to get heads around.
‘HAVING THE CONNACHT CHAMPIONSHIP BRINGS SUCH PRESTIGE’
‘I think so because for everyone in London, Connacht Championship is a huge day, a 5,000 crowd. A great day for young and old, for anyone who has any kind of an interest in GAA to come together. It’s a massive day for the county in terms of how prestigious the competition is. Financially as well. It was just a blow to the county to not have that game.
‘For us as a group of players, Championship is what you set your sights on. You really build everything around being in prime condition for it. Of course it’s a hammer blow, mentally more so for the players because management had got our heads around that it might be a no-go.
‘To play for London as well, the commitment you need is incredible. I admire every man that commits to an inter-county team but being involved in inter-county football in London is a different beast. The travelling involved, every second week to Ireland.
‘You don’t see a weekend once you’re with the London football team on an away trip. Where lads have to travel to training, using public transport across the city – it’s just a different beast. They’ve done the hard slog in November, December, January, February, March – we were coming to the point where we were reaching our fittest and priming ourselves for the Championship. That was tough.’
Right now, from a London viewpoint, 2021 looks just as uncertain.