‘Frankie says this picture is more famous than the Mona Lisa’
Shane Curran on the day St Brigid’s secured their place in history
THE last time they were here, it famously ended with a kiss. On this occasion, Shane Curran and Frankie Dolan will be in the Croke Park stands 11 years on from the day they helped St Brigid’s scale the summit of the club game.
In beating Ballymun by a point, they became history-makers, something which Curran and Dolan celebrated in a lip-smacking moment that was captured by Stephen McCarthy’s lens.
‘Ah, sure, Frankie was onto me the other day and he reckons that picture is more famous than the Mona Lisa,’ chuckles Curran.
‘He could be right, but I don’t think there will be anyone paying millions for it.’
As a group, they remain as tight as ever. Last year they held their 10th anniversary with a night on the tiles in Galway followed by a couple of days of golf.
To a man, everyone turned up, including Senan McBride and Darragh Donnelly who flew in from Dubai, Cathal McHugh from Abu Dhabi and Richie Blaine from the US. But, then, they had quite an amount to dine out on, reeling off eight Roscommon county championships inside 10 years and completing a three-in-a-row of Connacht titles.
They even had a dry run for that All-Ireland final win over Ballymun, running Crossmaglen to a score in the decider in 2011.
In that sense, when they took to
There is no guarantee that you will ever get back there again
the field in the final 11 years ago they could not be in a more different place than the team that will do so today – albeit with the overlap of goalkeeper Cormac Sheehy and Ronan Stack the starting survivors from 2013 – against hot favourites Glen.
‘We had been around All-Ireland semi-finals and final stages for a number of years and when we won it, we were at the end and we just managed to get over the line whereas this team is very much at the beginning and getting to an All-Ireland final is a major achievement.
‘But that said, you can be at any stage you want but when you get there and have the chance to win it, there is no guarantee that you will ever get back there again.
‘It is 11 years since that final, we did not get back and these lads now have a chance to create their own bit of history,’ insists Curran.
A year later, having served county and club for a quarter of a century, he finally packed away one of the most storied pair of goalkeeping gloves ever worn.
Better known as ‘Cake’ – a moniker derived from his surname (currant cake) – he has filled the void with coaching and management, having completed a threeyear term with Caulry in Westmeath.
He remains in thrall to the game but is not blinded by it.
‘Look, I am not one of those for knocking the game for the sake of it,’ he says, seeking context.
‘Over the last decade, it has changed completely.
‘It has gone like soccer only that you can use your hands. It is very much possession-based, tiki taka, shifting it from side to side, and then you are trying to penetrate through the central areas to get scores.
‘You see very few scores kicked now from outside what they call the scoring zone and once you get past the 45-metre line it is all handpass, handpass and handpass. It is all about skills in the hand to open up that space to create those scoring chances.
‘The game is what it is now and until the people in charge of making rules come up with one or two that make sense then this is what we are going to have as a spectacle.
‘Do I like what I see? No, I don’t because the patterns of play are now very similar, they are very easily copied and there is very little room for ingenuity in the game, very little room for players to play off the cuff, there is just very little room for any of that unless you are very exceptional.
‘And those that are exceptional end up getting double and treblemarked in games.
‘However, I do think the game will evolve again.’
But for football to evolve to a better place, it will almost certainly need help to do so.
A committee, made up of high-profile figures including Billy Morgan, Michael Murphy, Pat Gilroy and Kevin McStay, was set up last autumn with a view to making recommendations that could feed into rule changes.
Separately, a rule change that would see all kick-outs pass the 45m line is being trialled in college football. Curran is adamant that the latter will not work but he has his own ideas.
‘The simple thing that changes the whole game is if you just move the kick-out back.
‘I have been saying this for the last four/five years, move the kick-outs back between the penalty spot and the small parallelogram and that changes the game.
‘It does away with the need for shot clocks, not passing the ball backwards and a lot of the rubbish we see being talked about now as possible rule changes.
‘Once you make the kick-out a contest, the game changes. And once you make the pitch as long as it can be instead of condensing it into a three-quarter soccer pitch which is what they are doing now with the kick-outs from the 21m line, then that changes the game.
‘You could literally restart a game
from a hospital bed, it is so easy to do it now.
‘I am 52 now and I could still go in goal and easily kick the ball out in the inter-county game because a lot of the time there is no skill in it. But if the goalkeeper has to kick the ball further, it also means that it will become too far to pass it back to him.
‘And if you lose the ball, then you just have to defend man on man, and if you win it, it means that it will take you further up the field to attack.
‘It is a very simple way of addressing the restart issue. But instead of doing that the focus is on getting the ball past the 45 without allowing the press to go on anywhere on the pitch.
‘You are kicking the ball into a group of players. If you win the ball fine, but if you lose the ball the attacking team is faced with 13 defenders straight away and that is not going to work. It is just pathetic. I don’t know when it comes to rules why they have to complicate the bloody thing.
‘If you actually trace it back, one of the real issues is because they brought the ball up to the 21m line for kick-outs, it facilitated the likes of Jim McGuinness and it facilitated that low block defence.
‘If you take the kick-out back 14 metres from where it is now, the game completely changes and why they can’t see that is utterly beyond me.’
Curran has reason to rue his timing. Long before it became the fashion, he had a more expansive interpretation of his role in not being afraid to venture beyond his square.
‘I would love to be playing now. It is a gift to be playing in goal now, it is so easy to play there now.
‘Sure, you can bring the ball up to midfield now and nobody will touch you.
‘We give out about the game, but I love how it has evolved over the years too.
‘I was fortunate as a player in that I had coaches and managers who could see the value in doing that long before it became sexy to be doing it.
‘They could see the value in it and that was a very different game at the time because you would not really have mass defences as such, you might be faced with a sweeper and you might not depending on who you were playing.
‘What I would like to see is the goalkeeper coming out and having to beat a forward or two along the way to get into an advanced position but we are probably some way away from that,’ he admits.
As for the current day exponents of the role, he rates Kerry goalkeeper Shane Ryan at the very top.
‘Shane Ryan is just a brilliant goalkeeper and a brilliant exponent of the modern game.
‘He is probably the best because he is technically a very good goalkeeper as well and a lot of those who come out the field are not really good goalkeepers, they are hybrid footballers.
‘But Shane understands the technical side of the position whereas someone like Ethan Rafferty with Armagh, he would not necessarily be a very good goalkeeper but he is an excellent footballer.
‘That is the trade-off because that is what managers are prepared to trade off.’
While Curran may have concern about where the game is at as a spectacle, he has none with those who have now taken up the baton playing at an elite level, despite a narrative that seeks to portray the inter-county game as a joyless grind when compared to his time.
‘You hear this talk about how there used to be great characters in the game. “Characters” is a very kind of loose term, we were competitors and we did what we had to do to try and win a game. It is very easy to put labels on people. ‘Some people will tell you that the lads today don’t enjoy playing the game, I don’t know about that because anyone that I have talked to has no complaints and it seems like the guys who are not playing are the only ones who are complaining about it.
‘The players today enjoy their game, they enjoy their social life, maybe not the same way we did, but the inter-county players have to deal with all the rubbish on social media and keyboard warriors and that sort of s**t. That I wouldn’t miss and I think it is very hard on them.
‘I think we should appreciate them a little bit more. I am not advocating for professionalism but I think players need to be looked after, maybe a lot better than they are, whether that is with tax-breaks from their work or whatever it may be.
‘These players are contributing to the exchequer in terms of the millions that are spent by supporters following them around the country and taxes are earned off that spend and I think there should be some system that recognises that. ‘Perhaps, where they get some tax back at the end of their playing careers, if they have played five years or more at inter-county level. These are the conversations that need to be had.’
Today, though, it will be all about a little less conversation and a lot more action.
And if they do bring it all back home, well just pucker up.
When it comes to rules, I don’t know why they complicate the bloody thing