‘You realise the jersey is bigger than you’ – new captain speaks

With Marc Ó Sé and Aidan O’Mahony having departed the stage, the time has come for Peter Crowley to take centre stage, writes Damian Stack

AT first glance nothing much out of the ordinary. Just a night very much like any other number of nights before. In the dressing room guys getting ready, guys sitting where they normally sit, guys talking to whom they normally talk.

Alongside him a man he knew well, all too well, a fellow member of the defenders’ guild. The rhythm of the night was as familiar to one as to the other. Then all of a sudden it struck them, struck them and caught them cold.

Looking around the room one commented to the other, ‘Jesus that’s a young dressing room’. Soon enough they figured that one of them, Shane Enright, was the oldest in the room and that the other, Peter Crowley, wasn’t too far behind him.

It’s a realisation that comes to us all sooner rather than later, much as we’d prefer it didn’t. Nobody is ever as young as they used to be. In football, as in life, time has a way of catching up with you.

One day you’re the bright young thing, fresh-faced with your whole career ahead of you. The next you’re part of the furniture. One day you’re sitting in awe of the established names and the next that’s you, you’re the establishment now and how you once saw those established names is how the young guns, in turn, see you.

In his first couple of seasons on the Kerry panel Peter Crowley truly was walking amongst giants. The Kerry squad he came into was one of the most gilded of all time. It must have been intimidating and at a certain level that’s kind of the point.

Those first few months and years on the Kerry panel are what separate the wheat from the chaff and not just in terms of outright ability. Almost as important – possibly even more important – is that a footballer realise he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, to be humble enough to take on board the wisdom of others, to be brave enough to ask for it.

Crowley joined the Kerry panel in 2010. He didn’t play his first league game until 2011 (against Cork in Austin Stack Park) and his first championship game until a year after that again (against Tipperary in Thurles).

In that time he took instruction from Marc Ó Sé, from Tomás Ó Sé, from Aidan O’Mahony, masters of the defensive arts. Anything they were willing to teach him he was willing, nay keen, to learn.

The education those greats of the game offered ensured that whenCrowleydidmakethestep up he was ready for it. Without it, without them, he wouldn’t be the player he is today and that’s what that look around the dressing room a few weeks back brought home forcefully.

Tomás has gone. Marc has gone and, now, in the last couple of weeks so too has Aidan. With those great repositories of knowledge, those keepers of the flame departed the mantle, the responsibility had fallen upon him and Enright. It’s their time now.

“You do realise when you get older that the jersey is bigger than yourself and you need to be teaching these fellas what it means, what the Kerry jersey meansandthatyouhaveto represent it properly,” he says.

“It was always going to happen. We’ve been lucky they’ve gone gradually and we haven’t had to deal with a mass exodus at any stage. It started I suppose with Tomás, Declan [O’Sullivan], then you’ve had Marc and Aidan gone now, they’ve staggered it well, which has helped us as a group that we haven’t had to deal with a massive vacuum of leadership.

“What it does mean that fellas my age group now, myself, Paul [Geaney], James [O’Donoghue], Paul Murphy, Enright all these fellas, we all have to stand up and become the mainstays in the team now and show that we can drive it on and do what the boys have done for the last fifteen years really.”

To reinforce the point that now is his and his generation’s time to lead, Eamonn Fitzmaurice has named Crowley as his captain for the first half of the National Football League.

In time the Dr Crokes players will return and when they do will in turn assume the captaincy – the smart money is on Colm Cooper with Johnny Buckley a dark horse for the nomination – but until they do the burden of leadership falls upon the Laune Rangers man’s shoulders. Although one does get the sense that he’ll carry that burden lightly.

It’s an honour – “one hundred percent” – it’s just that for Crowley leadership is about things other than those traditionally associated with the captaincy. Not for him soaring rhetoric, instead he’ll focus on doing what he does best.

That means playing football, getting stuck in, doing all those things that have made Crowley fast a firm fans’ favourite. He’s the lionheart who puts his body on the line, or at least that’s the popular perception anyway.

To Crowley’s mind, however, that’s something of a caricature. Sure he’s famous for that monstrous tackle he put in on Colm Cavanagh, but there’s more to him and to his game than that one tackle. “It’s a funny thing,” he says. “It’s something I’ve never completely understood is this idea that you have to have this fella who can lay out the big hit. For me it’s not the big nail, it’s stopping a fella. He’s coming at you and to stop him you don’t have to put him on his backside.

“You have to change his direction and I think people kind of get caught up with ‘geez he nailed him’, but you might only get that once, while in another game you could have four or five tackles where the turnover is more important than the hit.

“I suppose speaking from personal point of view is that people keep coming up with that Tyrone hit I had, but the thing is about that I never actually turned over the ball, it doesn’t make any use.

“I might tackle a fella and you mightn’t notice, but it’s more effective for the team. I just think sometimes we can get caught up with the idea of the big hit and some fellas seem to think I’m mad after it, but I’m not really.”

It’s easy to understand where Crowley is coming from. Folk-memory is such that footballers don’t always get to choose how they’re perceived and remembered. As much as people have tended to describe football as a game of inches – thank you Al Pacino – more accurately it’s a game of moments. Moments live on. Moments transcend.

Equally so they can be fleeting. Starting on Sunday against Donegal in Letterkenny, this will be Crowley’s seventh National Football League campaign. Time flies and all of that, 2011 doesn’t seem that long ago.

“I think there was maybe one or two years I took the league for

granted,” he explains.

“I kind of questioned the benefit of it, until last year when I missed [some time] with the shoulder and then I got to go back and got the full run of games and you realise just how important it is to get those games.

“It gives you a measuring stick for the rest of the year. It is important there’s no doubt about that, it gets you to your performance levels in the right areas, I just question why it needs to start in February and why you need to condense it a bit.”

That does seem to be a bit of a recurring theme for footballers and hurlers in the last couple of years, a constant refrain that falls upon largely deaf ears. Even so the league is pretty much the most condensed competition the GAA operates at a national level (and, no, the Railway Cup doesn’t count).

With the league players get to play seven games over a two and-a-half month period. Contrast that with Kerry’s four games over three months during last summer’s championship.

“We all want games and I think the league is good because you get to go to places you wouldn’t normally get to go to,” Crowley says.

“Last year I got to play in Monaghan for the first time ever, you get to see how those different GAA communities operate. I always find that interesting. You’re playing games, you’re travelling with the boys and it’s what you want to do.”

More than anything else what Kerry footballers live for is to win, to win games, to win leagues, to win championships. The public – Pee Sé’s famous bunch of effing animals – expects as much.

“Look I don’t think external pressure bothers any of us,” Crowley is forthright in saying.

“The internal pressure that we put on ourselves to perform is greater than anything that can come on. The way our group has come on we’ve come after one of the greatest Kerry teams of all time, so we know that the standard is set.

“At the end of the day I think basically you need to win multiple All Irelands to validate yourself and put yourself where you want to be in the history of Kerry. One All Ireland while we were obviously delighted to get it and it’s a huge honour, you want more.

“It’s the nature of the beast, it’s the nature of being a sportsperson, you need to keep going, you need to keep winning. So the pressure we put on ourselves that pressure is huge, we just need to win more.”

The big picture for Kerry is Sam in September. Always has been, always will be and, yet, Crowley refuses to talk in those terms, not now anyway. Focus too much on the big picture and you risk more than you realise.

When we spoke last week Crowley’s focus was on the next training session and now with just days to go to Letterkenny that’s where his focus will lie.

“Ultimately the next day is what gets you to the big picture,” he stresses.

Sunday’s game is just a first step on a much longer journey. To reach their goal Kerry will need Crowley in step all the way. No better man.

The league gives you a measuring stick for the rest of the year. It is important, there’s no doubt about it – Peter Crowley