Time for clubs to let stars of county get on with life
THE words rat’s ass and romantic Ireland have been chasing one another around in my brain this morning and they will be with you shortly, I’m pretty sure of that. But, first, a few words about Michael Darragh Macauley. A footballer I love to watch. Officially, I’m a fan, and I’m not being unkind to him in what I’m about to write. Though it may appear to be like that.
The week after next the Dublin midfielder, who has repeatedly entertained over 82,000 people with his rare mixture of power and mayhem, will be running around Croke Park in the blue and white stripes of the club who taught him mostly everything he knows. Ballyboden St Enda’s, Macauley’s home parish meet Castlebar Mitchels in the All-Ireland club final.
As usual, on the biggest day on the club calendar, the place will be threequarters empty, leaving those who turn up at even greater risk of being completely perished.
The football final, and the accompanying All-Ireland club hurling final between Cushendall and Limerick’s Na Piarsaigh, will be on TV as well — not that anyone watching or anyone traipsing around elsewhere on St Patrick’s Day will give a rat’s ass who wins, or who is left heartbroken.
Macauley, same as any of the country’s famed footballers and hurlers, who get to play on the most sacred ground in the country will find it an emotional, absolutely hair-raising, dream-like experience. Win the game with his old schoolmates and former next door neighbours, and he will be telling us it was one of the greatest days of his magnificent career.
He might be the happiest footballer in the whole country. But is the price being paid for his happiness really worth it?
IT’S way past time to let the reins of Romantic Ireland bloody well go. And until that happens, the tomfoolery of trying to build a club and county fixtures list in one calendar year will continue to bedevil the smartest and most sane of men and women.
Nobody knows how to make this work, and that’s because there is no way to accommodate a man like Macauley in his noble pursuit of being a good clubman and also serving Dublin as he does.
In trying to do so, all of Macauley’s best mates in Ballyboden St Enda’s suffer. Like every other club in the country, they are starved of championship games through long treks of the summer, and then they are squeezed into the opening weekends of the autumn when everything they have been preparing for all year long is decided in a mad frantic dash for the line. It’s all so ridiculous. Unnecessary too. Though the GAA refuses to see how it works left and right of them, how the best soccer players in the country and the finest rugby players out there graduate from their humble beginnings. In soccer and rugby it is the natural order for the most skilful and athletic to play
only with the most skilful and athletic.
It’s the same in every other country too.
We discovered last weekend how Danny Welbeck and Marcus Rashford, who scored goals at either end of Old Trafford were both former young strikers with Manchester community club, Fletcher Moss Rangers. They said goodbye to their club. Their old club that fields 17 teams, much like so many GAA clubs, waved goodbye to the two boys and got on with their life.
It’s more than a graduation, it is a natural order — and an order that our GAA administrators are foolishly trying to defy.
The best move on. They say adios. And, of course, the club that reared them is weakened, but Young Munster was never embittered for one day that Paul O’Connell spent with Munster and Ireland, and St Mary’s College watched Johnny Sexton step onto a much vaster stage than Templeville Road and everyone i n the club applauded.
In 2009, in Leinster’s breakthrough year in the modern game, when they annexed Munster in Croke Park in the Heineken Cup final and won Europe’s big one for the first time, Sexton stepped into the boots of an injured Felipe Contepomi and immediately kicked the penalty goal that propelled them away from their arch- enemy. That same season Sexton had played in the All-Ireland League for St Mary’s, but after that expert strike of the ball his days of running around with his best of mates were counted down fast.
It’s time now for the GAA to put down a line. The most talented footballers and hurlers in the association, who cross that line must be told that they cannot do an about turn. They most definitely cannot jump over and back across that line.
Ballyboden St Enda’s would survive without Macauley. They would get on with life.
And the lives of every footballer in the club would prosper. Those lives would become more satisfying with championship games all summer long, more fulfilling.
And Michael Darragh Macauley would get by just fine too, even if he had to sit in Croke Park on St Patrick’s Day as a spectator on the day of the All-Ireland club final.