True genius passed the test of GAA greatness
AJULY evening with the GAA officially emerging out of lockdown and into the bright light of high summer. Ratoath have a senior football challenge lined up and word quickly f i l t ers around t he WhatsApp groups that it might be worth getting down to Sean Eiffe Park and picking a decent vantage spot. Why? The opposition happen to be St Vincent’s and word is that Diarmuid Connolly is going to be starting.
The St Vincent’s player has the kind of star quality that crosses county boundaries. And so, on a balmy Friday evening with players and supporters just warming to the notion that 2020 might yet be salvaged from a sporting point of view, there is one show in town — a show within a show, even, with the six-time All-Ireland winner cast as the central character.
Even the supporting cast come with big billing.
Brian Mullins, one of Dublin’s all-time greats, is running the line in a floppy hat.
Professor Niall Moyna (who has been at the vanguard of the Dublin City University football revolution and was part of the Dublin set-up for the 2011 All-Ireland win under fellow St Vincent’s clubmen Pat Gilroy and Mickey Whelan) is alongside him.
Club and county All-Ireland winner Ger Brennan is togged on the line, waiting to be called for a cameo appearance.
But all eyes are on Connolly to see if he can produce one of those moments of ‘ah here’ magic that put extra numbers on the gate r eceipts and separate the sporting gods from mortals with feet of clay. And he doesn’t disappoint.
There is no sign of a Covid-19 stone. In fact, the opposite.
He looks lean and mean, all chiselled features and chest-out confidence.
For 20 minutes, he glides around, well- marshalled and floating on the fringes of the play. And then he gives those in attendance what they came for.
Drifting from centre-forward to the left wing, he collects the ball and swivels to kick a 40-yard pass on the diagonal to his wing-forward on the opposite side.
The outside- of-the-boot pass has just enough height and spin to clear the fingertips of the Ratoath wing-back and set St Vincent’s in for a goal. A couple of minutes later, he repeats a version of the same for a point.
A lesson in timing and vision and ball-striking from a consummate two-footed player.
It’s the blink- of-an- eye execution that elevates it to another level.
Of the clips and highlight reels that have been circulating online in tribute to his talent, his cameo late in last year’s All-Ireland final replay against Kerry was perhaps the best example of that same skill — first having the physical power in the tackle to force a turnover f rom a l ost Dublin kick- out, and then hitting a raking pass to team-mate Ciaran Kilkenny who slotted over a valuable point.
It’s a test of greatness to be able to do something no other player can reproduce in the same fashion, the angle of pass and trajectory of the ball the kind to turn up on a Leaving Cert maths paper about where the laws of physics and trigonometry combine.
That night in July teased the question of whether he would tog out with Dublin again. Connolly had been a part of new manager Dessie Farrell’s squad for the five National League games in the spring but hadn’t featured.
For three seasons now, his future with Dublin had been in question. So, Wednesday night’s retirement missive online didn’t come as a major shock.
After the disciplinary controversy and 12-week ban of 2017, Connolly skipped to Boston in 2018, and would have been stateside in 2019 but for a visa issue — before Jim Gavin parachuted him back into the squad for a tilt at the five-in-a-row.
As Bernard Brogan’s book documents, that was a very unGavin-like move.
But Connolly’s talent is such that he felt it was a risk worth taking. And he produced when introduced for the second half of the replayed final against Kerry.
In the mould of a Matt Connor or Maurice Fitzgerald, he has that languid style, the ability to play the game as if everything around him is happening in slow motion. It’s as if in all his play, he achieves that rare thing that players at the highest level often talk about experiencing — being so in the moment that they can see the pass, break, kick or strike happening frame by frame.
At times, it was like Connolly was perpetually in that bubble.
To make the game look easy is so hard; just as in John Updike’s ode to Ted Williams, the simplicity of great writing is such a difficult art to master. It’s 60 years ago this month since the author’s famous essay on the Red Sox left-fielder appeared in The New Yorker, starting with the lilting lyricism of the opening line that has become stitched into the Fenway Park narrative — the description of the ‘ lyric little bandbox of a ballpark’.
It’s a 6,000-word ode to baseball as much as the crowd favourite who had a testy relationship with The Fourth Estate. A man who refused to bow to convention and instead strode a singular path as a singular talent.
‘The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories,’ Updike wrote.
There are aspects of those words that Connolly, no doubt, could identify with.
Witness his own off-field travails and the red-button temperature gauge, the switch that could be flipped by other opponents — provoked in the 2011 All-Ireland semi-final against Donegal, he fell for the bait and reacted and was red carded.
He was lucky to be cleared for the final and play his part in the breakthrough of 2011, when Kerry were beaten and the order since 1978 was turned on its head.
Prodding linesman Ciaran Branagan in the chest in a fit of pique over a sideline ball in the Leinster quarter-final against Carlow in 2017 cost him above and beyond that small act. The indiscipline set off a chain reaction that took him off the squad and on a flight to Boston for 2018.
From the skinny teenager who joined the panel in 2007 to the 33-year-old who bid adieu with an online statement on Wednesday night, just two All-Stars is hard to stack up with his luminous talent. A talented dual player whose first love of hurling was no surprise given the fact that he has a Clare mother and a Kilkenny father — the former keeps his son’s medals hanging from a frame at home.
For a player who played the game on the edge, on the ball he conveyed such serene detachment. And what a big game player too — seven points from play against Tyrone in 2011 and 2-5 from play and two goal assists in the 2014 club final against Castlebar. He even l ed the attack against Donegal in the 2014 semifinal and if his shot hadn’t hit the outstretched leg of Paul Durcan in goal, Dublin’s sights could be set on eight in a row.
Such a flair player, his talent couldn’t be straitjacketed by the
“Talent could
not be tamed by new tactics”
“Retirement
didn’t come as a huge shock”
tactical evolution of Gaelic football into a kind of algorithm. Even when the shot map showed the reluctance of Jim Gavin’s Dublin to s hoot f r om outside an expanded D, he still thrilled the fans with the possibility of the skyscraper point, the launcher from downtown.
Updike’s memorable take on Ted Williams appears in the collection of essays The Only Game in Town – Sportswriting from The New Yorker. It finishes with the player delivering one final home run, refusing to bow to entreaties to come out and greet his supporters one last time.
‘Gods do not answer letters,’ wrote Updike, the story’s climax followed by anti- climax, as so much of life and sport.
‘ The Sox won, 5– 4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York.
‘So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.’