RUNNING TO A STANDSTILL
Donnchadh Walsh has shaped his life around Kerry football but he doesn’t want to be known just as the Kingdom’s athletic roadrunner
IF KERRY’S beautiful obsession has a face then it belongs to Donnchadh Walsh. In that peculiar Irish way, he has finally been acclaimed as a hero precisely because of his celebrated role as Kerry’s unsung hero. The important thing, though, is to make the distinction that he is not an accidental one. Everything he has done has been planned to its minutest detail to bring him to this point, every one of life’s decisions processed by his absolute desire to be a Kerry footballer.
‘Every decision I have made in my life is directly related to football,’ he explained, as he took time out from this week’s Opel GAA/GPA All-Stars tour in Boston.
‘I repeated my Leaving Cert because I felt we had a good football team at the time.
‘I chose UCC because I felt it was the best footballing college in Munster at the time.
‘I left civil engineering because I was brought into Kerry and I wouldn’t have made the Kerry team if I had stayed an engineer because they work long hours. Site work is eight until six and if concrete is late on site then you are working until seven or eight.
‘But then I suppose every fella could say that,’ he says.
Hardly, but it would be impossible for him to comprehend that anyone could not make their life fit around playing football.
It is that absolute tunnel vision which has been so pivotal in making him the player he is. This year, while others, such as James O’Donoghue, Kieran Donaghy and David Moran reached up and grabbed the spotlight, he was the one constant that kept driving the team.
Apart from his tango with a brush, which saw him come off second best in a dance off with the Kerry minor Tomas Ó Sé at a giddy homecoming festival in Killarney, it was the citation from Niall ‘Botty’ O’Callaghan as he introduced Walsh that stood out. He recalled how at a practice match earlier in the year, when the Kerry players were clocked by GPS vests, Walsh’s reading ‘was off the radar.’
It was not quite that − he travelled 11.5km when the average road trip for an inter-county footballer hovers between eight and nine.
BUT it wasn’t just the mileage. What left the Kerry management stunned was the amount of time that he pressed hard on the accelerator, making the kind of hard runs that are designed to drain the body. ‘They were joking a couple of years ago when I was tested in training that I was marking Tommy Griffin and he ran less than half I did.
‘I was living in Dingle at the time and he was driving me home and joking that “run away there and I will pick you up in Blennerville.”
‘I was always interested in cross country, I competed in schools and did particularly well without ever
I don’t class myself as a skilful player so I have to compensate by being fitter than my man
training for cross country.
‘Maybe in Cromane I was the best player on teams at underage and I was expected to do everything from catching the ball to going up and scoring as well.
‘But I don’t class myself as an unbelievably skilful footballer so I have to compensate by being fitter than my man and being able to keep going and getting into easier positions to kick scores.
‘It’s my way of kind of compensating for my lack of brilliance in long range kicking, for example, or my speed or my skills.
‘You just play to your strengths and my strength has always been I am fit and I need to be fitter than whoever I am marking.’
It could be argued that he is underselling himself in some fronts.
Anyone that thinks that he is a skill-free zone should check out the quality of his finish for Kerry’s second goal in the 2013 All-Ireland semi-final, a beautifully dinked finish, yet publicly the acclaim went to Colm Cooper for his pass that split the Dublin defense.
In a way that summed up his career: Even in his best days the glitter never seems to get a chance to stick.
And even this week, he travelled to New York not as an All-Star but as a
replacement one, something that irritated quite a few observers in the Kingdom.
He, though, insists that it does not grind with him.
‘I probably got more plaudits for not getting an All-Star this year than for getting one. ‘That’s the way it turned out; more people were coming up to me when I didn’t get one whereas they would probably have said nothing if I had got one. It doesn’t bother me. ‘Everybody remembers a player for a certain thing − I’m the athletic player, others are the strong player, the skilful player, the tall player, the high fielding player... it is just a bracket that people like to put you in and that’s fine with me.’
YET THERE are those with sensitive nostrils who will argue the game has been diminished precisely because players who lean on athleticism are now deemed to be of more value than players who might rely on ball-playing ability.
Justifiably, Walsh begs to differ: ‘I think it is good in the sense that no matter what type of player who are − you might not be the most gifted − if you work at it and are dedicated enough to your sport and can improve in other ways you can be a vital part of a team.
‘At the moment in Gaelic football, around the middle the number 5, 7, 10 and 12 positions you need fellows who can clock up the miles and work hard and even though they mightn’t be the most skilful players they can do a job for the team.
‘In the overall sense then, am I taking the position of a player who is more skilful than me? Then it is up to the rule changers − and the rule makers always come to the top and always advance.’
‘But I know I said I’m not the most skilful player but I’m not saying I’m not skilful either,’ said Walsh.
The latter amounts to stating the obvious, but he almost had to be prodded into prosecuting the case that he is much more than a roadrunner.
In Kerry, though, they have long come to appreciate the fact that he is anything but an accidental hero.