We’ll win All-Ireland within the next two years, says Gleeson
‘I’LL OPENLY ADMIT I WAS A HOT-HEAD, IT’S STILL THERE SOMETIMES’
AUSTIN Gleeson played his final hurling match of 2016 a few weeks before Christmas. It was an East Waterford Under 21 semi-final, Erin’s Own providing the opposition for Mount Sion. It was also his first time on a field since he came home from ‘a mad night’ in Dublin with both the Hurler of the Year and Young Hurler of the Year awards.
So, did the gifted youngster get a taste of what to expect in the coming year, when defenders will be determined to take him down a peg or two?
‘Ah no, there was none of that,’ Gleeson smiled at the recent announcement of Littlewoods as a sponsor of the hurling Championship. ‘I was treated just the same. I went to school with most of the Erin’s Own lads and was marking a fella that I had grown up with since I was three or four, so there was nothing savage in it.’
Mount Sion lost that game by 10 points, a rare bum note to finish a season in which Gleeson dazzled us all with his breath-taking skill. But despite being recognised as the best hurler of 2016, Waterford still failed to scale the mountain.
Gleeson’s rare talent, however, is one of the main reasons optimism abounds within the county; Derek McGrath’s young team may capture the All-Ireland title that eluded the entertaining Waterford side of the 2000s.
However, the 21-year-old accepts that the coming year will be significant in the development of the current team and they definitely need to make further progress.
‘Yeah, it’s important we kick on this year. We are getting to the same stage against the same team two years in-a-row. Obviously, we went that bit further last year than we did in 2015, as regards getting closer to Kilkenny. But we didn’t cross the line.
‘And I think we need to go that extra step, even just getting to an All-Ireland final, just to get the bearings of the day, whether we win it or not. If we could just get over the line against Kilkenny, it would be massive and give a boost to ourselves for the coming years,’ Gleeson feels.
‘So yeah, this year is huge for ourselves, huge for the management team, huge for everyone. We need to up it and try to go one step further.’
Being Hurler of the Year could become a psychological burden for someone as young as Gleeson, a student at Waterford Institute of Technology, but he’s level-headed enough to know he might experience a dip in form in 2017 or that it will be hard to match everything he did last term.
‘The secret of it will be not to try and out-do yourself from last year. It’s not going to be pressure from the outside, or pressure from the management. It’s going to be your own pressure that you put on yourself, that’s going to be the massive thing that I will have to cope with this year.’
Although his [hurling] talents were signposted from an early age, there was a point in his late teens when he garnered a reputation for having a fiery temperament. But under McGrath’s management, and working with some sports psychologists, he has curbed this side of his character.
‘Yeah, I will openly admit that I was a hot-head and it is still there sometimes,’ Gleeson says. ‘But with maturity and age, it has been reined in a small bit. Players and management had meetings and it was said to me in those meetings, that you need to forget about what’s dished out to you. And in my second year in the squad, I worked with a couple of psychologists. They asked me what was the main thing affecting my hurling and it was discipline, that I always reacted. So I worked with them for a few months and it seems to have worked.’
It wasn’t only the raft of awards wonby Gleeson that made 2016 such a special year. Even when he is the dominant personality on the field – as he was for that thrilling drawn encounter with Kilkenny last August or as he inspired the Under 21s to their All-Ireland success – there is a zest to his game. He feels that enjoyment is the most important factor.
‘In our games, you have a job to do for the first 10 or 15 minutes and the lads outline what that job is, but they also tell you to just express yourself and do what you want to do. ‘And the last two words always that are said in our dressing-room before we go out are “enjoy it”. That’s the main thing and that’s what we are doing at the moment.’ Of course, the eternal debate about Gleeson is where he could be positioned on the field for Waterford to get the most out of him. ‘I don’t really know where my best position is or where I prefer to play,’ he says with a wry smile. ‘I played my best hurling this year at centre-forward, certainly in the last few games and that was probably my main position and if I had to pick one, it would be centre-forward maybe.’ With McGrath remaining at the helm, and experienced players like Michael ‘Brick’ Walsh indicating they are going to stick about for another year, the reigning hurler of the year is looking on 2017 with confidence. ‘If Derek hadn’t come back, there were question marks over whether some of the senior players were going to come back. But everyone is on board because we just believe under him, we are going to walk up the Hogan Stand steps and collect Liam MacCarthy in the next couple of years.’ Should Waterford eventually bridge the gap to their last All-Ireland in 1959, Austin Gleeson will probably need to find more space on the mantelpiece.