Nine summer days took Joyce from despair to triumph
WHAT should have been the week of David Joyce’s sporting year last July morphed into the most bewildering one of his life.
The 26-year-old Castlebar native would end it on top of his coaching world as he watched the Roscommon team he had helped prepare beat Galway, against all odds, in the Connacht final. In that moment, he had justified Kevin McStay’s gamble in placing the physical care of his players in the hands of a coaching rookie.
If Joyce’s head was in a whirl, it could not have been any other way. He had gone, inside nine days, from numbing grief to a family celebration to the madness that enveloped Pearse Stadium that Sunday evening.
It was on July 1 that the news broke that the Breaffy footballer David Gavin had drowned in Canada. His body has yet to be recovered from Kinbasket Lake Reservoir and the impact of the tragedy cut those closest to the bone and still does.
‘David was one of my best friends and it was on July 1 we heard about that. We were just devastated by the news and when something like that happens it is so hard to make sense of. It was just so awful and just one of the strangest weeks of my life,’ he says.
‘And on the Saturday my brother got married in Turkey, so that is where I was on the day before our biggest game of the year. I actually had to leave the wedding early to get a flight back and I just got to Galway in time for the match.
‘All that happened, especially after losing my friend, it was just the most surreal, bizarre week I ever experienced,’ he recalls.
Joyce may be the least well known of Roscommon’s Mayo connection, working in the shadow of county legends McStay and Liam McHale, but his is a sporting life less ordinary.
He has captained his country, played a cup quarter-final at Old Trafford, coached in the AFL, and, despite not sitting his Leaving Certificate, was conferred with a Masters in sports management and administration in Russia.
If there has been one thread that necklaced the pieces of that adventure, it is the fearlessness which served as his passport to keep chasing his dream no matter what was thrown in his way.
He was touted as one of Ireland’s brightest soccer talents when the Castlebar Celtic centre-half was selected to play for the Republic of Ireland Under 15s, going on to captain the Under 17s where current senior international James McCarthy was a team-mate.
He had trials with Stoke, Bolton, West Brom and Celtic, but it was Birmingham City that caught his eye and the feeling was mutual.
‘They made the offer when I was 16, so literally after sitting my Junior Cert exam at school I was on the plane. Of all the clubs I had been for trials with, Birmingham was the one I felt most at home in and I ended up signing a threeyear contract,’ he recalls.
He thrived in his first season and broke into the youth team that reached the FA Cup quarter-final, where they got the plum draw of Manchester United at Old Trafford. They lost 2-0 to a side that included would-be Premiership stars Danny Welbeck and Danny Drinkwater.
It was plausible he was heading that route too. A regular with the reserves in his second season, he was on occasion invited into first team training as part of thenmanager Steve Bruce’s blooding process, but cruelly − at the very end of his final reserve game of the season against Portsmouth − he ruptured his cruciate ligament.
As he spent his third year in rehab Bruce was replaced by Alex McLeish, and while he was given a six-month extension his face no longer fitted and he dropped down to non-league football.
He would suffered a second cruciate injury three years later, this time togging for Castlebar Mitchels in the Mayo county championship. That killed his last chance of even a semi-pro career.
‘I had intended going back that I would try and play League of Ireland and after that I knew that playing at an elite level was going to be beyond me,’ he explains.
By then, though, his sporting life was on a different track, having been accepted on a sports science degree course in John Moores University in Liverpool, he returned home to complete his degree in DCU on the advice of Niall Moyna.
Sandwiched in between that and winning an IOC scholarship to complete his masters in Sochi, he secured a coaching internship with the AFL’s Essendon Bombers.
‘I just shadowed their staff and I learned an awful lot from that. It was interesting have spent so many years of my youth as a player in a professional environment and then to get to see it from the other side for six months as a coach.’
Then a friend, Ryan Warden, who was doing some physio work with Roscommon mentioned to McStay about knowing just the kind of guy who was capable of heading up the performance unit that the Roscommon manager wanted.
It has not been all plain sailing. There was simmering public discontent with McStay and his management after six defeats on the bounce last spring but it was never going to be any other way, suggests Joyce.
‘In pre-season there had been a lot of change with players going out and coming in and perhaps some were not in great shape so there was a lot of work to do.
‘The big difference with the top teams is that when they come back, they are already 70 per cent ready and you are just topping it up whether we were at 30-40 per cent and trying to close that gap. That is why we struggled somewhat in the League; we were trying to close that gap so much.’
By the end, though, they were where they needed to be.
‘Kevin said to me that he wanted the team peaking for the Connacht final so that was our big goal. We would handle the League as well as we could but the big goal was that on July 9 we would be fully sharp.
‘It was an amazing feeling after seeing how much work these lads had put in. Coming from Mayo, you would nearly take for granted winning a Connacht final but when you see how much it means to Roscommon people it was a brilliant experience.’
It would end on a more sobering note, a 22-point defeat against Mayo – who they meet again today in the FBD League – but Joyce is upbeat for what lies ahead.
‘I suppose it was a reality check as to how far we have yet to travel to challenge the likes of Dublin, Mayo and Kerry,’ he admits. ‘There is gap between those counties and the pack but we are very much at the front of that pack and with the return of players who were not there last year, there is no reason why it can’t be another successful year for Roscommon.’
‘THEY LOST 2-0 TO A UNITED SIDE THAT HAD FUTURE STAR WELBECK...’