ONCE WERE WARRIORS Kevin O’Neill has followed Colm McManamon into inter-county retirement. They are pictured here in 1997.
Nobody can go on forever
Kevin McStayNEWS that both Kevin O’Neill and David Brady retired from inter-county football was expected. Both players had spent the winter/spring contemplating their next move with Mayo seniors and the wise money was on retirement. They had tested and tasted the ups and mostly downs of inter-county football over a decade or so and the bottom line was drawn. Without too much pain I suspect.
Their departure from the stage further ages me, I knew both of them as young footballers. Kevin hung out as a ball boy/water boy with the Mayo team his father trained (and we played on) in the mid 80s while David was a familiar face around the Quay playing rugby and football in his formative years.
David Brady has long ago established himself as a footballer of considerable presence. His forceful and aggressive approach endeared him to followers of the Green and Red and, in his last years at the coal face, he reaped, perhaps, his best rewards.
His county career at All-Ireland level was inter-twined with a club career that saw him anchor possibly the best club in the county over a period of ten years.
He gave us some very real championship performances with Mayo and some very good days in Croke Park. It must have been a brilliant feeling to finally win a major final, with his club, in HQ, scene of so much desolation in his football career. To have his two brothers aboard with him was the icing on the cake. Kevin O’Neill was a different fish entirely. Quiet, shy, almost apologetic on a football field his early career promised so much. An All Star when just out of his teens, it augured well for future success with Mayo. But by the end of the 90s followers were left wondering if he had crashed and burned. It was true he was off the Mayo landscape prematurely but it was more a case of sinking and disappearance.
Why this fine player had to wait almost another decade to resurface I really do not know. Like all sports careers, there are many reasons and no reason at all why things pan out the way they do.
But there is no arguing both Brady and O’Neill will look back and recall 1996 and 1997 as the ‘Lost Years’. There is a book yet to be written about that generation of players and how they rose from nowhere and almost pulled it off. They both had particular relationships with county managements over a protracted period and that was possibly part of the background. Obviously, both are strong personalities; you need to be if you are to survive in a tough football world for so long. But it was their perseverance that impressed me most about these two players. They simply came back for more: from rejection, from retirement, from injury, from disappointment and possibly from desperation.
When contemplating retirement from Mayo football, a friend once told me he was desperate to make the right call. The county had been so close and so long out of the winner’s enclosure he felt they had to fall over the line one of these fine days. His great desperation would be to have retired just before that happened. And so he kept at it, for as long as his body allowed him. And still, never fell over the line.Maybe that scenario was one of the reasons they kept at it for so long; at any rate, even if things went astray in the middle of their careers, they both had recovered their footing into the middle of the ‘Noughties’. And the fag end of their playing careers saw them playing on the biggest days in Irish sport and making serious contributions. They had very good footballing careers, backboned their club teams over many years and Mayo fans will remember them as stand out performers. They gave great service over those years and their participation will be recalled with fondness.
Time to go back to the drawing-board again
A FEW months ago you will recall much ado in the GAA world about the topics of player burnout and a congested fixtures calendar. Some fine men and true applied themselves to resolving a situation that has been allowed to evolve unchecked, and is now threatening to bring part of the house down. Many fine suggestions made it to a Special Congress but in an overall sense these reports were filed away, perhaps to be given some air at another time. Or not. Much ado about nothing then.
A Rumpolean golden thread linked much of the hot air debate. The role of the club was trotted out by speaker after speaker, how dear it is to all our hearts, it being the very basic building block of the association. How precious indeed this unit is.
Despite the fixtures calendar being at bursting point, it was decided to park the idea of amalgamating the under 18 and under 21 championships into one single under 19 category. We heard a fair bit of waffle on this one and that noise was allowed drown out the expert medical advice.
Now a couple of months have slipped by and the GAA, using that same democratic process, has slipped the International Rules (Compromise/No Compromise Rules, take your pick) back into the mix. Our own county of Mayo rowed in with the proposal. The anger and disappointment within the Mayo GAA family when Pierse Hanley departed these shores filled a fair few paragraphs. How quickly we forgot.
What place in the schedule will the extra fixtures occupy? Most likely October I guess, that time of the year when club activity is at its peak. So, get ready for postponements, deferrals, deep winter football and plenty more hot air. The argument goes that it is better to have the Aussies in the tent in order to stop them raping our fields of young footballers!
Has anybody ever asked how many young players are lost to rugby and soccer? I will hazard a guess: many, many more than the number jetting off to Australia. And do we do anything about that development? There is an absence of logic here. Are the masters of the crooked ball and the ‘on the carpet’ guys such decent skins we don’t mind losing top young footballers to them?
Kilmaine duo only get what they deserve
ANOTHER All Ireland football club final has turned up a most deserving winner. St. Vincent’s of Dublin won in the end and while it was hardly a shock, it qualified as a mild surprise that they beat Nemo Rangers, the acclaimed kingpins of this competition. In recent years the club footballers from Mayo are no strangers to Croke Park on March 17 and this year was no exception. The winners of the 2008 final featured two lads from Kilmaine, each of whom played a major role in getting them to the final and then added to their reputations by contributing to the win.
It is a lovely sports story, tinged as the best sports stories must be with sadness. The death of Pat Kelly’s dad meant Pat played with a heavy heart. And he won his medal in the knowledge he would not be able to embrace his father when the final whistle blew.
Beside him Brian Maloney was winning his first big medal on the national stage and it too was most deserving. A few weeks ago we spoke about the character and application of both these Mayo boys and nobody in their old club or in the county will begrudge them their hour of glory.
Football can be a very tough journey; we know it is not the be all and end all but, nonetheless, we do measure parts of ourselves by our success at the game. Up to winning the club final both of these fine players would have known many dark hours in major finals; minor, under 21 and senior. But when players get their just desserts for years of commitment and enthusiasm, we know there is a fair-minded referee up there in the clouds. Every dog must have his day.
