Between the sticks

Between the sticks

Mick Wallace is enjoying the autumn of his career

Daniel Carey

MICK Wallace didn’t want to play football this season at all. The goalkeeper has had a long and varied career, and felt ready to hang up his boots. Gavin Dykes talked him out of it. The Scot recalls that the Sligo man’s exact words were: “Come along, you’ll enjoy it”. Wallace thought: “Oh Jesus, not at my age!” But he has, he says, ‘enjoyed every second of it’, and Castlebar Celtic are now in the last four of the FAI Cup final.
“Everybody’s got great respect for each other, and it’s rubbing off on the pitch,” he told The Mayo News. “I don’t know is it down to Gavin or the lads themselves. I’ll say this about Gavin and Vinny Maye and Lar Morahan … you walk out onto that pitch and you get the feeling that you’re a Premiership player. They get you geed up before the game, and you get the feeling when they’re finished with you that you can go out and beat anybody. The preparation for these games … nobody in Mayo sees what goes on behind the scenes, it’s unbelievable. Dykesy and the rest of his backroom staff really go into detail.”
Having played for Mulranny United and Westport United in the most recent part of a career that also took in clubs  in his native Scotland, Wallace has played under his fair share of managers. Indeed, he enjoyed success as a manager himself, when he took charge of the Mayo League’s Oscar Traynor Cup team in 2006/2007. He insists that Dykes has brought preparation to a whole new level in Mayo.
“Gavin’s been a professional all his life, so he knows what he’s doing. I’ve learned more in one season with Celtic than I’ve learned in 20 years anywhere else. And that’s no disrespect to any other club I’ve been at. What he does and how to prepare a team … he’s taken it to a whole new level in this county. People look at him and they think he’s an ogre on the sideline, that there’s nothing but roaring and shouting, but they don’t see what happens in the changing room. They don’t see what happens when we go training. It’s hard to explain the preparation and the detail. He has everything covered.”
Wallace chuckles that despite his long career, he’s ‘never been this far in any competition’ – in contrast to some of his younger team-mates, who already have a national title to their credit. Asked to nominate a highlight from the cup run, he plumps instantly for the seventh round victory over Grattan United. It was one-one and Celtic were down to nine men in Mayfield, but they eventually won the penalty shoot-out. It was 5-3 to the visitors when Grattan’s Brian O’Sullivan stepped up. Wallace saved that kick superbly, and according to the man himself, ‘you could just see from the look on their faces that they knew it was gone. Andy Neary came up then and we knew he’d score’.
Score he did, and so Celtic had that first game in what felt like an eternity back on their home patch. A single goal was enough to see off St Michael’s, but Wallace didn’t enjoy the experience: “I shouldn’t really have started the game, but I had my leg taped up and it went after about ten minutes,” he admits.
The injury still hasn’t fully cleared, and Wallace has been getting physiotherapy as he aims to shake it off. He estimated on Friday that his chances of playing were ‘only 50/50’. But should he be unfit, the netminder has full confidence in his deputy Neil McNicholas. Stevie Ryan, another man in the recovery room, is now off crutches, and Wallace hopes the midfielder will be fit, because ‘he’s playing the best football of his life at the minute’. Wallace isn’t complaining about the journey to Waterford for Sunday’s game against Carrick United either.
“We prefer it on the road – there’s a lot of expectation when you come back to Castlebar. But hopefully the next time we’re in Castlebar, it’ll be for the final. We’ll go down and give it our best shot. [If we lose], it won’t be for lack of preparation anyway.”