Distraught - this woman doesn't know what to do now she has lost her previously 'normal' husband to the GAA.

A married woman has contacted us concerned about her husband and recent changes in his behaviour.

With no-one else to talk to she was told to contact Talking Balls, her advisor or counsellor or whoever it was told her that we were highly knowledgeable, thoughtful and would give good practical advice laced with common sense.

The woman and her husband had recently moved to a new area for employment reasons. He had never displayed much interest in games gaelic and athletic before.

She, being a bit of a snob and having been brought up by a highly self-opinionated father, who considered the GAA to be the preserve of layabouts, gobshites, mucksavages and fellas who pursued a political agenda masquerading as sport, always found the GAA mildly distasteful.

Her own sense of opprobrium had been fuelled one day when she unwittingly gave a gaggle of GAA youngsters a lift home from school and they trailed muck and ordure into the rear of her spotless 4X4. The mark of studs and those awful blades could be clearly seen on the Camel coloured upholstery and needed more than a good valeting to remove.

Imagine her chagrin then, to learn that her husband had fallen in with a bad lot in his new job. These men were heavily, and she means heavily involved. They talked non-stop about hurling, football and even camogie, that dreadful game where big girls wore very short skirts and ran round a mucky field after a ball. It was the height of unladylike behaviour.

Over a period of months things took further and more turns for the worse. Her husband had started bringing their son to Gaelic and now the daughter had taken up camogie. She came home one day with a hole busted in the knee of her new skinny jeans from competing for a low ball. The boy had already put the knees out of a nice pair of those Canterbury trousers that the rugby boys wear so well.

Her husband had started heading off ‘up to the Pairc’ to watch all sorts of matches, senior football, hurling, underage camogie, seven a side blitzes. Before she knew it he had been co-opted onto the committee and was holding sub committee meetings in their kitchen and telling these big rough fellas with weather beaten faces, rough hands and ill fitting O’Neills gear that the ‘wife will make you a cup in your hand.’

Although rough looking there was something very civil about some of these men, not at al like the coarse creatures she had seen one day when she had followed the husband up to the Pairc to see what all the fuss was about. There they had been bellowing red faced at a young fella refereeing a game in a gusting gale.

The final straw had come when she caught husband sneaking out the door, himself clad in the O’Neills tracksuit and beanie hat. A row had ensued during which in a discussion about his forthcoming birthday and their wedding anniversary he had informed her that he would like a set of training cones for the former and wouldn’t be able to go out for a meal for the latter as it coincided with a championship match.

And her reason for contacting Talking Balls? Well it was to ask whether, as a friend had suggested, she go with the flow and submit to the inevitable or whether she issue her husband with an ultimatum. She realized that the latter would be futile as she might get the answer she didn’t want.

Another widow to the cause. Give her a year and she’ll be coaching fundamentals, making tea and sandwiches and bellowing at referees herself.

Book Review

“There is a destiny that makes us brothers,

No one goes his way alone;

All that we send into the lives of others,

Comes back into our own.”

Edwin Markham

A few years back Christy O’Connor wrote his seminal book about hurling goalkeepers – Last Man Standing.

It was a fantastic read offering a real insight into the minds of inter county players. Their mentality, their preparation, their hopes, their fears.

I remember vividly the passage about the Limerick keeper being hit with a sliotar on the testicle which duly disintegrated on impact. The things that struck about the book was that these were ordinary guys, fellas we all knew and if we didn’t know them we knew someone like them. A brother. Friend. Clubmate. A son. Nephew

The life of an intercounty player is monastic. Those that do it properly live for the game. They eat properly. They cut out the drink and the social life. They need to have understanding partners, wives, girlfriends. And as they get older it gets hard if they have children.

When I first heard about Declan Bogue’s book This is Our Year it didn’t really capture my imagination. An intercounty player from each team talking about the year they had had? Didn’t sound like something I would be bursting a gut to read. The usual platitudes. I would maybe give it a quick peruse in Easons to see if it was worth the cover price. I should have known better.

My attitude to books is straightforward. Having read enough badly written rubbish in my life so far I’m not one for wasting time reading books that don’t appeal. Paddy Russell’s book sits on my shelf. Pretty much unread. Dara Ó Sé unfinished. Brian Cody’s. Underwhelming.

In any book and a sports book in particular the writing must be good. The avoidance of dry, repetitious match details and player banalities is a skill in itself.

Trying to capture the appeal of a particular sport which is familiar to many of us is a difficult task. Trying to strike the balance between factual information and recounting details of matches that the readership will have attended. It is difficult. Some can manage it.

So approaching the whole concept of This Is Our Year in a pretty lukewarm fashion, I didn’t really pay much attention when it was serialised in Gaelic Life, where author Declan Bogue is Editor. These boys won’t say anything interesting I thought to myself and busied with reading the Big Interview.

Until one Thursday morning, sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea I started idly to read an extract about Dick Clerkin. I had always considered Clerkin an abrasive boy. I had watched him joust with Dara Ó Sé over the years. True or not, word was Ó Sé agreed to play a Railway Cup match for Munster because it would mean he was up against Clerkin. Here was a fella I had watched in action in Celtic Park. In Croker. I had my mind pretty much made up about the sort of fella he was.

Until I read the extract where he talked about his mother and the impact some of the criticisms of him by Joe Brolly and others were having. It was compelling stuff. It had all the passion and intimacy of our games. I know mothers of intercounty players. The big intercounty midfielder standing up for himself that we all see, is still the wee lad that kicked ball in the back garden. That’s what his mother sees.

Immediately after launch I spent a day or two scouring around the bookstores looking for the book to buy it. By that stage some of what Kevin Cassidy was saying about the Donegal set up was coming out. About the savagery of training. About the professionalism. About his own sacrifice and dedication. It confirmed what I had thought when I read the Clerkin extracts. This was good stuff. Eventually I tracked the book down and bought it. And boy but I enjoyed reading it.

The thing about gaelic games in Ulster is that it is inherently local. We know these boys. Our clubs play against them. We see them at matches. We see them hang over the wire at underage matches at their clubs. We see them coaching.

And then, on the big days we see them in Championship. Most of us don’t see them do what it takes to get them to Clones on Ulster Final Day. The sacrifice. The uncertainty. The self doubt. The savage commitment. Their expectations of aspects of their set up. The disappointment when injury strikes. The excitement when new management meets expectations. The unspoken dissatisfaction when it doesn’t.

The brilliance of Declan Bogue’s book is that has managed to get a group of intercounty players to trust him with their thoughts. It is the honesty and insight that makes it compelling reading. At times if I were to quibble I would say I rushed past accounts of matches that I watched or was at but that is a necessary part of the structure. For others that will help.

The irony in the fall out from the Donegal camp following the book’s publication is that one of the Ulster counties – Cavan –  was represented by their management Val Andrews. Andrews has his own fair share of achievement and evidently saw no problem in taking part in a project that casts a searingly honest spotlight into the nooks and crannies of intercounty preparation. When I finished reading the Cassidy situation had snowballed and rolled out of control. The irony is he is nothing but complimentary about Jim McGuinness and his regime.

Others are less restrained. Paddy Cunningham is forthright and critical of the Antrim set up. I was surprised having read it that there was not comeback from the Antrim management. Maybe there will be but as with Alex Ferguson and Roy Keane’s comments, if there is a problem in the camp, fix it. Don’t talk about it or seek to nail the guy who has the balls to say we could do better.

Likewise, the most shocking passage in the book is not from one of the nine protagonists. Rather Ross Carr, father of one delivers an ultra critical attack on the Down management in defence of his son. He rails against Aidan’s lack of game time with Down. As a former manager I would have thought he would have been more restrained or circumspect but again, it is to the credit of the book and its author that he has managed to capture these passions. There it is, ugly or not. Like it or not.

The narrative structure is excellent as it successfully interweaves the stories through one another in much the same way Christy O’Conner did in Last Man Standing. It is written at times as third party observer of the player in his own natural environment. The fly on the wall offers a great insight into Cassidy’s kicking preparation at home at Magheragallon – a dedication to his craft that ultimately brought Donegal back into the game against Tyrone and earned a quarter final victory against Kildare.

Likewise the description of the day in Ballinascreen when Skinner Bradley damaged his knee. Bitingly honest. Accurate too. The players I have spoken to that were there have confirmed every word of even the smallest detail even before I ever read Bogue’s account.

In other places the main players recount in their own words. The fact that not all were top of the bill in the Championship adds to the interest.

Mickey Conlan of Derry troubled with injury, sacrificing everything to make the team including changing jobs, a decision which I think he would admit has benefitted him greatly. Barry Owens, brilliant player in a bruised and broken Fermanagh set up. My admiration there is greater than ever.

Ricey is perhaps the most reserved of the subjects. Cassidy has been well documented and harshly treated in my view. Aidan Carr’s story is one of a plane that never really took off. Val Andrews is insightful. Stevie McDonnell refreshingly honest. Paddy Cunningham may have a few extra sprints to do come pre season!

And last but not least Dick Clerkin. It was his account that brought me to the book. Since he has started writing for The Examiner. What Clerkin’s story tells us, if we didn’t need reminding, is that these boys are amateurs who are professional in everything else they do. So that the rest of us can chat about football the whole summer through. But, if something does go wrong, as it did for Dick, he still has a mother and a family to go home to. We would do well not to forget that.

Declan Bogue captures that. All of it. The essence of what it is to be a gaelic footballer in Ulster. Just because they are familiar doesn’t mean we know them. But after reading this, you will have a better idea of what it takes to get them to Clones on any given Sunday every summer. And that is what makes this tale of this particular band of brothers such a compelling read. Buy it. You won’t be disappointed.

The Old School Hurler. Age never wearies him, he hurls every day as if it's his last.

This article first appeared in the All Ireland Hurling Final programme.

The tale of the Returning Old School Hurler, like the story of the man who’d been abducted by aliens only to come back to earth, is a tale worth telling.

In a club far away from the heartland of the Déise and the Cats lives our man. A Legend perhaps. The Returning Old School Hurler may have emigrated, succumbed to a fragrant or, more likely, nagging wife, or over-depended on the drink. Now he’s returned, pressed backed into service, reluctantly, with a gnawing in the pit of his now-larger-gut.

Our man, as someone that could ‘hurl a bit’ is asked to put his shoulder to the wheel one last time, to help a posse of precocious young Turks find their own feet at senior level. His role? To pull hard, early and often; to show example; to demonstrate his guile and to dispense restorative justice to liberty-takers, if required of course. The latter achieved with as much subtlety and aplomb as the deft flicks by which he lifts and clears the ball from a melee of players on the edge of his own square.

In his day Lucozade was something brought to hospital; on a coul day a t-shirt worn under your jersey – not one of these skintight affairs that looked like something guys would wear to a nightclub called the Pink Paradiso. The balls too seemed lighter these days – in the mists of time poccing a water-logged sliotar over the bar late on to seal victory was a valuable life-skill, requiring wrists of iron and the swing of Thor to heft the hurley. And what of the hurley itself?

He returns to his mother’s garage to retrieve his sticks – linseed oiled and sprung, long, and elegant, with narrow grips of bare ash, sweeping down in curves sweetly-grained to a supremely crafted bas with honed blade. When he pulled them from his bag, the dressing room fell to silence, staring in wonder – bananas temporarily unchewed and Energise undrank. Our man pondering the unexpected interest, but saying nothing – as usual. Short shorts, too tight for comfort, a badge-faded battle-worn jersey – barely legible: County Final 1989.

On the field he raised a greying eyebrow – the young Turks’ hurls like malnourished saplings beside his own – colourfully gripped but armlength short it seemed to him. Not for the Returning Old School Hurler – his hands dipped in rosin, sliotar seized from the air with the speed of a cobra strike. The 37″ hurley? He could hook a man across the road twas that long, but could he wield it? Oh yes. In style. With panache. In any situation.

Gradually the younger players knew – they were in the presence of a higher being. When he trained, they watched. When he played, they played. And when he finally spoke, they listened.

Old School. Twas as if he’d never been away you know.

The Calm Before.

“It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us. . .”

Eoghan Rua camogie won the All Ireland Intermediate Club Championship in March 2011, repeating the achievement in 2012. Those days in Croke Park were unforgettable for the players. The Chinese have a saying, the journey is the reward. It is a sentiment I can relate to.

The 2010/2011 Ulster and All Ireland campaign followed our first ever Derry senior championship success. Having defeated a good Clonduff side in the Ulster Final we were preparing for an All Ireland semi final against the Munster Champions. It was uncharted territory for us. Lavey had been down that road before providing inspiration and a reference point that we could be successful, even though the gradings at All Ireland level had changed.

My own involvement started a number of years earlier. How times have changed. I recall going in to one session at St Joe’s . The players stood in static lines of three pucking a few well-worn sliotars back and forth. There was no intensity worth talking about. A number of the same players are still involved. That level of operation wouldn’t be acceptable or tolerated by them now. They came a long way and matured as players, as individuals and as a group. Anyhow, back to Autumn 2010.

We were notified by the Camogie association that the All Ireland Final had been secured for Croke Park but that this would mean that rather than playing the competition off prior to Christmas with a final in later November at a county ground somewhere, the semi finals would be played in February. The Final would follow in Croke Park in March.

To be honest I personally groaned and grinned at the news. The former because it raised a whole new expanse of uncharted territory; the latter because in my wildest dreams I never for a moment thought I would be involved with any team in Croke Park other than as a supporter. I had watched an old teammate from school Noel Donnelly steer our alma mater Omagh CBS to a Hogan Cup title. I roared at him from the premier level that day and he replied with a thumbs up. In time a conversation with Noel was to be one of the most important pieces of advice I received about taking a team in Croke Park.

Having won Ulster we were embarking on a serious adventure. The team had limited experience playing outside Ulster, various players had county experience, some had played inter provincial and a few of them had won the Gael Linn. Others had experience at University level and others had played in Ulster College All Star teams. In 2009 we had entered a team in Kilmacud sevens and performed creditably.

Preparations continued, and by continued I mean the intensity of training was significantly stepped up preparing for Ulster, and then the All Ireland campaigns. My own view was that we had to incrementally increase the pressure for the higher-level competition we would encounter. It had to be incremental, and in fact the players often didn’t notice the greater intensity work, or if they did they didn’t complain (that much). At times sessions became brutal. I recall sitting next to a lad from Ballinderry at the County football final and he was telling me about work Mike McGurn had done with their senior footballers. It immediately gave me ideas. Over that winter I did a course with Ulster GAA that gave me plenty of food for thought. I also attended a couple of other events that enabled me to bring new fresh ideas to training in addition to material I drew up myself based on my perception of how and where we needed to improve as a team.

This Croke Park carrot meant a number of things in practice. Firstly although it was late October, we had to stand down our entire training programme. It was not possible to keep a squad in training for two months with no further games until February. The team would have gone stale and collapsed inwards on itself. Keeping the thing fresh was key. That then raised the issue, having taken the team off the boil completely, how could we get them back to the required standard. It posed plenty of challenges, not least for the players. Essentially we were asking them to maintain a high level of personal fitness over an eight-week period with no collective training.

In trying to plan for this I spoke to a number of coaches, including people within the club but more importantly and specifically St Gall’s manager Lenny Harbinson and Paddy Tally then Down coach. Both freely gave me advice on their own experience and offered a few pointers on the way in which to manage the situation and the players’ expectations. I owe both men a debt of gratitude and took great pleasure in contacting them after our first success to thank them for their sound advice.

In particular I would mention Paddy Tally because after our championship exit in 2009 to Lavey I wrote down all that was wrong with training, my own coaching and the group of players. It made difficult, challenging and uncomfortable reading for me personally, but it made it crystal clear that things had to change, starting with myself.

I had to find a way to re energise my own contribution, in the hope and ultimately in the confidence that it would help the players. In late 2009 Paddy gave me some simple pointers, showed me some of what he was doing and importantly why he was doing it. That meeting opened a new window on coaching for me. That and a session taken by Eamon O’Shea in early 2011 in Dunloy showed me what was possible with a little imagination added to the mix.

The suggestions Paddy and Lenny gave me helped me straighten out my own thinking and simplify things that were worrying me. As a consequence for example having initially been of the view that players involved with University squads should not play with them, I did an about turn and agreed that they should continue their commitments. These were after all competitive games and although there was a risk of injury the pros of a happy contented player outweighed the cons. Méabh McGoldrick, our captain was also captain of Jordanstown and to have been overly prescriptive would have resulted in an unhappy player. Méabh played away with Jordanstown and managed her joint commitments admirably. A light hand was the correct way to proceed there.

Without going into the details, for both winter campaigns, we congregated in December. We worked to a pre planned schedule of sessions I had designed to get the players back to fitness through a fairly brutal but condensed programme followed by a three week championship set up working on specific areas of play. The latter included matches, some of more value than others.

The players were required to train and play matches during the Christmas holiday, the quid pro quo being that I organised sessions in a way that the players could go out on St Stephen’s night, New Year’s Eve etc. I don’t believe in a drinks ban when you have a committed group of players and ours were highly committed during these two specific campaigns.

In addition to the normal season’s training the winter sessions involved in the region of 50 training sessions between December and February, a further 12 -1 5 between the semi finals and finals; video work, travelling to watch the potential opposition in marathon all day trips to Cork, Kilkenny, Westmeath, Laois and Tipperary. For each of those Brendan McLernon drove hundreds of miles at his own expense. The craic was good and we established a sort of standard routine. Brendan’s antics scouting the opposition team were priceless. He would eavesdrop on team talks; size up players during post match celebrations dictating notes into the ubiquitous machine. These scouting trips were the bedrock of success in 2011 and 2012. Yes it was a total pain in the arse leaving home at 6:30am to drive to Buttevant or Durrow but the notes, tape and observation were beyond price. You get a sense of what you are dealing with observing another squad in action. It is hard to describe but it was an essential part of the method.

For every training session over the winter we provided food and water for our players. For the first campaign that was dealt with from within our own resources i.e. team management. For the second year the club organised a rota amongst members to ensure that every session was provided for in terms of food. This was particularly important because we had a number of players travelling from Belfast, often leaving work to come straight to training on a Tuesday and Friday. We started sessions a bit later to accommodate the travellers but that meant in turn they were later on the road back to Belfast.

That winter the weather was particularly horrendous with terrible snow. It is to our credit we only had to cancel one session. Twice I had the players on the beach in temperatures hovering around minus ten. On Boxing Day we trained on a small patch of sand as steam came off the nearby sea. The players were put through a savage running programme with limited recovery. One passed out in the cold, another tore a hamstring from inadequate warm up. Thermal tops and leggings were compulsory. It was savage stuff. One day heading to Dunloy for an indoor session another player badly damaged her car skidding on ice.

During the second campaign one player came to me and pleaded to go home after a 40-minute session in torrential rain and wind at the University. Under the floodlights, the windmill spun in the darkness, we couldn’t see it but we could hear the sound, as the floodlight illuminated the 45-degree sleet and rain and the waterlogged field. The water was lying on the pitch as players completed a stamina running figure of eight routine with little ballwork. The twelve or so players that came out that night will not forget it. Others either couldn’t make it from Belfast or assumed the session wouldn’t be on. They should have known better.

Not having lights ourselves at our club pitch, we had to train in other locations midweek. During the 2011 winter we used the lights at Coleraine rugby club twice a week. We were immensely grateful for their cooperation even if it was a costly exercise. There were some in the club ranks that raised an eyebrow at both the venue and the costs but we needed somewhere to train. My view on this and other matters was that I was prepared to do whatever it took, and wherever the task took me to ensure the players had every chance of success in their campaigns.

In 2012 we used the new lights at the University of Ulster which meant we were able to train on a proper Gaelic pitch for all of our sessions. This was a significant bonus and not to be underestimated. There are times since that I have gone in there, and looked round, the place deserted. It was our laboratory, the teams tactics and strategies were forged in that place night after night. It was in there that we worked on the elements that ultimately won us the match against Ardrahan.

In terms of financial costs, the first year our campaign involved overnight stays in Dublin twice (the first day our semi final was postponed due to a waterlogged pitch). For the replay the game was at the last moment on the Thursday fixed for Cloughjordan in Tipperary. Whatever chance of travelling to Dublin on the day of the match, this required an overnight stay. This time in Birr. The three overnighters cost in the region of £3000 each for accommodation, coach and food and other expenses.

On these overnight stays we got our routine in place. Mass if we could get it that evening rather than in the morning; dinner, team meeting and then players could do as they pleased. Some went for a swim, some went to the physio. It was kept as relaxed as possible. My abiding memory is that once we got on that big Yellow Chambers Bus, the squad was together, the players were happy in the company of their teammates. The routine was similar, the atmosphere relaxed and the craic good.

Looking back there were some magical moments along the way, and as someone said to me today, it is only when something is gone that you realise how much you miss it.

“In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”

The Journey was the reward.