The Club

by Christy O'Connor

  After Ken had spoken, John Carmody adopted a different tone. At least we were creating goal chances, and a goal would eventually come. ‘There have been a lot of positives to our play,’ he said. ‘So just keep going, keep going. It will happen for us.’

  Ken didn’t seem to think so. As we were making our way down the field to take up our positions for the second half, he sidled up to me.

  ‘Did you hear that bullshit? Going well? For God’s sake, this crowd are only intermediate. We should be blowing them away.’

  ‘I know, I know, but we have to stay positive,’ I responded.

  Then as we both looked back up the field it was like staring into a wall of light. A watery sun was dipping low in the autumn evening and visibility was almost nil with the glare from the wet grass.

  ‘Chris, be calling and covering behind me the whole time now because I can’t see a thing,’ Ken said to me, just before the ball was thrown in.

  I just looked at the umpire. ‘He can’t see a thing but he expects me to see everything. He must think I have X-ray eyes that can see straight through a blinding sun.’

  Five minutes into the half, a long cross-field ball from their midfielder went straight into the net. When you’re a goalkeeper there are never any excuses, but did I see the ball? If a jumbo jet was coming at me, I wouldn’t have seen it.

  I knew then that it was going to be a difficult last 25 minutes. We were facing into a stiff breeze, a lethal sun and a soggy pitch with a team half flaked from having had so many dual players playing their second game in 24 hours. Although we started throwing in substitutes all over the place – including Jamesie – we were still looking for a performance. Ballybrown were really up for it now, having got a lead and with a sizeable home crowd roaring on their every score. They had an army of bodies on the sideline, which was being marshalled by Tom Ryan, the former Limerick manager. We were a senior team and a scalp which would provide an injection of good vibes for them before their next championship game.

  They ended up beating us by ten points.

  Holy Jesus.

  *

  The following night, I was at a meeting in Gurteen to help draw up a newspaper advertisement for applicants for our new underage coach. Halfway through the discussion, I got a call from Conny, but I didn’t take it. As soon as I was about to dial his number after landing in home at 10.45 p.m., he rang me. He had some news for me that was eating him up.

  ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘Patsy just rang me there earlier on to tell me that I’m not on the panel for Friday night.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You heard me. I’m not on the panel. He said that there were 34 togging out at the moment and that I wasn’t going to be togging on Friday. He asked me to be a hurley carrier, but I don’t know about that. I’ve only said it to Seánie, Ken and yourself and I just want to get your opinion.’

  ‘I’ll ring you back,’ I said to him. ‘I’m ringing Patsy straight away.’

  ‘No, no, no, don’t ring him, I don’t want that. Please don’t. Just leave it and we’ll sort it out.’

  Patsy is a very good friend of mine and, while I have made a conscious decision this year to keep that friendship divorced from his management, I can’t agree with him on this one. Conny brings so much to our set-up. When he trains, his intensity is a huge influence on the temperature of training, especially in games of backs-and-forwards, because he normally flattens whoever comes near him. He was a critical influence in altering the mood at half-time against Ballyea, while he also had a really positive input before the Sixmilebridge match. He is a leader and a character, the sort of person you always need in a dressing room.

  He paid the price for not being around for the challenge match against Ballybrown at the weekend, but the guy is getting married in 12 days’ time and he was sorting out wedding plans with his fiancée, Sinéad. Anyway, the man trains harder than a US Navy Seal. Recently he recruited a private trainer, someone who used to work with the boxer Ricky Hatton. Management don’t see that work he does on his own in Dublin, but it’s not as if they have a reason to doubt his commitment. Conny was one of our best players with the juniors against Éire Óg last week and when the majority of the juniors on the senior panel went home afterwards, he stayed on and trained with the seniors for a session that didn’t finish until close to 10 p.m. And then drove back to Dublin.

  Conny’s obviously not in management’s plans, but I think he’s been treated harshly recently. The man co-runs his own company in Dublin, Titan Marketing, and when we played the Galway intermediates in a challenge in Tubber three weeks ago, he had driven from Dublin to Cork that day on business, and then from Cork to Tubber on the Galway border in north Clare for the game. We were down a huge number of bodies, against a squad that had 37 players togged out, and I felt we really needed his physicality on the night. Seánie wasn’t togged out but was in the stand, and he told me afterwards that he caught Patsy’s eye at one stage and pointed to Conny in an attempt to encourage Patsy to get him on the field to start winning dirty ball. He only got the last eight minutes.

  Then the poor old devil paid a huge price for it afterwards. He told Sinéad that he was working and he never mentioned the match because he knew it would entail him getting back to Dublin after 1 a.m. He came back to my house afterwards for some food and to charge up his phone. As he was eating a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen, just after 10 p.m., he put his index finger up to his mouth to tell me to keep it quiet as he rang Sinéad.

  ‘Hi, babe, I’m just after finishing up now and I’ll be heading up the road in a few minutes.’

  I just shook my head at him as he got off the phone. ‘You’re an idiot. I’m telling you, you’ll get caught. Women have a knack of finding out these things. I learned my lesson the hard way with Olivia. She caught me telling lies about matches and training a few times and it caused holy war. You’re better off to come clean.’

  This is another conundrum of the club player. Whereas the inter-county player can justify the manic commitment to his wife or partner because of the profile and rewards, the ordinary club player doesn’t always have that bargaining power. As a result, he often has to engage in clandestine operations. My work colleague, Michael Foley, told me one time that I was going to the same effort to hide my involvement with a bunch of minor hurlers as someone who was engaging in an extra-marital affair. But a couple of loose words on the phone one evening to one of the selectors, and I was rumbled.

  It’s inevitable. The morning after our game against the Galway intermediates, Conny was under pressure to get out to work, and he asked Sinéad to get his jacket out of his jeep. As soon as she opened the door, she got the stink from the wet gear wafting through the air inside. She checked his gear-bag and noticed his wet gear and the fresh grass stuck to his boots. She stormed back into the house.

  ‘Where were you yesterday evening? You told me you were working.’

  Conny had no choice. He had to come clean.

  Sinéad, who had spent the previous evening writing out their wedding invitations on her own, just picked up the batch of invitations and fired them at him.

  Conny just loves the club and he would do anything for this team. But there is a deeper meaning to his passion over the last year. Twelve months ago, his father Gerry suffered a brain haemorrhage. Along with Conny’s brother Seán, Gerry Conroy was this team’s best supporter. He never missed a game, even if it was a challenge match against some team up in Galway, and he was our rallying cry in the huddle before we played Sixmilebridge in last year’s championship because he’d been struck down two weeks earlier. Gerry can’t go to matches any more, and deep down I know Conny’s motivation is for us to get to a county final and for his father to witness it.

  Now that he’s been dropped, all his efforts feel like a slap in the face. ‘I think I’m being made a convenient scapegoat for some of the ghouling that’s going on around the place at the moment,’ he said to me over the phone. ‘But I he
ld my counsel. I could have taken Fahey apart for some of the shit that’s been going on, but I didn’t. He needn’t talk to me about commitment; I’m trying to commute from Dublin for hurling and keep people employed up here. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll probably just take it on the chin and turn up on Friday. Sure I can’t watch the match from the stand, I’ll go stone mad. No man is bigger than the team and maybe I’m not training as hard as I can either. But a man has to have his pride as well and I could tell them to go and fuck themselves.’

  Seánie and I weren’t happy with how he’d been treated and we spoke on the phone about it early the following morning. We couldn’t see where it was coming from and we both agreed that Patsy had slightly lost the run of himself. I thought that he had been very clinical and decisive earlier in the year but that he had let emotion take hold of him recently, and this had affected his decision making. I brought up the incident against Ogonnelloe when he became involved in the fracas on the pitch.

  ‘In fairness to him,’ said Seánie, ‘somebody caught him and pulled him down on the ground.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, he shouldn’t have been anywhere near the place,’ I responded. ‘That’s the last place he should have been. He needs to step away from all that and retain a cool head on the line.’

  Then Seánie made a point. ‘What’s going to happen now if Conny says that he’s not going to do the hurleys on Friday? Will Patsy tell him to shag off?’

  ‘One of us should ring Patsy,’ I said. ‘We need to get a hold of this now because we can’t afford to lose him from our dressing room.’

  Seánie said that he would ring him and then he’d call back. An hour later he was back on to me. Patsy told Seánie that it was more or less John Carmody’s call and that they’d wanted to trim the panel for Friday’s game. Seánie then rang Carmody, who said that nothing had been finalized yet. After Seánie reasoned with him, Carmody agreed to include Conny on the panel for Friday.

  Conny had already accepted that he wasn’t going to be part of the panel on Friday, but he left a message on Patsy’s phone to say that he was still ‘100 per cent committed for Friday’. Now that he was back on the panel, Conny wasn’t convinced that the management’s decision to return him to the squad would be wholly beneficial in the long term.

  ‘It’s no harm for management to be unpopular,’ he said to me later that afternoon. ‘I was reading there recently about Tom Brady [New England Patriots’ quarterback] saying that he doesn’t want to be friends with his coach; he just wants to be coached. When he goes to the training ground he doesn’t want to be told how great he is by his coach; he wants to be coached to become a better player. And that’s the bottom line, with any of us.

  ‘I had no problem taking the hit and letting everyone else know that I wasn’t happy about taking the hit. Because it would have sent out a message to everyone. I’m not annoyed with yourself and Seánie for battling my case, but this is a back-down from management now. The boys have backed down and they’re probably not going to drop anyone. I bet you no one will be dropped now, including Mully. I think they missed a glorious opportunity to be ruthless and drop three or four of us. To really shake things up.

  ‘Now, if we win on Friday we’ll have a four- or five-week lay-off and there’s going to be more disruption because lads will get sidetracked again with football or some other thing. I was at the wrong end of a bad call, but I was willing to take my medicine and use it wisely to get us going again. And I feel that there needs to be a clear-the-air meeting because the way we’re going, we’re just going to fuck away the chance of winning a county title.’

  The following morning, I was greeted at the door by the postman, John Williams, who is also the Corofin hurling goalkeeper. ‘Ye’re a cute crowd, bringing an All-Star out of retirement to try and win the Canon Hamilton,’ he said to me. ‘The whole place is talking about it.’

  It was the Clare People’s back-page story this morning. Jamesie is definitely back now anyway.

  12. Let the Healing Begin

  Here we go again. Despite everything that has happened over the last few days, you can still almost sense complacency infecting us like a virus in the lead-up to our last group game, against Broadford. Even though Newmarket and ourselves are the only two teams to have won our opening three games, six points probably won’t be enough to put us straight through to the quarter-finals. A defeat to Broadford and we’re more than likely back into the pit for a play-off.

  Three days ago, a blind man could have seen that the attitude wasn’t right: some lads were just slobbering through the drills, almost as if waiting for closing time of the game on Friday. I was doing my own goalkeeping training on the other pitch with Paul Madden and Mikey Rosingrave and I didn’t feel involved enough with the group to suddenly arrive with the sirens flashing and start lecturing them. At one stage I went into the dressing room for my puckout hurley and Ken Kennedy followed me in. He wasn’t training because he was nursing a hamstring strain from the weekend’s game.

  ‘You need to say something to them,’ he said. ‘They’re all over the place.’

  ‘Jesus, Ken, guys are sick to the teeth of listening to me,’ I said. ‘Maybe someone else will sense it and knock it on the head.’ Nobody did.

  We have three wins, but it’s mind-blowing how we seem to think that the job is done in the group, especially after such an insipid performance against Ogonnelloe two weeks ago. On Wednesday morning, Seánie McMahon rang me – he’d been to the cryotherapy clinic the previous evening because he’s been struggling to shake off a strain in his back.

  ‘Lookit, we’re blue in the face from talking about this stuff, but it has to come from you now tomorrow night,’ I said to him. ‘Just lay it on the fucking line to them. If they don’t listen to you, we can forget about it.’

  Before training on Thursday evening, Seánie spelled it out as clearly as he could. ‘It’s the same fucking story with us again. We’re gone casual and we’ve absolutely no reason to. We think the job is done, and it’s not. We went into a group game against Corofin two years ago with the same bullshit attitude and we were beaten. Our Under-21s went into a quarter-final last year against Meelick-Parteen in a game that we should have won by ten points and we were turned over because we weren’t mentally ready for it. From now until tomorrow evening, we get ourselves steeled for an unmerciful battle. And we come to the battle ready to fight for our lives.’

  Those comments are nothing the lads haven’t heard from Seánie before, but his authority and immense standing as a player always lend huge weight to his words. He rarely raises his voice when he speaks but you can almost read the passion and emotion in the creases of his face.

  It’s always impossible to speak after Seánie, but I just wanted to re-emphasize one point. Our senior footballers are out in the championship next Tuesday, and if they win that game they’re out then again the following Friday.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘if we get dragged into a play-off, we’re absolutely fucked. We’ll be playing hurling and football games on the same weekend, and guys won’t be able to walk. Our season will be as good as over.’

  I travelled into Cusack Park on Friday evening with Jamesie and Mikey Rosingrave. It was the first time that Jamesie was togging out for a game in the Park since the 2004 county final. As we entered the gate, the groundsman Martin Flanagan spotted him.

  ‘Hey, I’ve put ye in the dressing room closest to the gate. So you won’t have to walk as far.’

  The team wasn’t named until we arrived in the dressing room, and it was a strange selection. Management were obviously trying to shake things up, but it reminded me of what our physio, Eugene Moynihan, had said to me a couple of weeks earlier: that guys didn’t really know where they stood and that the uncertainty was affecting players’ form and confidence. Competition is the lifeblood of any squad, but we’re not Kilkenny, and Eugene had a point. I got the impression that management felt we’d have enough to beat Broadford even with a risky
selection. And if things did start going against us, we’d just empty the bench to finish off the job.

  Traditionally, Broadford would have been renowned as a tough east Clare outfit. But this was a young and skilful team who had just come up from intermediate and who should have beaten Sixmilebridge in their previous game. Our approach was simple: we wanted to physically bully them off the field.

  ‘Warm up the shoulders, lads, because we’re going to be using them,’ Ken said in the huddle just before we left the dressing room. ‘Let’s frighten these guys.’

  ‘Loads of people around the county are saying all week that there’s going to be one big upset at the weekend,’ roared Patsy. ‘Well, there’s going to be no upset here.’

  We started well and were four points up after 20 minutes until we gave away a ridiculous 20-metre free. Niall White fouled his man 30 metres from goal and then protested by throwing his hurley on the ground and the referee moved the ball in ten metres. Craig Chaplin buried it.

  We got a goal back almost immediately and were in a good position at the break. Three points up and with the breeze at our backs to come. Then we went out in the second half and capitulated.

  It was one of the most disheartening half-hours of hurling we’ve produced in living memory. They got a run on us and we just basically lay down and let them walk all over us. They hit four successive points before we had our first score of the half from a free to level it up. Then Conor Hassett was red-carded for an off-the-ball offence.

  Management had sprung Jamesie from the bench to try and rescue a perilous situation. The first chance I got, I hit him with a short puckout to midfield and the shot he took went barely twenty yards.

  They pushed on and went ahead again with a couple of minutes remaining. They would have been out of sight if they’d converted half their chances, and we couldn’t buy a score. The last five minutes were like a slow march to madness.