A posse of Limerick hurlers turned up to the fourth day of Leopardstown’s Christmas meeting, dressed in the uniform of young men at the races: suit jackets, long coats, leather shoes, some ties, a couple of caps. As far as we could tell nobody pestered them for selfies. Since helmets became compulsory, and masks were added, hurler’s names are far more famous than their faces now.
Limerick might not have been training on Christmas week, and maybe you would think they had seen enough of each other. They weren’t long back from 10 days in Sandy Lane, hosted by their patron JP McManus, and from start to finish the intercounty season had lasted the guts of eight months, five sessions a week, at least. Huddled together on their rocket to the moon.
“Is the craic gone out of top-level hurling?” Shane McGrath asked in his column on the RTÉ website last week. “Are more and more players at intercounty level choosing to live life?”
The interesting phrase was “live life”. When we assume that the enjoyment, or the “craic”, has been sucked out of being an intercounty player, are we missing the point? Is it meant to be fun, in the sense that you and I would recognise? Are we superimposing our understanding of enjoyment on a very particular way of living?
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Intercounty players know that other varieties of living are available too, the vast majority of which don’t involve being dropped, injured, beaten, abused on social media, disappointed, stretched and drained. But maybe intercounty players don’t see much fun in those alternative lives.
To outsiders and civilians, being an intercounty player now seems like an ordeal, an endless sequence of Bush Tucker trials. The split season was supposed to reduce the amount of contact time for intercounty players, but instead it has just intensified it.
To one degree or another, every intercounty team ignores the official return to training date in November. Players are presented with fitness programmes as soon as their club campaign comes to an end. Last autumn one intercounty team, with a new athletic lead, insisted on meeting all prospective panel members on the Monday morning after their club team had lost, so that they could be furnished with a training programme.
It sounds draconian and fanatical, and maybe you wouldn’t entertain it a second time if you were dropped at the end of pre-season training. But every year players are desperate to be noticed and courted and inducted into that way of life.
In the middle of all this the concept of “sacrifice” has been redefined. There came a point when every team’s seriousness or ambition was defined by their appetite for hardship. For a while there weren’t enough hours of darkness. Any team that trained before midnight was only codding themselves. Only extremes were explored. That lunacy has abated and some of the managers that depended their reputations on that kind of carry-on are being lapped at the back of the field.
It has been replaced by the concept of the Everyday Athlete. That is the modern creed for intercounty players. What might have been characterised as intrusions not so long ago, are regarded as smart and willing choices now. Recovery sessions on the day after matches; regular gym sessions, all year round; meals designed for refuelling rather than pleasure; yoga; pilates.
For intercounty players it is not a case of life being fitted in around this; it is not bolted on to the side of their lives, it is not separate, it is integral to their day-to-day living.
In his fine column McGrath, a former Tipperary captain and All Star, spoke about the impact of the condensed intercounty season. During his career winning teams often had a month or more between championship matches. With that timetable there was a license to go drinking after matches, and the next day too. Now, he writes, players might treat themselves to a “pizza or taco fries” but nothing more decadent.
But even in the 10 years since McGrath was at the height of his career so much has changed. After Limerick won the National League on Easter Sunday last year John Kiely was asked if the players would be allowed to let their hair down. His answer was unequivocal: they would put their feet up for the evening and rest for training on Tuesday night. The opening round of the Munster championship was just a fortnight away.
Since intercounty training really got serious, over the last 15 or 20 years, long spells of in-season abstinence from alcohol has been a basic requirement for intercounty players. Shore leave would occasionally be granted, but everybody understood the code.
One of the strange things about Full Contact, the Netflix series on the Six Nations, was the sight of beer cans being milled in post-match dressingrooms. The only time you would see alcohol in an intercounty dressingroom now is after an All-Ireland final, or when a team has been knocked out. Players don’t kick up about that. They want to behave like Everyday Athletes. Does that sound like fun? Maybe not to you and I. They’re different.
So few intercounty teams finish the year with any silverware that winning can’t be the only incentive. Intercounty players are dreamers, but they are not fools. To make it worthwhile they must crave something else: the feeling of being pushed, the feeling of being in supreme physical condition, the empowered feeling of being part of a group that is driving towards something. If any of that was easy, or modified, what would it be worth?
After two of Limerick’s Munster championship matches in the Gaelic Grounds last year the players and backroom team sat for hours at the pitchside, revelling in the evening sunshine and in each other’s company. After one of their All-Irelands Mike Casey said on Newstalk that you start to miss training a couple of weeks after the season finishes. Not the physical effort, but the company of those people.
There are many other ways of having fun in life, and maybe they sometimes miss the lash of porter and the feed of taco fries. But who are we to say it can’t be enjoyed? We’re not in the middle of it. That’s where the feeling lies.
