There wasn’t much James McCarthy was bad at. There were players on the six-in-a-row Dublin team who were faster but you’d never have said he was slow. The Dubs could always call on more skilful footballers – but when it came right down to it, you’d have backed him to kick a crucial point ahead of a few of them.
Nobody was tougher, nobody had deeper wells of endurance. And nobody – absolutely nobody – loved making Dublin great more than he did.
The one thing he was no good at was acting. James McCarthy wore every Dublin result on his face, unable for – and uninterested in – the ritual deceits most players feel they have to peddle after games. When Dublin won, he made no effort to hide his elation or play it down. When they lost, it clawed flesh out of him.
After one of his greatest performances – and certainly his greatest in defeat – he limped out to the Dublin team bus an hour after the 2022 All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry. He looked like a man staggering from a bomb blast. “Just exhausted,” he said as he stashed his bag in the hold. “We came out on the right side of those games plenty of times.”
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There was a sequence in that game that became semi-famous, about 20 minutes into the second half. Dublin were a couple of points down but McCarthy was having none of it. He met Adrian Spillane on the edge of the D with a shoulder that would have stopped a train. The ball squirted loose and he got a toe to it before Diarmuid O’Connor could go down on it. Then he beat Killian Spillane in a foot race to direct a sliding clearance out to Seán Bugler.
When Bugler was fouled by Seán O’Shea to stop Dublin’s momentum, McCarthy turned to the Hill and shook both fists. There was no nuance at play here – he was giving every last person in the ground his message right between the eyes.
He curled over their next point as well, ending a 15-minute spell without a Dublin score. Then he rose to win the kick-out, leading Ciarán Kilkenny to flash a point. It was pure defiance, letting Kerry know they’d have to be a good three points better than the team he was playing on if they wanted to beat it by one.
“It was a pleasure to be there to see James McCarthy in action,” wrote Darragh Ó Sé in The Irish Times the following Wednesday. “I have said it time and again in this column down the years, there’s nobody in the sport I would rather have beside me on a team.
“He did the work of five men on Sunday – up and down, winning tackles, setting Dublin moving, scoring his own point, winning kick-outs. And all this after he missed an early goal. The sheer bull thickness of him was a sight to see.”
McCarthy was 32 at that stage, a dozen years into his Dublin career and still schooling younger players as he went. He was more than sheer bull thickness, admirable as it was. He was an incredible athlete – Niall Moyna is on record as saying he’d have made a serious 800m runner.
There was a Leinster Championship game against Laois in Nowlan Park in 2016 where he seemed to cover the ground between the two 45s in about four strides before sending Diarmuid Connolly away for a goal. The running power, the accuracy of his handpassing on the run – he was unstoppable in that mode.
He would have been a huge player for Dublin in any era, but he was a perfect fit for what football became through the 2010s and into the early part of this decade. He could run all day, he was a buzzsaw in the tackle and he rarely gave a bad pass. Everything about him seemed to drive Dublin forward and put the opposition in retreat.
But maybe McCarthy’s greatest attribute was as a kind of human thermometer, able to sense what his team and the game situation required. He was brilliant at getting a feel for when Dublin were a little bit off it. He knew the power of a well-timed hit or a driving run, how it might shake a sleepy league performance out of its funk.
And they loved him for it. The Dublin players who made up that dressingroom through his career are all their own men, filled with their own ideas and likes and dislikes. But they all adore James McCarthy.
Getting him up the steps of the Hogan Stand in 2023 as captain was the last great hurrah of that team, and when Dessie Farrell was asked about him beforehand, he described McCarthy as “the greatest we’ve ever had”. Which was a pretty big shout, given all the storied Dubs from down the years. But Farrell had no hesitation in saying it, all the same.
“It’s just, he’s all in it,” Farrell expanded. “It’s all about the team. He’s the most low-maintenance individual you can come across. Every day, he’s like a lion out there. He just wants to play football and be the best version he can be for football.
“I’ve the utmost admiration for him – as do all the lads. I know it’s clichéd – the spiritual leader, the warrior, all that type of stuff. But it would be a tough day going out without James McCarthy, that’s for sure.”
Tough for Dublin, Farrell meant. But now that the day is here, it’s probably a tougher day for McCarthy himself. Being a Dublin footballer was everything to him and the lack of it in his life will leave a hole.
Every Dub would be only too delighted to fill it with thanks for what he gave them.
James McCarthy by the numbers
83 Championship matches
9 All-Ireland titles
14 Leinster titles
6 National Leagues
5 All Stars
Man of the Match in the 2017 All-Ireland final
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