Colin Sheridan: Donnellan had a competitive fortitude uncommon in most men
Some artists speak to us through their successes: Their All-Stars, their nine-darters, their underwear lines.
Others, like FC Barcelona’s Martin Braithwaite, speak through their very public failures.
A fortnight ago, Barcelona ‘unveiled’ Martin in front of an empty stadium. It was bizarre, and not just because he has a name better-suited to a Labour MP for East Lothian. In a scene reminiscent of a bad body-swap movie, Braithwaite took to the centre circle of the sacred Camp Nou — the same hallowed turf ripped up by Cruyff, Maradona, Rivaldo, and Messi — and attempted not one, but two rainbow flicks. Both failed.
Then, like a pot-bellied dad at a five-year old’s party, he casually rolled the ball under his foot and shimmied past an imaginary defender. At that moment, the Barcelona PR team may have wondered — as with the felled tree in the forest — if a new signing fails to perform upon unveiling and nobody is there to see it, did it happen?
Well, thanks to Twitter, it most certainly did. The world chuckled, and I along with it.
But buried beneath the surface of that mirth, was guilt. And empathy. And regret.
Braithwaite’s public shame — in bizarre synchronicity with the news that Prince William would visit Salthill Knocknacarra Gaelic football club, in Galway, this week — reopened a glass cage of emotion I had long sealed shut.
Some 15 years ago, I had my Martin Braithwaite moment over the course of one elongated GAA club season, and bore accidental witness to history. I may not have literally failed on two rainbow flicks, but, figuratively, I most certainly did.
Salthill Knocknacarra, like most city clubs, has always attracted transfers from footballers just like I was: Young men trying to build a life in the town, and wanting football to be a part of it.
This trend made it an easy and understandable target for the wrath of every other Galway club, especially from the north, the Helmand of football in the county. The mercenary tag had been a handy stick to beat them with. For me, it was an obvious and easy choice: My brother was already there, as skipper and talisman.
I never asked, but I guess the ‘welcome’ he regularly received from the faithful on the Tuam Stadium terraces (being from Mayo, of course) did his character more good than harm. I’m biased, but I’d like to think that after a decade of his kicking and fielding exhibitions — often under fire — he earned their grudging respect.
As for me, well, there was little in the talent department to ever suggest we were related, so I never felt their rage the same way. My arrival did, however, coincide with another, one that would change the course of the club’s history.
In an instance of bizarre serendipity worthy of a 30 for 30 documentary, my transfer was ratified the same night that Michael Donnellan’s was, and he was less a footballer and more a freak of nature.
Twitter was not a thing then. Just as well, because, as they danced on the streets of Rockbarton at the news of Donnellan’s arrival, I was trying and failing rainbow flicks in an empty Pearse Stadium.
In two strokes of a pen, Salthill Knocknacarra gained an early edition Skoda Octavia, and a Rolls Royce.
I understand, now, that my failures to impress were not unique. What brings any of us to the back pages of newspapers — either writing or reading — but the belief that we were once, ever so fleetingly, good enough.
And, in that moment — as boot leather meets ball and the O’Neill’s floats between the sticks — we, as mere mortal men and women, ever so temporarily understood the burden of greatness, and in that comprehension came the convenient realisation we were somehow better off without the curse of its touch.
That Salthill Knocknacarra won their only club All-Ireland the very season I joined was in no small part due to Donnellan’s arrival. But it was not because of it. They had lost a county final the previous season, and with the brother, Gordon Morley, Finian Hanley, Seamus Crowe and Sean Armstrong, they should’ve achieved more before then. The arrival of Donnellan, however, was the EpiPen to the chest they needed.
Popular, unpopular, it didn’t matter: Salthill beat Caltra, Crossmolina, St Brigid’s, Kilmacud Croke’s and St Galls to win that All-Ireland.
As a dozen Galactico-laden club teams in Dublin could testify, personnel is only one ingredient for success.
After revisiting historian Paul Rouse’s comments on Off the Ball in 2018, on why he believed Donnellan was more a cult hero than an all-timer, I understood, if disagreed, with his argument.
Not least because, I, too, made assumptions about him, as a young man who had to endure Galway’s wiping of Mayo’s eye in 1998 and 2001.
I erroneously thought Donnellan’s contribution to teams was more sporadic and enigmatic than profound and game-changing.
How wrong I was, and how privileged I am to remember the filthy, dirty pitch in An Spiddal, where Salthill trained that long winter, and the demonic perfectionism with which Donnellan infused a team, and which undoubtedly won an All Ireland for a club once perceived as a soft touch.
It’s no secret Donnellan was blessed from birth with talent — he genuinely could play any position on the field — but if his creator was responsible for his gift, it was Donnellan, and Donnellan alone, who was responsible for a competitive fortitude uncommon in most men.
It was neither subtle nor kind, but it served as a plumb line for anyone who dared cross him.
He worried much less about the ability of those he played with than about their application.
How badly both Galway and Mayo could do with someone of his ilk now. The former, unproven and in danger of believing their own hype, would have their wings clipped and focus sharpened with one lash of his tongue.
The latter, in danger of trusting their own obituary, would be told to ditch the self-pity, and go defy the odds.
So, as William, Prince of Wales, stares curiously at my face in the photo of that all-conquering squad in the Salthill clubhouse this week, wondering where he saw it before, it’s likely he will little note, nor long remember, the brief story he will be told about what the club achieved 14 years ago next week.
Which is a shame, for like any tale of triumph, it contains multitudes.
