Eoin Cadogan: Chase dual dreams for as long as you can but it's now near impossible

The thought did cross my mind about returning to senior football having stepped away the last few years.

Fri, 18 Mar, 2022 - 17:11

WITH it being my first year being back full-time with the club, the thought did cross my mind about returning to senior football having stepped away the last few years.

The physical toll on the body towards the end of my career just wouldn’t allow me to do both. Though at times I've had a love-hate relationship with the code, football has been very good to me, and is a game I thoroughly enjoy. But the idea of returning and trying to contribute in some way quickly evaporated when I saw the league format and championship programs. Twenty weeks of league games between hurling and football made even me realise that the physical demands wouldn’t justify a return and certainly wouldn’t put me in a position to give a wholehearted effort all of the time.

Flip it back ten years and those concerns wouldn’t have even entered my mind. Through 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014 I committed to both Cork hurling and football squads. Week on week, hurling, football. Consecutive weekends, championship games even falling on same weekend! It was chaotic and tiring, but I was living that dream that I never thought possible so I always had a smile on my face in doing so, regardless of how difficult it might have been. From this older perspective, I can now see it was an impossible task for someone trying to maximise his potential.

How did it work? Play a league football game Saturday or Sunday. Monday night was some form of active recovery with skills involved so ball alley for 30/40 minutes to loosen out and then head to Fountainstown beach and into the seawater for 15/20 minutes. I loved going to the sea as it was a release from the competitive sporting bubble and a place to gather your thoughts.

Many evenings during February and March when it was dark early in the evening my father would drive to Fountainstown and park the car on the slip down to the water and shine the lights down (to ensure I wouldn’t drown). It’s not just the players who go that extra mile in trying to achieve dreams.

Tuesday would be a hurling warm-up and some form of skills for 45 minutes just go flush out the legs. Thursday full training. League game on Saturday/Sunday and back into the same process Monday.

When playing both, I always did have it in the back of my head that some of my teammates can’t be happy with this guy dropping in some weeks and not being there the next. Only natural, especially if they were on the fringes of the squad.

I was lucky that the inter-county managers took control of the situation if any disgruntlement was surfacing. They always communicated the situation and ultimately if you were picked to start it was because you were performing for the time you were there. There’s no place for sentiment at inter-county level and it also gave me a little bit of an edge. When I was picked to play I wanted to prove myself right and that my selection was justified.

Prior to returning to hurling full-time in 2018 (I chopped and changed a lot), I would have said that football would have taken a far greater physical toll. With the tackle you are using your body, arms and hands a lot more. Typically you were covering a far greater distance in football over hurling and with congested defences, you needed to use your body to break the tackle and line more often than not.

But there's been huge changes in hurling over the last four years and some of the same traits and skills from the football playbook are now required. The use of the spare hand raises its head every year but there’s a skill in that too, not unlike football tackling with the near hand. With referees really clamping on wreckless use of the hurley, I see it as a positive for players to use their bodies to tackle.

Similarly, the distances the middle eight are covering might surprise you. During one of last year's Munster Championship hurling games, as a wing back, I covered 9.4km and still wasn’t in the top three when it came to total distance covered and metres sprinted. We’re told the ball does the work in hurling but while the ball is at the other end of the field, you are still making three or four tracking runs on an opposition forward.

Team puck-out set-ups are now making that middle third more congested too which brings more physical contact and more time in the sea on Mondays!

Do I see more dual players re-appearing at senior inter-county level? No I don't. Essentially because the playing standards in both codes are now so high, and the levels of commitment needed to even be considered good enough are so great, that it's an impossibility.

Parking the three onfield sessions a week and two maintenance gyms sessions, players are also analysing opposition, working on individual skills, monitoring sleep and calorie intake throughout each day - and that’s before you ever hit the field for game time.

In saying all that, would I encourage any young hurler or footballer to play both, or any other sport for that matter, for as long as they could?

Yes I would. What age that can continue til I can't say, but for the betterment of the individual, it's a positive to experience different sports. Inter-county demands huge commitment and dedication, but we all have dreams when we’re young. It’s important to chase them.

Fountainstown will still be there when you've turned 30.