MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Dónal Óg — Number one the loneliest number
You grope around for the new and shiny but you end up with a dusty second-hand phrase because frankly, nothing else fits better.
Take one of the more seductive fall-back positions in sportswriting, when personality is matched with performance in a neat equation. Here’s the flashy forward, outgoing and gregarious. Contrast with the dour defender, grim and silent.
It’s hard to avoid that cliché in the case of Dónal Óg Cusack, though, and his goalkeeping career with Cork. The goalie: the focused loner, the noisy organiser. The man who spends his sporting career in front of thousands of watchers without facing them. Number one, the loneliest number, in the words of Aimee Mann.
Nothing so became Cusack as a ‘keeper as the short puck-out strategy Cork used. He had licence to use the ploy as he saw fit, and sometimes it didn’t work out; it didn’t work out on the biggest stage of all once, for instance, and Cork conceded a point in an All-Ireland final, with all the cards on the table — because a short puck-out went awry.
That didn’t deter Cusack and his teammates from looking for the short puck-out again from the very next restart, though.
(On a slightly incidental note, his omission for the coming league campaign means that Cork have completed thirty-one years with two goalkeepers. Ger Cunningham held the post from 1982 to 1998, and Cusack took over then. You’d find less continuity on the bench of the US Supreme Court.)
The fourth estate will miss him, certainly. This writer once turned up for a run of the mill season-setting interview with Cusack and a wide-ranging discussion of Buddhism ensued.
That kind of chat isn’t unheard of with sportspeople, of course. The difference with Cusack was that it all went on the record, unlike the athlete in another code who waxed lyrical about his passion for an obscure academic topic, then begged for it to be omitted from the interview – before he popped up in a Sunday paper yakking away on the same topic . . .
Anyway.
There’ll be plenty who won’t miss Dónal Óg Cusack. Being front and centre in the Cork strikes didn’t endear him to many people within the county and far beyond its borders.
Sitting at the top table with the GPA ensured Cusack disappeared from a few more Christmas card lists.
His sexuality drove thousands to homophobic chanting on the terraces – though come to think of it, they’re likely to miss him more than most.
What good are bigots without a target, after all?
Outing himself in his autobiography is likely to be the key line in any summary of Cusack’s career, which is unfortunate. Unfortunate in that beyond the Buddhism and the bolshiness, he was a hell of a ‘keeper.
In the 2004 All-Ireland final Cusack stood tall in a one-on-one with Henry Shefflin, saved the shot – and had the presence of mind to work the ball to Wayne Sherlock rather than ballooning the ball upfield for a cheap roar.
In the 2006 All-Ireland semi-final he defied decades of goalkeeping logic by swiping Ken McGrath’s late free away as it was heading over the bar, preserving Cork’s one-point lead.
And he always took his time with the puck-out, even with the baying of the crowd looking for a long bomb downfield, he was looking for the advantage – for the angle, that edge.
In one of our most recent chats Cusack brought up the idea of introducing young players to the notion of what it meant to be an intercounty panellist: the demands and responsibilities.
Now he’s looking at the other end of that process, I was reminded of another chat we had, years ago, when I asked many of the then-current Cork players about their team.
Nobody summed up what it meant better than Cusack.
“We believe that Cork should mean more than representation,” he said.
“If we give it this time and get this associated with it in the public eye and spend this much time together, then it has to mean more than that.”
It does mean more. Thanks to him and more like him.
