Leader Brendan Cummins destined to go down Donal Óg Cusack and Davy Fitzgerald route
Where once they were coached by just the one ferociously-driven former goalkeeper, now they’ve a second. In Brendan Cummins’ new book ‘Standing My Ground’, the former Tipperary netminder tells of a former selector not feeling adequately self-assured in addressing for the first time a room of All-Ireland winners and high achievers. You can take it, just like Davy Fitzgerald before him, Cusack held or radiated no such fears on that score.
It is surely only a matter of time before Cummins himself joins that extraordinary trinity of Munster goalkeepers into management and walking to the top of another room with designs of winning more Liam MacCarthy Cups. Already he has set about serving an apprenticeship, as a goalkeeping coach and advisor this past season to the Kerry hurlers and Cheddar Plunkett’s Laois project. In the foreword of ‘Standing My Ground’, Liam Sheedy predicts that Cummins will make an outstanding manager. Anyone who reads the rest of Cummins’ book will be in no doubt as to why.
This year’s additions to the GAA canon may not feature a standout classic a la ‘The Club’, ‘Out of Our Skins’, ‘The Bloodied Field’ or ‘Last Man Standing’ that prominently starring Fitzgerald, Cusack and Cummins, but there is plenty of recommended reading on offer for those immersed in the games.
Mary White’s ‘Relentless: The Inside Story of the Cork Ladies Footballers’ is a manual for how a team can improve and transform itself; Jim McGuinness’s ‘Until Victory Always’, ideal for a coach searching out on a similar journey. For an individual player looking for ways to get the most out of him or herself, Cummins’ is the one to get their hands on. Rarely has a GAA autobiography being more generous or insightful into how to prepare and play at the highest level.
What’s striking about Cummins is his awareness: of where he’s from, where his team is at, and most of all, his game and self.
At 16 he realised that if he was going to play minor for Tipperary he had to learn to strike the ball as well off his left side as off his right.
“I had neglected this aspect between the ages of 12 and 15 which had left me playing catching up with the other boys.”
But he would catch up with them, practising almost every night in the local ball alley, using a ball soaked in water by his dad to make it more challenging to strike.
In time he would overtake everyone, bar perhaps Damian Fitzhenry and Davy Fitzgerald, the two goalkeepers he aspired to be a composite of.
Around the time those goalkeepers were retiring, Cummins was still looking to perfect his striking. He would tie a smartphone to a goalpost so he could later study the pace and timing of his swing. Even after training with Tipp in Thurles, he’d regularly stop off at the hurling wall near his home in Ballybacon. There on the wall he’d scrawl circles, one at the height of Paddy Stapleton’s catching hand, another at Paul Curran’s, so to programme himself to be as accurate in his short puckout as Cusack slaving away himself in the alley in Rochestown.
All around him he found ingenious, simple ways to further improve and enjoy his game. Over time his match week routine would include taking a half day off work on the Friday and going for a walk around 3.30.
Why? “To get a feel for what the light was like at that time of day. We trained in the evening and the afternoon light bounces a different kind of glare on the senses.”
Yet there are some things you can only prepare yourself so much for. The Friday before the 2011 All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin, Cummins’s wife Pam learned she was experiencing a miscarriage.
Cummins’ book is not in the usual confessional tradition of someone experiencing troubles with alcohol or gambling, but in recalling how that miscarriage affected him before, during and for a long time after that game, he gives us a stark reminder of just how little the critic in the stand often knows just what the man in the arena, trying, sometimes failing, in the arena is privately going through.
The other impression of Cummins is his willingness to have the hard conversation. On occasion, with himself.
On others, with management. On others, with team-mates. Sheedy in the foreword recalls it was Cummins who turned the pivotal team meeting after the team’s 2010 Munster championship exit to Cork. By bluntly saying if they carried on as they were, Tipp had as much chance of winning that year’s All-Ireland as Carlow, Tipp would win that All-Ireland.
Yet as often as he challenged and confronted team-mates, he often more cajoled, encouraged and reinforced them.
Just as he himself momentarily froze in the 2001 All-Ireland drawn semi-final against Wexford, a month later he noticed Tom Costello had a similar tricky spell during the final; his head was down, looking at the grass; he was playing from behind.
“Are you all right?” he enquired of Costello.
“I’m all right,” Costello instinctively retorted. “You’re not, you’re gone,” said Cummins. “Relax now, just follow your man around for the next few minutes...
Get in front. You’re not on your own here.” With Cummins, they never were. It’s why he’ll lead again.
