There’s no valour in any concussion
This month 13 years ago, I tore the medial collateral ligament in my left knee. Not on the field of play but spinning down a kid’s swimming pool slide on a camping site in Christchurch, New Zealand. On the way down, my left leg caught the slide’s steel stairs as the rest of my body followed gravity’s course. Pain. Worse still, stupid pain.
My concussion story isn’t a proud one, either. Mine wasn’t about putting about sticking my head where others feared to stick their boot. Thirteen months ago, I was on my way to answering the front door from my upstairs home office when I slipped on a toy the dog had just left on one of the steps close to the landing.
On my back, I careered down the entire flight of stairs, banging my head against the wood in the descent. More pain. More stupid, stupid pain.
“You alright?” asked the gas man who had heard the kerfuffle through the front door and porch. “Grand,” I grimaced, beckoning him to get his meter reading done and silently urging him to be on his way so I could end the brave facade.
That’s what I remember from a day apart from the headaches and jetlag-like disorientation that evening. A day or two later, the pain in my back had grown. An MRI scan later showed a collapsed disc but the shock of the impact, the concussion itself an injury, had masked from me the extent of the problem.
I tell my story because there was no valour to it but neither should there be any associated with concussion on the field of play. Sportspeople who put their bodies on the line are to be admired and revered providing they are responsible.
This week, starting today, the ’s own Ruby Walsh will aim to make the Cotswolds his playground once more but his admission on Sunday he was prepared to ride concussed in the 2012 English Grand National, and would do so again, is troubling. There are fewer braver than Walsh but that is reckless.
That disregard for one’s self is shared in Gaelic games. Rory O’Carroll may have decided to step away from inter-county football months after indicating a third concussion would likely persuade him to retire but Aidan O’Shea, who admits to suffering concussion six or seven times, remains.
There are few sights in Gaelic football more beguiling than watching O’Shea use his combination of force and dexterity to beat defenders but knowing what we know, should we be looking on through our fingers?
Last month, Tomás Ó Sé, who suffered a number of concussions, recalled one occasion where he was hospitalised by a broken jaw in a club league game, which left him a quivering, mumbling wreck.
“A bang on the head was nothing to get too worked up about. Had there been a training session with Kerry the following day, I wouldn’t have thought twice about heading down to it.”
Ó Sé says his attitude has changed dramatically since, but the culture of machismo remains in Gaelic games and will continue to until players and, to a lesser extent, managers stop exploiting what is admittedly a far from an exact science. It is not enough to consider the here and now. The implications of taking one blow to the head too many are simply too severe.
There are those in Gaelic games like those in rugby who claim concussion is the worst kind of PC, symptomatic of the urge to ascribe a medical condition to every ailment. They are wrong. BBC’s jarring interview with former Glasgow Warriors player John Shaw last month is the video nasty that should be replayed over and over until the dangers of concussion truly hit home. Shaw was knocked out over 12 times in his career and suffered a heart attack in a legends game in 2007.
During the piece, he suffers a brain freeze — “That was one of my cut-out moments there,” he explains after experiencing a silent blank for a number of seconds before admitting it happens “frequently”.
Education is essential but is it in everyone’s best interests? Dublin’s reasons might have been genuine but the recent claim the senior football management blocked a player from contributing to a newspaper article on concussion doesn’t look or sit right. It’s only three years since a clearly dazed Rory O’Carroll was allowed to remain on the field for the final 15 minutes or so of an All-Ireland final having collided with Mayo’s Enda Varley. Dublin should be proactive in such situations.
Speak to those involved in underage coaching in urban clubs in the likes of Cork and Dublin and there is considerable anecdotal evidence to suggest parents are becoming more and more inclined to guide their children towards Gaelic games than rugby. They are more convinced Gaelic football and hurling are safer sports.
But the same unwritten rule of grinning and bearing apply to them. There still exist parameters for pain. Worse still, stupid pain.
john.fogarty@examiner.ie
Going into last weekend, there was a marked drop in the number of goals in Division 1A compared to previous years. For the first time this decade, the average goal count per game had dropped below two to 1.78.
That figure was made all the starker in contrast to Gaelic football’s Division 1, where the average was above two, the best since the black card’s debut in 2014.
Division 1’s average goal number is currently running at two, which is still higher than Division 1A’s 1.91, but at least there was an improvement in the number of three-pointers scored in hurling’s top flight on Saturday and Sunday.
Some truths remain the same – that two of the most goal-shy teams in Waterford and Dublin failed to raise a green flag in Walsh Park was hardly surprising.
However, in Páirc Uí Rinn and Pearse Stadium, there were goals and, more than coincidentally, top class entertainment. Before this weekend, apart from Waterford’s thrilling one-point win over Tipperary, this hurling campaign had hardly raised an impartial cheer.
With this forthcoming weekend presenting one dead rubber in Kilkenny and another, at least on paper, for Cork in Thurles, eyes will turn to the Division 1B “final” in Ennis for excitement.
However, don’t overlook Cork’s need for a first win. Beating Tipperary would mean three meetings in the space of nine weeks but that’s the type of familiarity they can live with.
Predicted final Division 1A table: 1. Kilkenny 2. Waterford 3. Dublin 4. Tipperary 5. Galway 6. Cork
For those who follow Crossmaglen Rangers and Armagh’s fortunes, Jamie Clarke would have always come across as an exception not just as a talent but as an individual.
An affable guy with a penchant for fashion and coffee, his desire to be part of a bigger world means he won’t be part of Armagh’s plans this year. Football simply isn’t his raison d’être.
That is abundantly clear in BBC Northern Ireland’s excellent documentary on his club, which will be screened next Monday.
“I just feel there’s a lot more to me than living in a rural town,” he says, explaining his decision to leave for New York during Crossmaglen’s county championship run last summer. Clarke returned for the Ulster Club championship and remained until the All-Ireland semi-final defeat by Castlebar Mitchels but he had fallen out of love with the game, if not the club.
“I don’t enjoy it as much because of the pressures of having to win all the time, and wanting to win for the sake of winning so nobody else can win. It’s not about having fun and enjoying the game any more.”
As Robert de Niro’s character Lorenzo Anello says in , the saddest thing in life is wasted talent. It would be wholly sadder if Clarke was made to live a life he didn’t want to lead.
