Stephen Cluxton exits without fanfare but leaves lasting mark on the game
Stephen Cluxton. Picture: INPHO/Tommy Dickson
So now we know for sure. He’s gone, never to return. On the same weekend that Henry Shefflin put to bed any idea of Joe Canning lining out again in his county’s colours, so did Dessie Farrell regarding the possible availability of Stephen Cluxton playing for Dublin in 2022. As Farrell put it, “No fanfare, no official announcements from him, but Stephen won’t be involved this year.”
Farrell stopped short of using the R word but that’s what’s happened here: Stephen Cluxton is retired from inter-county football. We may well never see Paul Mannion or Jack McCaffrey again in a Dublin shirt, this now being Mannion’s second consecutive season sitting it out and McCaffrey giving a third consecutive championship a skip, but the pair of them still aren’t due to turn 30 until next year; there is a slim prospect that they return a la a Brian Corcoran when he was of a similar vintage. Cluxton turned 40 just before Christmas. You can’t — or at least don’t get to — come back at 41 after a two-season hiatus, not even him. Farrell told the assembled reporters after last Saturday’s game in Tullamore that out of respect to Cluxton “we need to let him live his life”, to move on, essentially, from Dublin. But in adding “and we need to do our own thing”, he hinted that Dublin needed to move on too, from the Cluxton drama whatever about Cluxton himself.
In their various media dealings since the All Ireland semi-final defeat to Mayo, the Dublin camp have talked about taking on board the necessary “learnings” and clearly Farrell has absorbed at least one from that ill-fated 2021 campaign. When looking at himself as well as back on the season Dessie obviously asked himself the Delores Question: Did you have to let it linger? A couple of weeks out from that All Ireland semi-final and he was still fielding questions about Cluxton possibly returning to the camp before the season’s end. The 2022 All Ireland semi-final is six months away and already Farrell has quashed any notions of not just Cluxton having any part this season but Mannion and McCaffrey as well. This year he has not let it linger. Just as Jim Gavin liked to incessantly talk about The Process, Dessie Farrell seems to have similarly adopted some of the language or at least philosophy of Nick Saban, the serially-successful gridiron college coach: Eliminate The Clutter.
Gavin had long held a similar outlook which helped him connect with Cluxton: the goalkeeper had an even greater antenna and aversion when it came to possible distractions. It was seen as somewhat ironic that by not wanting to create a fuss about his status and availability last year, Cluxton duly created a fuss. But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Earlier in the year Cluxton had been training within the Dublin system only to be reportedly unhappy with the setup breaching Covid restrictions. With it, something else was broken: be it a trust and then a regimen and habit or want. Whatever, the long and short of it is that a possible sabbatical has now morphed into full-blown (inter-county) retirement.
To reiterate Farrell, there’ll be no fanfare or official announcement, at least from Cluxton’s end, but the Herald can start the press and the commissioning for the special supplement. A Dublin institution like that simply has to recognise a Dublin institution like him and the moment that last Saturday was. Along with Kevin Heffernan and Gavin himself, he forms the Mount Rushmore of Dublin football; everyone else is fighting for that fourth spot.
But he transcends county. He defined an era and redefined a position by his willingness and openness to learn and borrow from others who transcended their sport.
Donal Óg Cusack was not the greatest hurling goalkeeper of his generation but he was its most influential: Brendan Cummins has eloquently spoken about how much he adapted his own game after how Cusack revolutionised the sport with his short puckout. For all the talk there has been in this millennium of how much hurling has adopted football tactics and its obsessiveness with possession, the transfer of ideas has worked the other way too. Even after Cusack stopped lumping restarts down the field, football goalies continued to do just that until Cluxton decided there had to be a better and smarter way. Now goalkeepers are more starters – or at least re-starters – than they are stoppers.
But not only was he most influential on-field player of his generation, but off it he was the most influential and dominant player within the most dominant team the game as known. Bernard Brogan was another totem of that team, the other great difference-maker between the teams of the 2010s and those of the preceding two decades — other Dublin sides simply hadn’t a finisher like him – but even he viewed Cluxton with a certain reverence and even fear.
In his book The Hill Brogan recounts how at one stage in the Gilroy years they were housemates. By then Brogan wasn’t a regular mass-goer but that year he was, because Cluxton was and part of his routine that you couldn’t upset was that he got in some church the morning of a game.
And they had to be the first at training. Brogan at the time was working as a trainee chartered accountant and had to leave his city-centre job at five o’clock on the dot and dash across town on his red Honda motorbike to make it in time to catch the 5.45 lift to training in Cluxton’s car. Any time later and he wouldn’t wait. “Even if you were in time you risked a dirty glare,” Brogan wrote.
Sure enough they’d be the first into training, honing their frees and their craft. Brogan was Dublin’s go-to freetaker from anywhere inside 35 metres, but when Kevin McManamon ended up tripping over Barry John Keane’s outstretched leg at the end of the 2011 final, the two old housemates exchanged another look and Brogan signalled Cluxton up.
The rest, as Brogan says, was history. And what followed that, historic, Cluxton following Bryan Cullen up the steps to lift another seven himself.
One of his other legacies is Evan Comerford, already one of the most accomplished goalkeepers in the country. Comerford should win an All Ireland and possibly more as a starter in the coming years.
But even if he proves to be a Steve Young, Cluxton was Joe Montana — and Tom Brady rolled into one. The GOAT.
