Eimear Ryan: Keegan gives male players permission to put family first
PRIORITIES: Mayo’s Lee Keegan celebrates after the 2021 Connacht final. Pic: INPHO/Lorraine O'Sullivan
I am a Tipperary millennial, and so I am a huge Eoin Kelly fan. He represents an important bridge for Tipp: a young newcomer in 2001, part of the team that ended a decade-long famine, and captain for our next All-Ireland in 2010. (Lar Corbett, also a whippersnapper in 2001 and hat-trick hero in 2010, is the other side of this talismanic coin.) I was 14 in 2001 and 23 in 2010, so it’s no exaggeration to say that Kelly was a hero of my young adulthood.
Short, strong, never the quickest but with a lethal sidestep, Kelly was possessed of extraordinary wrists, and was able to calibrate them to score from pretty much any angle. He also had extraordinary strength of will, frequently scoring with two or three lads hanging out of him, and well able to put the head down and go for goal when Tipperary needed something. (I’m using the past tense, but 41-year-old Kelly is still putting in a ferocious shift with his club, Mullinahone.) I come to praise Kelly, not to bury him, etc etc.
But I was puzzled by a recent interview that he gave Eoghan Cormican of this parish about his new role in the Waterford hurling backroom team. What is it like being in another county’s dressing-room, Eoghan asked?
Eoin replied: "When you look at the GAA world now, Henry Shefflin making the move to Galway really opened everyone else’s minds." This baffled me, in that Kelly seems to be suggesting that Henry did something out of the ordinary in taking up a managerial job with a county not his own. Whether it's supportive comments like Kelly’s or the disapproval emanating from Brian Cody last year, this was neither a groundbreaking nor a taboo move. Taking up the Galway role was a perfectly reasonable next step in Shefflin’s career; why do we keep remarking on it?
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that both Kelly and Shefflin hail from counties that generally make an internal appointment. Kelly himself hurled under Nicky English, Michael Doyle, Ken Hogan, Babs Keating, Liam Sheedy, Declan Ryan and Eamon O’Shea, all of them Tipp men. Shefflin hurled under you-know-who. But still – a manager crossing county boundaries is by no means novel. It can be a prelude to managing your native county, or a change of pace afterwards – but it happens all the time.
Maybe the most famous example is that of Eamonn Cregan, the Limerick man who managed Offaly in 1994, the year Offaly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in the last five minutes of the All-Ireland final. Winning an All-Ireland as manager is a towering achievement, but for Cregan it was bittersweet, as he became the first manager to defeat his native county on the biggest day in the hurling calendar. He knew many of the Limerick players from a previous term managing Limerick in the 1980s, as well as county underage setups. When he went into the dressing-room after the game, he said: "Lads, I know how you feel. There is nothing I can say that is going to ease the pain."
Ger Loughnane went to Galway after Clare. He was succeeded in that post by John McIntyre, a Tipp man, who had previously managed Offaly. The prolific Babs Keating managed Laois and Offaly between two spells with his native Tipp. Dalo had three years with Clare followed by six years with Dublin. Davy Fitz managed Waterford, Clare, Wexford, Waterford again. In the late 2000s, Limerick had a streak of Corkmen: Justin McCarthy, Donal O’Grady and John Allen. In Micheál Donoghue, Dublin have their second Galwayman in a row. Antrim and Wexford have former Tipp goalkeepers Darren Gleeson and Darragh Egan in charge. And on and on. Same as it ever was.
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There was an outpouring of appreciation this week as everyone’s favourite marauding defender, Lee Keegan, hung up his inter-county boots. Amidst all the sharing of classic Keegan moments – crucial goals, penetrating runs up the pitch, memorable grappling matches with Dublin forwards – there was a slight aura of melancholy, too. He’s the only player to win five All-Stars without also winning an All-Ireland – a distinction I’m sure he would prefer not to have. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a player – in hurling or football – who has provided more magical All-Ireland final moments without ever climbing the steps.
Keegan is 33, so Mayo fans may have hoped he had a few more seasons to come. But with 12 years put down for his county, and with a number of injuries and surgeries since 2017, he has a lot of mileage on the clock. And then there’s the family: one of the things I loved about his retirement statement was his mention of his parenting responsibilities as a reason why he could no longer keep up his inter-county commitment. So often, it’s a factor in retirements of female players at around the same age: for Keegan to bring it up as a factor for male players, too, is important, and gives others permission to do the same.
In retrospect, he had pretty much flagged his retirement in an interview with Malachy Clerkin of the in November, soon after he was part of the Westport team who won the senior county title for the first time ever. Keegan said: "You want to be a present parent. I don’t want to be dipping in and out, missing milestones and events and that kind of thing."
He added this delightful anecdote: "I remember after we lost the All-Ireland against Tyrone, I was chasing my eldest one around the pitch … Look, I sat on the pitch in Croke Park and cried enough times in my life. What was the point? It didn’t change the result. I still had to chase this absolute nutter around the pitch. At least it added a few more miles to my GPS stats."
All the best to him in what will, by the sounds of it, be a lively retirement.
