Eimear Ryan: Keegan gives male players permission to put family first

There was an outpouring of appreciation this week as everyone’s favourite marauding defender, Lee Keegan, hung up his inter-county boots.

Wed, 11 Jan, 2023 - 18:00

Eimear Ryan

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.