Quiet man Fennelly carries big burden
It had nothing to do with Beano’s omission either. McDonald’s absence may have grabbed the national headlines but there were few dissenters when news of his demotion for today’s game spread from parish to parish.
The Arles man’s form had suffered in the wake of his nine-month injury lay-off. The nitpicking within the midland county zeroed in elsewhere.
Would the experiment of shoe-horning Darren Rooney into the full-back slot backfire?
Was little Donie Brennan capable of withstanding 70 minutes against an Ulster team?
Which Padraig Clancy would turn up in midfield?
Not for the first time the name of Aidan Fennelly barely merited a mention. Fennelly is this team’s Denis Irwin. No fuss, no fear, no worries.
Type in a word search on him in the Laois section of hoganstand.com and a mere 19 articles is the result. Do the same for Joe Higgins, his colleague across the pitch in the left corner and 110 stories pop up.
“Everyone knows what a great player Joe is but Aidan is one of the most under-rated defenders in the country,” says Laois selector Declan O’Loughlin. “If you had two Aidan Fennellys you could play the second one at corner-forward and he’d do as good a job for you.”
Mick O’Dwyer certainly thought so. Back in 2001 Fennelly had skipped forward from half-back to score the winning goal in a nondescript O’Byrne Cup game.
O’Dwyer tossed him in up front for a few games when he jumped the fence from Kildare late in 2003 but he saw that Fennelly offered far more as an attacking wing-back.
By the time they faced Offaly in the 2003 Leinster Championship replay O’Dwyer had shuffled his defence around and Fennelly found himself in the unfamiliar number two jersey.
“I’d never played there in my life before,” he recalls. “It was totally different. As a half-back you have the freedom to go up the wing and support the attack. In the corner you stop your man, play the ball off and get back right beside your man as soon as you can.
“If you don’t, at this level, you’re in trouble because the ball can come straight past you and corner-forwards are well able to take goals when you give them a sniff of one. For some reason, teams like giving some of their best players the no.15 jersey.”
Maybe so, but it’s rare that Fennelly has been burnt badly by any of them. Men like John Doyle and Alan Brogan have suffered in his shadow but it’s his two-game tussle with Dessie Dolan last summer that stands out.
Though Laois eventually lost the replay, Fennelly limited Dolan to two points from play over 140 minutes.
“Ah sure, I gave him his Allstar,” he replies, modest to a fault. “Dessie’s a real handful. He flies past you. He’s so quick and he doesn’t slow down at all when he’s soloing the ball.”
Derry’s Mark Lynch is due to stand next to him at throw-in today, though he won’t be surprised to see Paddy Bradley sidle up to him at some stage, “to get away from Joe”, as he puts it.
Like Irwin at Old Trafford, Fennelly is only truly appreciated when he’s missing. After the loss to Armagh in the 2003 quarter-final he ruptured cruciate ligaments in his first game back with Portlaoise.
Though O’Dwyer was stung by a spate of injuries and withdrawals the next spring, Fennelly’s was the name that those in the know enquired after.
But it was nothing compared to the injury that threatened to sever his career. “I was too young to be playing senior football basically.
“I’d just turned 18 when I was called up to the senior squad and when the doctors examined me they said what I had was a rugby player’s injury - repeated belts in the same place.
“The bottom rib was squashed in on my kidney. I was lucky because I was told when I went in for the operation that I might only have one kidney left when I woke up.
“Thankfully it went well. It would have been too dangerous to keep playing football if I’d gotten that removed.”
: Derry 5/4 Draw 13/2 Laois 5/6
: B Gillis, K McGuckin, K McCloy, G O’Kane, F McEldowney, SM Lockhart, P Kelly, Patsy Bradley, F Doherty, P Murphy, E Bradley, J McBride, M Lynch, Paddy Bradley (capt), E Muldoon.
: F Bryon; A Fennelly, D Rooney, J Higgins; C Begley, T Kelly, P McMahon; P Clancy, N Garvan; R Munnelly, K Fitzpatrick, B Sheehan; C Conway, B Brennan, D Brennan.
: P Russell (Tipperary).
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