De Paor: silly to walk away with the team doing so well

SEÁN ÓG DE PAOR is bucking the trend. There are few 33-year-old double All-Ireland medal winners who could boast such zest and hunger for an NFL final. De Paor heads up that select group.

In the age of burnout and early retirements, there has been something oddly reassuring about his presence on the wing for Galway. He has been there for 12 years now, and yesterday as journalists and players gathered to publicise the Allianz double-header on Sunday, people wondered if there was some secret science only he and fellow thirty-something Kevin Walsh were privy to out west.

"Well, a lot of it has to do with my job," says de Paor, a teacher in St Mary's College in Galway. "The job is fairly complementary to the amount of training we have to do. We have a lot of free time, weekends free, three months off in the summer, finish at four every day. So any extra training we have to do, you can usually find the time for it."