Show me the facemask, Nickey

IT’S NOT every day Nickey Brennan would put you in mind of a Tom Cruise film, but he did this week.

Not late-period Cruise, the weird Magnolia roles, or early, toothy Cruise, like Taps or Rumble Fish. No, Nickey’s plea to hurlers to leave off their helmets had us scratching the head and frowning — shouldn’t there be a specific word to describes that feeling? — before we remembered Jerry Maguire, or what we like to call Classic Cruise.

When the eponymous agent, played by T. Cruise Esq., suggests to Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr) that maybe he could show some more enthusiasm when he scores, maybe his team might come across with more bucks...

Rod replies, slow and aghast: “You want me to dance...?”

Nickey doesn’t want anyone to dance. What he actually said earlier in the week to the dozen county captains at the launch of the hurling championship was: “I ask the 12 captains here today to lead by example and leave their helmets aside for the parade or hold them in their hands.

“Recognition of our hurlers is sometimes difficult because of the helmets, especially those with a face guard. The helmets are necessary out on the pitch during games but hurlers should be as recognisable as their football counterparts.

“When you go back to your teams, I ask you as leaders to call on your team mates to do likewise.”

Nickey’s point is a fair one, but there are some immediate issues. For one thing, just how recognisable are modern footballers?

A few years ago, I wrote about how similar many players on the northern teams in particular were — they all seemed assembled from the same Meccano kit — tight haircuts, low body fat in turn leading to gaunt faces, all without a sense of humour (sorry).

All of which led to considerable difficulty when it came to telling them apart.

The fact that many of their hurling counterparts wear barred helmets obviously lowers the recognition factor further. A couple of years the Galway hurlers organised a press night after training, and it was noticeable that as kids crowded around their heroes, most sneaked a look at the name scrawled on the shaft of the hurley before addressing the player directly (“Here, sign that...Richie”).

Being less than recognisable isn’t always a bad thing. Without getting spancelled entirely by euphemism, some players’ welcome for anonymity is in direct correlation to their on-field reputation. One intercounty hurler of our acquaintance has a girlfriend from a rival county, and on occasion he’s been out and about socially in her home place only to hear detailed discussions of his performance, not all of them completely complimentary. The fact that the same man wears a facemask on his helmet makes him something of a mystery...and that’s just how he likes it.

There’s a cautionary tale in looking for too much “recognisability”. Reverting to American football, there was more than a touch of controversy some years ago when the NFL authorities noticed players hurrying into the endzone when a teammate scored — so they could doff their helmets and join in the celebrations, thus raising their recognisability for endorsements, etc.

From there it got complicated, with fines for excessive celebrations — which sometimes included pre-choreographed dancing. The whole thing reached a climax four years ago, when a New Orleans player scored a touchdown and pulled a mobile phone from padding surrounding one of the goalposts and made a call to his mother.

Maybe Nickey should concentrate on telling his umpires to have a good look at the goalposts. After all, if they can get mobiles into Portlaoise Prison, what’s to stop them being stashed in Croke Park or Thurles?

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