Still keeping eye on the ball

A FAMILIAR face will stand between the posts for the Cork hurlers tomorrow.

Donal Óg Cusack returns for the visit of Galway in the pick of tomorrow’s action and is relishing his first outing of his 16th season in county colours.

Three months into the 2011 season and score technology is the hot topic of debate with GAA chiefs set to bite the bullet and experiment with state-of-the-art systems in the coming weeks. Who better than the Cloyne man to assess the importance of Hawk-Eye et al which could change the face of Gaelic games at inter-county level?

“This isn’t about the umpires,” says veteran Cusack. “I make as many mistakes as anyone, on and off the field. I know you have the argument — and FIFA are using it too — that they don’t want referees refereed, but what people want, what the players want, is fair play and to get the big decisions right.

“I’d have no problem with video technology. People say it would slow down the game but if you look at what’s happening already, for a lot of the close decisions there’s a bit of a delay because umpires are consulting among themselves.”

But hang on a moment — doesn’t that call for fair play fly in the face of what we see every week, goalkeepers trying to influence umpires, waving balls wide that are clearly over the bar, encouraging those bad calls themselves?

“That has always been there,” he counters. “Look back at Nicky English’s kicked point in the Munster final of ‘87, Ger Cunningham (Cork keeper) waving it wide, to Richie Bennis’s pointed 65 in the 1973 Munster final, Tipperary players waving it wide. You’re always going to have that. The overriding thing is that people should go home knowing justice has been done. That’s not happening in a lot of cases at the moment.”

Donal Óg was speaking in Ballincollig at the Bord Gáis Energy READISCOVER Your Local Library Week, where he read sections from his best selling biography Come What May to an appreciative audience. When you consider the many GAA players who won’t even give an interview for fear of the negative repercussions it might provoke, how big a decision was it, then, to write such a revealing and intimate book?

“People had been on to me for years about the possibility of it, but it was one of those things I just put to one side. Then it got to the stage where I felt it was time to do it, for a number of different reasons. Having made the decision, I didn’t want to go down the route of ‘I got up in the morning at six o’clock, went training, had breakfast’. I wanted to talk about Cloyne, the place I came from, the love I have for it and for the people there who started me off.

“I also wanted to call things as they were in my own personal situation, and did that. I wanted to make a couple of points as well in terms of what had happened in Cork over the years. I think I did that also but hopefully not in any way taking advantage of the fact that I was the one putting it down in black-and-white — that was something I was very conscious of from the outset. I have to say — and not just because we’re in a library! — I like reading, but I never expected to be involved in this side of it, to be writing something that people might have been interested in reading. But it’s like everything in life, you don’t know how things are going to turn out. I’m glad I did it.”

Given that he was already the target of much vitriolic abuse from opposing ‘fans’, wasn’t such a frank book just giving them extra ammunition, adding to the pressure of his position?

“I don’t know, it’s hard to measure that kind of pressure. Maybe there’s something I’m missing here, something that I don’t see or I don’t get, but you’re playing for Cork, you’re in the goals, you’re playing a game you love to play.

“I don’t feel any more pressure than was already there — a lot of it is looking at the bigger picture.”

Speaking of the bigger picture, his interest in politics is now well known — how much consideration did he give to running in the recent election? “I had the option maybe a year ago, then another option came up more recently. It’s something you’d think about; I have a few people around me I’d trust 100%, I consulted them, and between my own thoughts and everything else, it didn’t happen. That doesn’t mean you’re not interested. I have a general interest in current affairs, and this election, in terms of both the turnout and the result, you could say that people have had their say. With everything that has happened over the last few years, with recession, bailouts, IMF, the world economic situation, I think we all have a better understanding how the world we live in operates.

“There’s a lot of fear in the country, a lot of people under all kinds of pressure, pressures they’re not used to deal with, pressures that maybe they’re not skilled in dealing with. They used the democratic option, through the ballot box, to voice their displeasure at the way things had gone.”

What about his own political ambitions — still alive? “I don’t know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that you should never rule anything out. I have a lot of other things I want to do, things I need to do…”

Such as?

“Hurling is very important to me. As much as possible I try to live in the present, and I’ve spent as much time thinking about that (hurling) as anything else.”