Focusing on the ball, big and small
- A retweet on Eoin Cadogan’s twitter account
FOR a moment Eoin Cadogan smiles, then checks himself.
He shouldn’t be smiling. We shouldn’t be talking about this. You asked him there for his memories of when the final whistle sounded in Croke Park last September, prompting him to recall Aidan Walsh “jumping around the place like a girl”. But wait, why are you asking about that? That was so last year. This is now only days after Killarney.
“Look,” he says with almost a certain agitation, “I’ll have long enough to be reminiscing about that (last year’s All Ireland) when I’m up in the stand. You’re only as good as your last game and in our last game we were beaten by Kerry. Last year is over and done with. Whether it’s victory or defeat, you have to park it.”
If Cadogan has learned one thing from being a dual player, it’s that power and need to move on. One Sunday last August he found himself in Croke Park, part of a Cork full back line bombarded by Kilkenny and personally scorched by Richie Power and then on the Tuesday marking Donncha O’Connor in a training game, getting ready for the footballers’ big match back up there against the Dubs. If he’d continued to dwell on Power he’d have been scorched not just by O’Connor but by Eoghan O’Gara the following Sunday week too.
He’s parked Killarney now as well. When he woke up last Monday morning the aftertaste of defeat was still there but that evening while the rest of the panel were doing a recovery session, he was back training with the hurlers, Galway on his mind. On Killarney he’ll offer these final thoughts.
“It was a game we’d love to have won but we didn’t deserve to win. If we had come back and pipped Kerry by a point we’d have papered over all the cracks and then been knocked out in the quarter-final.
“We obviously didn’t learn anything from coming back against Dublin in the league final. We still made those mistakes again against Kerry. That’s something we now really have to address. But look, in a few weeks no one will be talking about the Kerry game. From here on in it’s knockout. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a different competition we’re entering.”
Of course for him this week, this day, it’s even a different sport. These last six days it’s been all hurling. He’s got in two sessions with the team as well as two sessions in the ball alley, including last night in the sanctuary that’s the alley in Rochestown. Any week it’s hurling he likes to get to the alley at least twice, to get his touch and eye in.
Sometimes Donal Óg Cusack is his companion and competitor down there. Cusack is hardly known for his acquiescent nature either so their games are hardly timid; balls that were clearly out have been called in, balls that have been in have been called out. “There’d be a lot of strong words said down there,” smiles Cadogan. “I’m after adapting to his style at this stage, knowing the kind of stunts he’d pull. But that makes it all the more fun.”
He’s gained the goalkeeper’s respect these last few years. When someone like Donal Óg Cusack describes you in his autobiography as a “strong-minded guy”, then you’re a strong-minded guy, and Cadogan’s continued status has only steeled that mind.
Want to know the biggest downside to being a dual player, the most draining thing about it? Always being reminded you’re a dual player. The constant commentary is the hard part; compared to that, actually playing and combining the two games is a breeze.
We’re talking only days after Niall Cahalane wrote in these pages that Cadogan was in danger of falling between two stools, an observation prompted by Conor Counihan’s decision not to start him in the Munster final.
“At this point in time,” wrote Cahalane, “we are all left wondering whether an outstanding athlete is doing himself or his county justice. I know both Denis Walsh and Conor Counihan have maximised Cadogan’s opportunity to play hurling and football by facilitating a flexible training regime. But in doing that, are they really optimising his talent? Cadogan is an asset to both Cork teams but his form and performance in both codes is suffering and sooner — not later — he will be forced to make a difficult choice.”
Cadogan likes and respects Cahalane. A milestone and education in his own development was as a 17-year-old in a county semi-final being entrusted to switch to midfield to take up the wily Castlehaven veteran. They even meet each other quite a bit now that Cadogan is working in town in business sales for 02, having scrapped his initial trade as an electrician after the bust pretty much ditched electricians. Yet as much as he appreciates Cahalane being entitled to his opinion, it’s not one he agrees with.
“To be honest I’m not too bothered at this stage what people think. It’s very easy for people to write in the paper or say on the radio that it’s time for this fella to pick one. But they don’t know what my condition is in, they don’t know how many nights I’m actually training.”
He doesn’t train any more than any other Cork player in a given week, outside maybe those visits to the ball alley when it’s a hurling week. He rests better than most county players. He’ll catch an hour’s nap between work and training. He’ll head down to Kinsale and Fountainstown for the fresh air. He watches what he eats. If anything he finds playing both codes helps keep him fresh. Know the way players talk about the benefits of “going back to the club”? For him going back to the hurlers or the footballers offers that diversity.
“I understand people are going to criticise you; as an inter-county player, hurling or football, that comes with the territory. And in my case if you have a bad game that’s the first thing that’s going to be thrown at you — ‘he’s playing both’.
The dual thing he feels is too lazy an attribution for people. Sometimes you just don’t play that well, sometimes you’ll just make mistakes, everyone does. All the way up with Cork underage he hurled in the half back line where there was more scope for expression and error too, but as a senior player he’s been confined to life in the full back line, a tightrope where if you’re first to the high ball and launch the ball upfield, you’re a warrior; beaten to it and the ball’s in the net and you’re a mug. In football if the ball falls to an opponent in the red zone, more often than not you can still recover, shadow, foil. In hurling there’s no such latitude.
Even when you get on that ball, you can be unlucky. Against Tipp in Thurles he was stripped of the ball by Bonner Maher for the game’s third and decisive goal. It was a great hustle play from Maher but Cadogan had actually got past him before Maher pulled his hand down Cadogan’s; another referee would have given a free out. But that’s just part of life playing full back.
He’d like to think he’s doing fine in both codes, as much as he can get better. The current arrangement is doing him justice; he’d hate to think what if he had caved in to conventional wisdom last year and missed out on an All-Ireland medal and a life experience like the semi-final against the Dubs — “the most incredible occasion I was ever part of, it was just electric”. It wasn’t lost on him either that some of his critics would have been then bemoaning that he didn’t start against Kerry.
“I’m 24 years of age. I’m going to be long enough sitting above in the stand cheering on Cork. But while you’re there and as long as you’re fit and your performances aren’t dropping, I’ll go with this. I’ll make up my own mind in my own time. I was coming home from work the other night and Teddy Mac was on the radio, a man who has done it himself, and in fairness the comments he made were quite sensible. He said about me, ‘I’m sure he’ll know himself when the time is right.’ And I will.”
Growing up, his two idols were Brian Corcoran and Seán Óg Ó hAilpín and part of the appeal was their dual status. But they’d have to run up mountains with the footballers for two hours one night, then run through valleys with the hurlers the next. These days the training is far more scientific and the trainers are far more empathetic. If Cadogan’s played a hard game on the Sunday, the trainers or physios will tell him to sit out a hard run.
Douglas have been hugely accommodating as have Denis Walsh and Conor Counihan. It’s helped that Walsh was a dual player himself and played alongside Counihan for Imokilly and Cork. Cadogan doesn’t even have to say anything to them; between them they make all the decisions, they take all the hassle out of it. The week of the Offaly game, Counihan didn’t want to see him. Then the week of the Kerry game, it was all football. It goes like that, week by week.
Don’t ask Cadogan about a potential championship double-booking in a fortnight’s time. It mightn’t even come to that, or if it does, they’ll get around it. It’s actually the league that’s the most challenging but they cope with it. Last March the hurlers were playing Kilkenny the same weekend the footballers were playing Dublin. Walsh and Counihan had spoken about it well in advance though and that Monday Cadogan knew he was with the hurlers for the week, Counihan giving him another leave pass.
Coming up the ranks he was seen more as a hurler than a footballer but leaving the footballers would wrench him, if he was to ever leave them at all. Even not playing in the off-season, he finds he misses the training and the craic with Shields and the lads. You don’t just play a game and don’t just play for your club or your county; you play for your teammates, your friends.
EOIN CADOGAN doesn’t just watch a sporting event unfold, he studies it. It might explain why he’s gone from being a bench warmer with Douglas underage teams to being the last great dual star in the GAA firmament. As a youngster he’d break down how Ronan Curran would routinely be the one in a bunch to emerge with the high ball.
At home when he’s resting up, watching games on telly, he’s scouting the movement and strong side of all the forwards, just in case he’ll encounter them down the line. Last Sunday on the bench in Killarney he was neither admiring nor cursing the movement of the Kerry forward line; he was studying it and in his own head countering it for when he’d finally be unleashed on the field.
He studies all sports at some level. Last Saturday after he’d packed his gearbag in good time, he sat down to watch the Haye-Klitschko fight he’d ordered on box office. He noted how Haye’s decision to delay his intro backfired, the cold-eye focus of Klitschko and how before the bell of every round, Klitschko would invariably be standing up, ready to go, something that must have further drained Haye who was still rooted to his stool.
It wouldn’t surprise anyone that Cadogan would have been watching the mind games at work in a title fight. Away from the field, he’s hugely affable; his text and voice messages in arranging this interview were among the most courteous I’ve experienced. On the field there’s a spikiness to his game.
Often it has served him well. Before the ball was thrown in last year’s Munster championship opener against Tipperary, Cadogan accepted Brian O’Meara’s handshake by then drawing the Tipperary debutant into his shoulder, leaving the youngster winded. It set the tone for the game with Cadogan its outstanding performer.
But it’s a delicate line. Donal Óg Cusack in his autobiography vividly recalls the previous year’s Tipp-Cork encounter in Thurles when Cadogan was making his starting championship debut. At half-time he has a word with his new fullback.
“I need to tell him to box clever. He is pumped and on the edge — that’s fine but he needs to be reminded just in case he doesn’t see it. I have experienced this with Sully (Diarmuid O’Sullivan) so many times over the years.”
That devilment and aggression has left him open to the derision of opposing supporters and of course to a fairly public and antagonistic running battle with Paul Galvin, but Cadogan defends himself.
“If you don’t have drive and don’t have passion you’re not going to go out and express yourself. I might come across as being a bit animated at times but you’d like to just think that’s your way of expressing what’s deep inside.”
A couple of months after an altercation in Páirc Uí Rinn last year in the league that saw them both sent-off, they squared off again later up the road.
“The other man in Kerry”, as Cadogan describes him, would be retrospectively suspended for his infamous fish hook but what was Cadogan doing in Galvin’s face in the first place?
“That’s football,” he just smiles. “These things happen, tempers boil over at times. How many incidents happen in other club games or inter-county games that aren’t highlighted. But because it’s Kerry and Cork, papers like talking about it and it sells papers. Look, that’s over and done with. Last year’s over and done with.”
This year he’s yet to be yellow carded in hurling. He was sent-off in football for drawing back on Stevie McDonnell in the league but even McDonnell himself gave testimony in support of Cadogan. It was only the second red card he’s received in football; the first, incurred against Galvin. But this reputation, it’s not something he wants.
“Getting sent-off and being all over the papers for this (flashpoint) and that, it’s not nice for my family and people close to me to see that everywhere. Do people think they want to be reading that? It’s no different to the other man down in Kerry. I’m sure his family are sick of people bringing it up constantly. It’s over and done with! Forget about it! Let’s move on!”
That brings him to Limerick today. “It’s knockout, not for the faint-hearted.” For all his notoriety, Cadogan’s record suggests an admirable big-game temperament, and he knows today he must play within or right on that edge, not go over it.
“If you’re going up there too hyped up or worrying about driving balls up the field, that’s the time a ball is going to slip past you and the likes of Damien Hayes or Joe Canning stick the ball in the net.”
Either way, he’ll park it. There’ll be a next game, a next ball, big or small.
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