Lyng’s perfect choice
CHOICES. Life tends to hinge on the ones that you make. Derek Lyng knows that and it was probably Brian Cody who taught him just how true that is.
In the spring of 2002, a 24-year-old Lyng had just broken onto the Kilkenny team when his professional career prospects also brightened up. He’d been offered a coveted sales rep job that he’d missed out on six months earlier. They had given him a brand new Ford Mondeo, the money was twice what he had been on, while on the company’s three-week induction training course he learned they would also be offering to pay for his hotel for six months.
The only thing was, he’d learned, the hotel and the job would be based in Galway and during the week the job would own him.
The weekend prior to the final week of the course, Lyng’s new Mondeo was one of the first cars parked outside Nowlan Park, not so much to atone for missing the previous few midweek sessions but rather to explain his dilemma to Cody.
The conversation after that was pretty brief.
Do you want to be an inter-county hurler, Derek? Yes, of course. More than anything.
Well, then, I’ll leave it up to yourself, so.
The following Monday Lyng drove the Mondeo back up to Galway, informed the work crowd of his decision before he was then informed to get out of their sight and bring the car to Dublin that instant.
“They were raging,” recalls Lyng. “They didn’t even meet in the office, I was to just leave the keys at the front desk. The mother had to come up to pick me up.”
Yet the moment Lyng walked out that door and towards his mother’s car, he experienced this feeling of profound clarity. He had made his choice. He was an inter-county hurler.
Last November he had another choice to make about whether to be an inter-county hurler or not, and again Cody had to be involved in the process. At Lyng’s request they met for a coffee in the Hotel Kilkenny. Lyng’s body was telling him it could no longer do what it used do so he was telling Cody the same thing. He was retiring. An empathetic Cody advised him to sleep some more on it, but the following day Lyng called to Cody’s school to shake him by the hand. Nine years and six All-Ireland medals on, it was time to step back across the line they’d drawn together back that spring of 2002.
It hasn’t been as easy living with that decision as leaving back the Mondeo was. For all the pain and injuries he’s suffered, he’s still in good shape and still loves to train, still loves to compete, but the transition of going from playing with one of the most elite teams in Irish sports history to just playing exclusively with the club has been a shock to the system.
It’s the same as clubs all over the country. You might be hanging around for ages just for teams to be picked in training. There might be no water, no one picking up sliotars, lads just stroll onto the pitch and tap the ball around. With Kilkenny, everything was in place and everything was done at pace and with purpose. You had no lads fooling around wasting their time playing crossbar challenge. Instead you’d be out on the field at least 45 minutes before training and seeing Henry with a set of sliotars trying to slot them over that crossbar, or James McGarry there earlier again inviting you, demanding you, to lash it at him or past him.
That culture is hardly there with the club. “It’s frustrating. You’ll have lads saying, ‘Ah, the drills are shite’ and you’re saying to them, ‘No, the drills aren’t shite; it’s our application to the drills that is shite.’ Lyng has found himself stepping on a few toes this year and it hasn’t always been appreciated. But, he also realises, hurling doesn’t and can’t come first to a lot of them, and an intermediate club like the Emeralds in Urlingford can’t be expected to be Kilkenny. Besides, the club has been good to him. It was always there for him when no one else would have him.
Everywhere Paudie Butler goes, spreading the hurling gospel, he mentions the story of Derek Lyng.
How a player who was constantly told he was just a plodder and a junior club player became a six-time All-Ireland winner; how a player who for years was boxed in at corner back or corner forward blossomed into becoming the second coming of Frank Cummins and one of the finest midfielders of his generation.
And it’s only right Butler does, because it’s a story every player and coach should know.
Choices. Back when Lyng was a fresher in Waterford IT, every prospective member of the GAA club was asked to fill in a sheet and there was one particular question that Lyng mulled over.
Have you played minor for your county? For a moment he considered answering in the affirmative but ultimately honesty got the better of him. No, he hadn’t. Truth be told, he couldn’t even make the teams in St Kieran’s.
Sure enough, that first year in Waterford, Lyng was nowhere near the Fitzgibbon panel and with the freshers found himself on the bench for the All-Ireland final, wondering did he tick the right box to that question.
Because perception counts and he knew that ever before he arrived in Waterford.
When he breezed into St Kieran’s he did so with great ambitions but after a poor game at corner back found himself a sub with the U14s for the rest of first year. He didn’t make the U16 squad either and only made the senior colleges panel in his Leaving Cert year. Even then he was only a sub when they lost the Leinster colleges final.
“The finest of people were involved with those teams but I do remember it being thrown back at me a few times ‘Now that’s the difference between playing junior hurling and playing senior colleges.’
“I always felt a guy with the same ability but from a different, more fashionable club was going to be picked over me, no question.”
It became somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy then, meaning Lyng, by his own admission, was also complicit in his own marginalisation. His first three years in Kieran’s were as a boarder and he resented its rigidity and somewhat rebelled against it too.
“Jesus, when I look back on it, it was crazy stuff, having first years stuck in a study hall from 6.15 in the evening to 10 at night. You can see why there are no boarders now. Sure half the time you’d be just trying to distract yourself, and then when you’d finally get out, you’d head off to where the smokers were. I would have had the odd drag myself and the teachers and coaches would have spotted that. That might have coloured their perception of me as well. To be fair to them, I probably wasn’t the best pupil and I probably didn’t fully apply myself in the hurling too.”
It was in his second year in Waterford that he really began knuckling down. His old schoolmate Henry Shefflin was down there as well and at the time was being challenged by his county manager. “In Kieran’s Henry would have had all the hurling and a great brain but he wouldn’t have been the name that Richie Hogan or DJ would have been. He really could have gone either way. He had a couple of brothers who had played underage for the county and for some reason they had drifted away and I suppose back then Henry was a lumpy type of fella who could put on weight easily. But I remember being down in Waterford with him and him saying to me, ‘Feckin’ Cody is saying to me to watch what I eat and be careful about the beer.’ But then after he got a taste for the lifestyle (of an athlete) he just drove on.”
Choices. Lyng began making a few big ones himself. A provisional Fitzgibbon panel were invited to attend the gym at 7.30 one morning, and while a couple of the county stars living with Lyng had enough credit in the bank to forsake it, Lyng knew he didn’t have such dispensation and was duly the first person in the gym. That raised some eyebrows and by his final year in college he had made the Fitzgibbon panel and was a peripheral player on the Kilkenny U21 team that won the 1999 All-Ireland.
“Maybe at 18, 19 I was still a bit immature but I suppose I got fed up looking at friends and flatmates making teams and I began thinking, ‘You should kick on now.’ I suppose I wanted to prove a few people wrong or at least prove myself.”
Then came Noel Skehan and Brian Cody. Good things happen to good people, Butler tells everyone, when the right coaches come into their lives and Lyng was a classic example of that.
Lyng still remembers the excitement and honour of receiving a letter from Skehan inviting him to be a member of the Kilkenny intermediate panel.
“Noel gave me huge confidence. He’d tell me, ‘You’re good enough to be going on (to senior hurling).’
Another time he asked me did I prefer playing wing back or centre back. I said ‘Centre back’ and he said, ‘Right, we’re going to put you in there so.’” By the summer of 2000, Lyng was occasionally training with the county seniors and then the following year was drafted in to the panel proper. His playing time would be restricted to just a few leagues and garbage time in the Leinster championship but after Galway unceremoniously dumped his team out of the All-Ireland series, Cody realised he needed a different type of animal for 2002 and a grasseater like Lyng was just the type.
Choices. Lyng remembers that 2001 season driving back from work in Dublin to make every training session and a particular weekend that summer when the whole club headed to Killarney for a good bonding session.
“I was only on the fringes of the county panel at the time and could easily have rang Cody and made some excuse to go, but I remember talking to my father who was over the club team at the time and hearing all the boys in the background enjoying Killarney while at home the place was deserted, except for me, because I wanted to be right for training the next day.”
Chance as well as choice played its part too. Two weeks before the 2002 league, John Power was down to play centre forward in a Waterford Crystal game when he had to cry off and Cody informed Lyng in the dressing room they’d be playing him there instead. The following week he scored five points from there against Meath. In the opening game of the league he gave Waterford’s Fergal Hartley a hard enough time of it but then during the team’s next game he was moved out to midfield and was picked to start there the next day out against Clare in Ennis.
A whole new world had opened up.
“That was a huge day for me, for us. I would have been in awe of Colin Lynch for years and honestly that day I remember just wanting not to be eaten alive. I look back on that day and wonder was God looking down on me?
“A ball broke between the two of us and I just let fly and we got a goal out of it. Another time then he went down the wing and I managed to block him and get the ball back and throw it out to one of our lads. Henry came out to centre forward that day as well and that’s when things really started to click for us. Looking back that was probably the biggest match we had that year.”
Six months later they had beaten Clare again in the biggest game of them all and Lyng would partner Lynch on that year’s All Star team. Someone who had only played a couple of games with his school and only one game underage for the county had become an overnight sensation at 24.
“A lot of it, midfield play, is about getting to the breaking ball first and by then I was physical enough to hold my own so I was confident that I’d win it.
“But I was still raw too. I wouldn’t have taken the right options half the time. If I had the mind then that I have now I’d have let the ball in more and wouldn’t hit nearly as many silly wides.”
In later years though the body began to creak. During the 2007 season he learned his hip was already arthritic and would need to be replaced within 10 years. One specialist said he shouldn’t even be hurling at all.
“I would have found it very hard mentally that year. Because naturally you were going, ‘Jesus, am I going to be able to compete with lads?’ I remember getting an injection soon after they told me all this and I felt great and was hurling out of my skin but then the pain started to come back and I found it hard to comprehend that I had arthritis in my hip and any day I could be playing my last game.”
The following year he had trouble with ankle ligaments and in 2009 he wasn’t fit to start any game up until the All-Ireland final. But he did manage to start that final.
How? Choices. By having the car full of water bottles making sure he was properly hydrated and recovered. By blocking out the pain with some anti-inflammatories. By getting up to take spinning classes at 7am, or get an hour of aqua-jogging in at lunch in either the Watershed in Kilkenny or the national aquatic centre whenever the job as a hospital rep for GlaxoSmithKline took him to Dublin. All those silent choices and quiet hours is how he won so much and played on for so long but after only being a sub most of last year he knew it was time to go.
He still has enough to be doing. His wife Evelyn had little Jack three months back and with Ruth being only a year older the extra time at home has been useful. Funny, though, he can never seem to get away from Henry and the boys even when they’re nowhere in sight. In weeks like this every sports journalist in the country seems to want a word from him on his old teammates and while he’s too obliging to refuse, it’s something that has surprised as much as amused him.
They still want more, he senses. He doesn’t think the five-in-a-row talk affected them last September, they just met a savagely good and hungry Tipp team who got a few breaks while Kilkenny didn’t, especially when Shefflin had to hobble off around the time Lar Corbett bagged his first goal (“When I saw Henry come off,” he says, “I began thinking, ‘Feck it, maybe this isn’t our day.’”) But now Henry is back and motoring as well as he was 12 months ago.
Lyng wants more too. Last Friday week the club played Dicksboro in a tournament game in Tullaroan and while they lost by four points it was great to just be out there and already he’s itching for their next championship game.
And the car is still full of water bottles.
He’s still making the right choices.
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