Cassidy wrong to break Donegal code of silence
IT’S far too easy to take the populist stance this week as Donegal football threatens to undo a year of work — as good as it was ugly — in the space of a book launch. That can be hard for a journalist to say, just as it can be hard for a fan to admit. But remove yourself from the equation and you’ll see that it’s as simple as this — Kevin Cassidy was wrong. It’s not a nice sentence to have to write in an era where Gaelic footballers are told to be as bland as rice cakes and where a player who speaks the truth is as rare as a Danny Dyer moment of reflection. However, there’s a very good reason for dressing room doors being bolted tight and if Donegal’s tactics can be defended because winning at all costs comes first, then Jimmy McGuinness’s decision to drop his All Star wing-back can be as well.
I remember interviewing Cassidy late on in July of 2006, days before his county bumped Fermanagh out of the qualifiers. But he was nowhere near Brewster Park that day.
Instead he had long since headed for Boston, having been dropped from the panel after himself and Eamon Magee decided to hit a bar. But he was the ideal subject and by the end of our conversation, the only challenge was trying to fit as many of his quotes as possible onto a newspaper page.
Speaking with northern journalist Declan Bogue, I found out he had the same enjoyable problem when it came to dealing with Cassidy for his book ‘This is our Year’. It was only this week that I picked up a copy and as you read it, you can be easily fooled into thinking it’s an overreaction to drop the player for taking part in a rare insight into the modern game.
After all, not only had Cassidy the decency to come out of retirement for his new manager but also, as interesting and provocative as his thoughts are in the book, they are actually complementary of McGuinness.
It was this line that Donegal’s 1974 Ulster-winning captain Padraig McShea took when defending Cassidy, commenting: “Sometimes the media like controversy so it will certainly help sales of the book. Sometimes players can get caught off the cuff and a lot of what Kevin said was misguided. And if I were Jim McGuinness I am not sure that I would have dealt with it as he has done.”
But this is to miss the point because key here is not what Cassidy said, but the fact that he said it.
So much of Donegal’s resurrection has been built on unity. From every man working for each other in tactics that have the physicality and imagination of shovelling coal, to a group renowned for the wide and winding buying into the straight and narrow, there was a trust and a bond amongst this Donegal team. And one of the core values of the squad was what happens on Donegal duty, stays on Donegal duty.
Cassidy went beyond that, indeed he never even told his manager about his part in the book, and by extension rebelled against something agreed on by one and all. In doing so, he not only went against McGuinness but his teammates too. In a set-up like Donegal’s, even more so that others, no man can be an island.
Whatever about McGuinness being over the top in banning the rest of the team from the actual launch and whatever about Cassidy’s decision to go to an event as an amateur player in the depths of winter, these are only symptoms, not causes.
The damage had already been done the moment Cassidy agreed to his role in the book. Indeed, reading back on the quotes from our chat in 2006, there’s an uneasy symmetry to all of this. “So at the start, the first couple of days, I was thinking, ‘Here, I’m telling you what happened, you’ve seen the effort I put in over the last few months so, Jesus Christ, why believe someone else, this really isn’t on Brian (McIver, then manager). But the more things broke, I noticed he was put on the spot and he had to act. I was told I was off the squad and that was it.”
Cassidy may come to that realisation again after the first couple of days of this latest saga. By which time McGuinness should also come to an uneasy realisation that after the blame game is finished, it’s Donegal football that is the real loser. A thread that should have been left alone by Cassidy has now been pulled.
The progress of 2011 could quickly unravel across 2012.
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