Gottsche out to make a Mark

CONNACHT SFC QUARTER-FINAL:

No? Meet Mark Gottsche then.

Born in Kellinghusen, Germany, he moved to Ireland when he was five. His father Jurgen picked up the GAA rulebook one day, fell in love with the sport and went on to become a renowned administrator in Galway.

It was no surprise then that Mark went on to join a GAA club.

“All I remember about that first day was it was lashing and I didn’t enjoy it all that much,” he said, “but we were lucky in Oranmore because Gerry Fahy was coming to the national schools as long as I can remember and he instilled a passion in a lot of us.”

That his side became the dominant one in Galway for their age group helped and Mark went on to play Galway minor, U21 and make the senior’s bench. After four years studying accountancy he spent a year in Jordanstown on a sports management course where he also played Sigerson.

He moved to London in November 2010 and was a central figure in the Exiles’ one-point loss to Mayo that year. Last year he was asked to play for the Connacht team in the interpros and in August he became the logistics manager of London GAA. Given the size of the city, that’s proven to be a task that will always be challenging.

“Logistics wise it is massive, but lads know what they are getting involved in before they come out. It tests you and drives you on, you want to make it worthwhile.

“For the winter gym training we were using Harrow School, which is one of the biggest private schools in London. It is actually where Winston Churchill went to school. By chance the groundsman is an Irish guy and he sorted us out. Then Greenford, which is about five miles in the road from Ruislip is the only place that has lights so we do most of our training there.”

The huge commitment required to play senior inter-county football with those travelling times, for a county that is usually not yours by birth, is one of the reasons for the big turnover of players. The other, of course, is those coming and going back and forth to Ireland or beyond.

Indeed, the obstacles they’ve had to overcome to get the chance to line out in Ruislip tomorrow are vast. Like when they were prevented from playing challenge games against Wicklow and Louth earlier this month.

“It went against the rule book but that’s the GAA, we have to go by the rule book. But as a group of players we want to concentrate on what we can control rather than having an excuse lined up.

“If we had them matches in Ireland we might have done better. We are going to control the controllables. We’ll let the management and the board deal with that and as players we’ll just move on and play hard.”

They won’t be hosting Sligo cold though. Despite finishing bottom of the league, this has been one of their most successful campaigns to date.

“We have a very competitive squad. We had 35-36 lads out training so we’d had a Bank Holiday there and had a match among ourselves which was fairly intense with a bit of bite, which was good.”

But will it translate to a result on the pitch? “We have been knocking on the door. We were within a couple of points in four of our league games and we won one of them.

“We lost heavily to Clare, but we are knocking on the door. We are not going to say we are going to win this year because you never know. We were confident enough last year and Leitrim came over and stole, well I won’t say stole the game, but took it by the scruff of the neck and took us on and beat us. If we can perform to the levels we can, say back to two years ago against Mayo, we’ll be there or thereabouts after 70 minutes.”

As Mark’s life can testify to, stranger things have happened.