Dual stars last of a great breed

I love the romantic idea of the laoch who can play both hurling and football but the environment is making them extinct

The more you do of this analyst/pundit gig the more you miss just being a hurler. No matter what you are saying or what point you are making you always love the sound of the sliotar on the bas more than you love the sound of your own voice. You always love dressing rooms more than studios or offices.

For almost everything you loved about being a player there is something you hate about being a pundit. At the moment I really hate talking about dual players. I feel like I have to begin sentences the way a lot of racists or homophobes do. Don’t get me wrong now, some of my best friends are….

It’s a cliche but it’s true. Some of my best friends are dual players. Some of the athletes I respect most are dual players. They are some of the most committed and idealistic people I know. Every time I open my mouth and argue it can’t be done anymore, that nobody can get the absolute best out of themselves in two different sports played across the same part of the year I feel crap. I feel like I am hurting them.

But in a week when so many lads following the ideal of being dual players turned in tired performances and Lee Chin who gave up on the idea looked like an even better hurler than he has before it’s hard to avoid the general subject. The Cork footballers are going down the qualifiers path now. They have huge work to do. The dual thing is one of the big fat elephants in the room.

I remember a few things about my own days as a player. I ran the equivalent of going to China and back doing endless laps of the tunnel in Páirc Uí Chaoimh for years. Useless for a goalie. I did endless athletics exercises. Useless for being a goalie. At times I competed with my buddy Sean Óg to the extent that we became obsessed. Once while training by ourselves in the Páirc we did fireman walks up and down those tunnels carrying heavyweights on both sides till we broke each other. Useless for being a goalie. I imagine that my poor old achilles which finally gave way was sending me texts I never read. Are you going to do much more of this? Doing my best down here but no promises? What are you at now? Mother of god will ya stop! STOP! In the end I did enough complaining to managers and got senior enough that myself and the other goalies got to do goalie specific work on our own for the most of each session. We got better straight away.

My argument is this. The world the GAA operates is in a constant state of flux. A lot of great hurlers and a lot of great footballers in the past got by on their innate skills in each sport and by being fit. The training for hurling and football was broadly the same. Some players are blessed with enough basic skills to be able to survive in both to a certain level. A fella mightn’t have been getting 100% out of himself in either sport but what he was getting out of himself was enough to get him on both teams.

Teams train better these days. They train more. And they train more specifically for their own sport. We know a lot more about what is specific to a sport these days. We know that the timing of things in football is different to hurling. The patterns of play, the speed of breaks, the touch, the feel, the physicality. We know that you don’t get a great drummer to teach your kid to be a concert pianist.

And even now all sports are only learning about the limitations about what can be carried over from a training session to the pitch. The most specific training that you can do for hurling is playing hurling. The skills you practice when you are hurling are as specific to the sport of hurling as you can get.

Something I’ve said before to kids: Henry Shefflin doesn’t practice every day because he is Henry Shefflin. He is Henry Shefflin because he practices every day.

I spoke to a team of inter-county minors a few weeks ago. They weren’t going well. They’d just been beaten in a challenge. The mentor said to me there were a few tired bodies in the dressing room they’d even been out the previous night. I couldn’t believe that. I started by asking who was the captain. Was he out last night.He was working till midnight. Ok. What did you do then? Went out. You went out at midnight the night before an inter-county game. And when had you last picked up a stick. Tuesday at training, he said. This was Saturday.

They sat there looking at me in disbelief. I told them that if you want to be a serious hurler you pick up the stick every day. The rest of your life fits in around that duty. That pleasure. You go to the alley and you work on your striking and your touch every day. Because nothing goes away quicker than timing and touch.

I believe the very near future of inter-county senior hurling will involve no collective physical training at sessions. Every player will have a programme that they go away and do by themselves. Somebody attached to management will monitor their fitness almost as a separate issue. When a player does that fitness work will be his own business. Players will turn up for training fit to hurl and with their timing and touch looked after too. Training will just be about learning the patterns and pathways of the team. Fellas who don’t bring the skills will be doing remedial work till they catch up.

We aren’t far off that stage now. I love the romantic idea of the laoch who can play both sports. I just think the environment is making them extinct. I would love to see a few of my friends really achieve the greatness they are capable of in one sport rather than shuttling between two sports and getting just enough out of themselves in both.

If and when some county is brave enough or mad enough to give me a team to look after my blue print for the five-in-a-row will be as follows; everything we do will be specific to our game and to the position. The muscle memory will be about hurling, the reflexes and instincts will be about the way we want to play the game. Knowing Plan C as well as we know Plan A and Plan B. Being fluid. If I wake up and realise I have some weight lifter or boxer training my players along the lines of what they used to do in a different sport I will take my best goalie hurley and beat myself to death.

Physical preparation is needed for specific performance enhancement. Speed, core strength, explosive power. Sport preparation is necessary for the rest. You get better striking off your left side by spending time striking off your left side. Playing a completely different sport might give you some overlap in terms of physical preparation. It won’t improve your touch.

Even the physical stuff will change. The days when all 36 guys in a panel all prepared physically in the same way are over. Training is becoming athlete specific as well as sport specific. Training will pass quickly from being increasingly sport specific to being based on the energy systems a player uses playing specific positions. Even putting it crudely in terms of what we know now. Aidan Walsh isn’t a corner-forward. His amazing athleticism and stamina almost means that his position on the field is predetermined. Same with a corner-forward. A corner-forward’s working day on the pitch will be different. Less involvement. Fewer possessions. More explosivity.

We are only at the early days in establishing potential not just in terms of performance but in terms of injury prevention and burn out. Sports science is in its infancy. There will always be an overlap. Some training will always be general but more and more each year the really key training will be sports specific.

For a while running up mountains and hills was the fad in hurling. For another period getting stronger and stronger was the craze. The more we know the more we appreciate that these things might give teams a short term jump on other teams but in the long term all these strength and function indices have to be relative and tuned to the specific sport of hurling. We don’t have to think too hard to decide that a corner-forward doesn’t need to be able to run up a mountain or that some county teams in the recent past have become too muscle bound and too skills limited.

All this is part of a game that has changed incredibly since I started playing inter-county hurling. It has even changed since I finished playing. I hope in a way I am wrong. I hope things change just slowly enough to let a few buddies of mine live the dream and play at the top in both sports. I’ll still argue with them about being the best they can in either but I’ll salute them for being the best they can across both. I’ll salute them for the men they are and what they are prepared to give to the GAA. I’ll be the first over the fence to celebrate with them when they win. Because they’re friends and they are the last of a great breed.