Mark Schutte making his mark for Dublin
It was a theme of Cusack’s TV punditry throughout the summer too, where Dublin were concerned though it clearly didn’t find favour with all of their players.
“I did really enjoy Dónal Óg banging on there during the year about how we needed new forwards, a clean sweep to find new players,” said Liam Rushe in October. “I was kind of thinking, ‘what new players could he possibly be talking about?!’ ”
Rushe made a decent point, as nobody was exactly putting their hands up to displace any of the starting forwards.
Under new manager Ger Cunningham this year, however, Mark Schutte has arguably been Dublin’s best player. To say that the emergence of a top-class forward is welcome in the capital would be an understatement.
Time will tell if the Cuala man is the real deal, the sort of player who can pick his way through the best defences and give Dublin that vital goal threat they’ve lacked in the huge games.
But so far, so good on that score. In the last two games, he’s been man of the match, firing five points from play in a crucial win over Galway and 1-5 in the quarter-final defeat of Limerick.
Mind you, his journey to the peak of the game hasn’t been the traditional one.
“Schutte is a German name,” said the versatile forward. “My granddad was born in Germany. He moved over to Ireland when he was four or five. He’s been here ever since.
“I probably get the hurling from the Kilkenny side of my family. It’s a funny enough background alright. My granddad’s brother’s son is Joey Holden who is the Kilkenny captain at the minute and Brian Hogan, the former Kilkenny hurler, is one of my granddad’s brother’s sons so we are somehow related, second or third cousins along the line.”
Growing up, Schutte cheered for Kilkenny when Dublin weren’t involved. Now he’s tasked with matching the achievements of the players he modelled his game upon. Again, to show how far he has come, he was once part of the Dublin senior football squad. That was for around nine months in 2011 until he figured that his best chance of regular activity lay with the hurlers.
A mini-revolution at his club, Cuala, in south Dublin has only helped his cause. In the match against Limerick, four of their players started and a fifth, Colm Cronin, came on.
“I made the decision at the end of 2012 to go with the hurling,” he said. “I came from more of a hurling club, my family have all been hurlers and I have relatives as I said in Kilkenny, so I suppose hurling was always my first love.
“Probably the main thing to do in Dublin is go with the football but having my brother (Paul) on the hurling team was also a huge influencing factor on me, a large part of the reason I went with hurling.”
Dublin have had an intriguing first league campaign under Cunningham, another Cork goalkeeping legend. A great start followed by a terrible two games against Cork - when they leaked 34 points - and Clare meant they had to beat Galway to be sure of staying up.
They duly delivered and with the pressure off now, and surely driven by revenge for last month’s Croke Park humiliation, they will travel to Nowlan Park on Sunday with optimism.
“I think all the four teams that are left in it would like to win it, ourselves and Cork included,” said Schutte, whose 2014 Championship was ruined by a dislocated shoulder suffered in the first match.
“It’s a cliche but any competition we enter we want to win it. We were disappointed losing the Walsh Cup final to Galway. Like, the league, Dublin have only won it once in the last 70 years. To win national titles, that’s the level we want to compete at. Winning it would be huge for us.” The continued strong form of Schutte is vital if they are to prolong their interest in the competition with a win over Cork.
“It’s been really enjoyable, with myself, Danny Sutcliffe, Liam, there’s been a lot of switching and moving around in the forwards,” he said.
“Being comfortable in the full-forward or the half-forwards is something we’ve been working on. If you limit yourself to one position, you’re easily marked.
“If you can play out the field, you give yourself more options so I’d be hoping that versatility stands to me.”
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