Daniel Goulding: 'We took the good times for granted'

Just retired and outside the bubble, Cork’s Daniel Goulding can reflect now on half a decade when the Rebels were consistently at football’s top table. The trials of Mayo remind the Éire Óg man that Cork’s 2010 All-Ireland title is to be cherished. But just as he might have been, were those halcyon days from 2007 to 2012 taken for granted?

IT was supposed to be the same kick. The way he’d trained and drilled himself, it was always the same kick. Dead ball, 45 yards out, off the ground, over the bar, no doubt.

One famous September Sunday in 2010 in particular, that was the state of mind that he was in. Didn’t matter that there were 82,000 looking on as he stood over that ball, that it was an All-Ireland final, that this was the day and the chance he and his team-mates simply had to take. He’d blanked all that out: It was just him and that ball and those posts.

Last summer though, six years on from that glorious day in Croke Park, Daniel Goulding found himself in a small provincial ground above in Longford standing over the same ball, and this time there was doubt.

It was his third kick from that range that day. In the second half of the 2010 All-Ireland final against Down, he’d also had three 45s. Each of them he had sent sailing over the bar down by the Davin Stand. But in the first half of this qualifier against Longford, Goulding found himself looking at going zero for three.

His first effort had been a good strike, only it went wide by “half an inch”. The second the Longford goalkeeper had taken off the crossbar. So, for this third kick, he found himself “under savage pressure”. He had to make it.

He didn’t. He pulled it. And that was his last kick at the posts for Cork. At half-time, with Cork trailing the home team by four points, he was substituted. A couple of weeks after Cork escaped from Longford with the win, he found himself not even on the matchday 26 for their next game against Donegal in Croke Park. Peadar Healy still wanted him up there, and he helped out in the warm-up, putting on the face his team-mates needed to see. But later that evening when Cork made their exit from the 2016 championship, Goulding sensed it was time to go himself. Even though he was still only 30, it was time.

And so, just like that, he’s gone. What felt just a little while ago the future seemed to be his and Cork’s but now he’s the past — and inter-county football is in the past for him. He will always have the comfort and pleasure of knowing that for one moment in time, he was and owned the present. It’s just that in recent years there had been a lot more days like Longford than the heady days of 2010 above in Croker.

“The enjoyment just went out of it a bit,” he says from the seat of a Cork City hotel that seems as comfortable as he is with the decision he’s made. “You were coming from a place where you’ve been a mainstay on the team to then maybe playing five or ten minutes of a championship game finding it hard to even get a shot off because of the massed defences.

“Through no one’s fault I just found I was coming home from training and matches being annoyed more than I was being happy. I’m not the kind of fella that can just go with the flow and say, ‘Look, you’re going training, enjoy it.’ I’m thinking of it constantly. And I just thought for the effort that’s required — because it’s gone to another level again from when we won it in 2010 — it wasn’t giving me enough enjoyment.”

He departs the scene as Cork’s second-highest championship scorer ever; only his childhood hero, Colin Corkery, ranks above him. But he was more than someone who just racked up high scores. He racked up important scores. For a few years there, Daniel Goulding was a goalscorer and free-taker supreme.

At 21 he came off the bench in his first All-Ireland final to kick a goal and a point. The following summer he fired a rocket into the Kerry net in both All-Ireland semi-finals against the old enemy.

Twelve months later, when Cork beat defending champions Tyrone in a seminal All-Ireland semi-final, it was Goulding who got the only — and decisive — goal of the game on his way to an All Star.

And then in 2010 he was man of the match on All-Ireland final day, putting on the finest exhibition of clutch, long-range free-taking that Croke Park in September has ever staged.

That day, that hour, was a long time in the making. As a kid in Ovens he’d kick ball every day for hours into the goals his parents had installed in their big front garden, carving out that pure, sweet striking style. “I’m an only child,” he says, “so half of it was probably out of boredom.” The rest of it was out of pure enjoyment; back then, coming from a small club like Éire Óg, it wasn’t really with the view of some day playing for Cork, though he’d often try to replicate a free Colin Corkery or Peter Canavan might have kicked on the telly the day before.

“Even at that age I used to love setting targets for myself and see how many I could kick out of five from this side and then maybe five from the other. Same with soccer; I’d put up a piece of cardboard for a wall practising free kicks or have a tyre in the corner of the goal and try and put it through that.”

Yet as much as he developed his free-taking out in the front garden all by himself, the final steps towards mastery would be learned the hard way in the biggest garden of them all — Croke Park, on All-Ireland final day.

“In the 2009 final against Kerry I kicked a couple of good frees but I kicked a couple of poor frees as well and there was nothing the same about any of them. Mentally I hadn’t put the work in. And it’s primarily because I didn’t know I had to put it in. I had a technique but in my head I was focusing on consequences and scoreboards instead of just focusing on kicking the ball.

“Even in the U21 [All-Ireland] final [win] against Laois [in 2007], I kicked four or five absolute beauties that day but then I kicked two or three awful ones, including a miss from the 21-yard line. It came down to not concentrating.

“I did a lot of work with [sport psychologist] Kevin Clancy in 2010 to help ensure the mind didn’t wander. It’d be, ‘Right, take seven steps back. Stand straight up. Pick your spot behind the goal.’ I was just way more focused. Kicking the ball like I would kick every single ball, regardless of where it was.” In 2010 that’s the space he was in. Nailing bombs into the Hill when Cork were under the cosh against an emerging Dublin team in the All-Ireland semi-final. Before that game he was taken by the crowd. “You had a headache going around in the parade, the noise was so loud. The All-Ireland final seemed quiet in comparison.”

But taking those frees into a Hill urging on their boys in blue, it was as if they weren’t there. Against Down then in the final he was even better.

Was one of the best in the business. It's was a pleasure @D_GGs 💪👍👍 pic.twitter.com/5ypMpeauSW

— Colm O Neill (@crossbar13) October 24, 2016

Goulding was only 24 but already his predominant emotion upon the final whistle was more of relief than joy. “I remember coming back to the hotel and before going down to the banquet I slept for half an hour. I was shattered. But it’s a great memory now.”

It was meant to be the start of something more than an end, and early on in 2011 that’s how it looked. First game back from the team holiday, Cork beat Kerry in Tralee thanks to a last-minute Goulding ’45, reaffirming his status as football’s Mr Clutch. Then in the league final they came back from seven points down against Dublin to win a third consecutive league title.

Then things started to slip. Gradually at first. A Munster final defeat down in Killarney. They seemed to be back on track with a convincing win over Down in the qualifiers but in that game Goulding sustained a leg injury while playing a brilliant pass in for a Donncha O’Connor goal. That ruled him out for the All-Ireland quarter-final against Mayo, joining his club-mate Ciaran Sheehan and Colm O’Neill on the injury list. In hindsight, it proved to be one injury too many and the following weekend they were ambushed by a coming force, one nobody had seen coming.

In 2012 Cork seemed to have reasserted themselves as the dominant team in football, winning another league and Munster and steamrolling a Kildare team that had never rolled over before on Kieran McGeeney’s beat. In the semi-final they came up against Jim McGuinness’s Donegal. Cork and Goulding had met the new future and were never the same again.

“I suppose when I came along first, especially at U21 level, your primary function was to win ball and score. It was 15 on 15, basically, backs all looking after their own man. Then you saw things gradually change. In fairness to Kerry, they were ahead of their time; they were never ultra-defensive but they were cute in how they would set up, dropping the likes of Séamus Scanlon back, not as a sweeper per se but as a deep defensive midfielder. Any time I was marking Tom O’Sullivan I knew that he’d go four or five times a game upfield. So I had to be aware of that. I could live with that. But since Donegal came along there were just bodies everywhere you looked.

“I actually got a lot of ball that day [the 2012 semi-final] — but it was ball I could do nothing with. I’d get ball on the loop and I’d turn on my left to swing it and there’d be another fella there, so you’d basically have to recycle and pop it off again.”

Goulding would actually have a fine enough championship in 2013 from an individual point of view, free from injury, starting every game, sometimes even at centre forward, like in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Dublin, on Ger Brennan. “It was one of those games where I could at least say I had a right cut at it. That summer I just took the shackles off and just went for it which was quite alien to me.” But for the team in general, that’s when the rot set in. For the first time in nine years the county failed to either win the league or reach the All-Ireland semi-final. They haven’t reached an All-Ireland semi-final since.

What happened? Goulding won’t blame management. He says Brian Cuthbert put in place a seriously professional set-up and that Peader Healy has done so too.

“The structures are good but the culture probably needs to improve. Fellas need to take more stock of what the whole thing is about and how important it is. If you want to get to the level of Dublin and Mayo, you have to be switched on the whole time and be accountable for yourself. The set-up is as good as any in the country. I just think a bit of confidence is needed and for everyone to focus on getting themselves 100% right.

“Around 2013 or so there was a big gap between the younger fellas coming in and the older lads that left in kind of one go. You can train as much as you want and put the best systems in place but when things start to go wrong for you and you’re without five or six key lads who were there just the year before, it’s very hard to pull it out of the fire.”

He accepts it’s completely fair to question the job his generation of player — Goulding, Cadogan, Shields, Kelly, Kerrigan — did in taking up the mantle after the departure of the likes of Canty, Murphy, Quirke, O’Neill, and O’Leary, but points out it was more complex than that. “If you go through it, that group of lads [his generation] were not on the pitch enough at the same time. You had fellas with injuries, fellas who lost form, and when you have only two or three lads playing regularly, confidence, even in the older lads, probably drains.”

Goulding was a case in point. After a good league in 2014, he was taken off at half-time in the Munster semi-final when Tipperary scared Cork proper. He was pleasantly surprised when Brian Cuthbert showed faith in him to start in the Munster final against Kerry, but then a surprising casualty after James O’Donoghue caused wreckage in the last football game in the old Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Although he was one of Cork’s better performers that day, he was left off the starting 15 for the rest of the championship. He wouldn’t start in a championship game against Kerry or in Croke Park again.

Goulding tried to evolve. His body composition changed significantly in recent years. He was a stone-and-a-half lighter than 2010. “My fitness levels would have got way better. I just found when you get limited chances to stake your claim and you don’t take that chance, your confidence takes a dent.

“As an inside forward you’re judged primarily, from outside the group anyway, on three or four scoring attempts a game. I’d have found even in the last year or two my frees weren’t going as well. I’d stick to my routine but the same confidence wasn’t there.”

That day against Longford there were those three 45s. He didn’t even get a shot off from play. In that first half he found himself exerting all of his energy tracking runners back the field, and not having enough to get up the field in a position to get a shot off himself. That day he felt like something from another era and the feeling was all the more cemented watching the All-Ireland final.

“Football is different now but it’s still a great spectacle. I don’t buy into this thing that they’re all just athletes now. If you look at those Dublin and Mayo lads, nearly all of them are athletes who can all play football as well. The hitting and the intensity in the All-Ireland finals was brilliant to watch. It just probably doesn’t suit a fella like me as much anymore.”

Unfortunate as that is, the last few days have made Goulding realise he was still so fortunate. He made friends for life from his time playing with Cork. Up to 30 former teammates will be at his wedding to Muireann next month, with Fintan Goold his best man. A few hours before meeting the Irish Examiner, he caught up with Colm O’Neill and John Hayes for lunch. One year himself, Goold, Ciaran Sheehan, and Paddy Kelly went to Cuba with their partners, dancing salsa and driving around Havana and the countryside in old Chevy convertibles. Memories and friendships like that will remain forever.

Maybe they could have won another All-Ireland but when he looks at this generation of Mayo player, he’s glad of the one he has, as well as the multiple leagues and Munsters and underage medals. “When you’re in the bubble, you’re only focused on the now. But looking back on it now, that run we had from, say ’07 to ’12, it was brilliant, though we took it for granted.”

The same could be said about him.

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