Desire for glory drives life consumed by football

With age has come maturity and a better balance between life and Gaelic football though Paul Flynn still struggles to separate the two at times, writes Paul Keane.

The Dublin forward, who turns 31 in July, reckons he used to devote around 95% of his time to football, either playing it or preparing for it.

Nothing or nobody around him got a look in and while that’s changed, and he reckons he now has a much healthier sport-life balance, he still hasn’t fully embraced the ‘less is more’ approach.

“When you take a night off for instance, and they reckon recovery is so important, it can be more important even than training, but you’re in this constant battle with yourself saying, ‘no, surely if I go out and kick 50 balls that’s going to be better’. So that is still hard.”

It’s an insight into the mind of a player who has been operating at the top level of his sport for the guts of a decade now.

The payoff is obvious because Flynn has four All-Ireland medals, the same amount of All Stars and was a key component of a team that recently went 36 games unbeaten, a new record.

But there’s a considerable sacrifice too and he has become increasingly aware football, for all the adulation it has brought him, doesn’t pay the bills.

He works in recruitment and is trying his best to progress in that sphere but still has to navigate around his football commitments to a degree.

“I have to leave work to go training at 5.30pm, or at 5pm some evenings, whereas if I didn’t I’d have another couple of hours in work and most days you’d actually need that,” he said.

While he’s in work, the industrious half-forward doesn’t like to talk about football either and joked it’s become a source of amusement for his colleagues.

It’s the same at home, around family, and there are parallels with the story that Alan Brogan told in an interview this week of chatting with his younger brother Bernard about various Dublin issues and being politely told to mind his own business.

“It’s weird, it’s like the elephant in the room,” said Flynn. “When I do talk with people they don’t talk about football, I try to play it that way. Maybe I created that myself by being a bit rude, you kind of have to be.

“It’s funny in work, it’s nearly a joke now, ‘Don’t talk to Paul about football!’ It’s nearly a little bit awkward because I’m like, ‘You can actually talk to me about football if you want’. But they don’t.

“My family wouldn’t either, at all. My family will ring my partner to ask something before they’d ring me. My Dad would be dying to ask me things. It’s just the way I try to do it. It took a couple of years and then people realise that it’s best not to talk to him about it, because he doesn’t want to. And I don’t read papers, I read the business part of them and that’s really it, I don’t read sports.

“Because you can’t, you can’t let it in. It’s hard, with social media too, but you just have to try to be disciplined about it.”

Flynn described a typical day for him.

“I might leave the house at 7 o’clock in the morning for work. I don’t get home until 10 o’clock at night. You have to pack your bag for training, make sure your suit is ready for work, get your food ready for the different parts of the next day. It’s a constant battle for time.”

Flynn made it clear he isn’t cribbing, he loves playing for Dublin and has no plans to jack it in anytime soon.

But there is a constant stress there too. Take the 1-6 he scored against Roscommon in the penultimate round of this year’s league. It was his highest tally in a Dublin jersey. But after games like that he tends to hone in on what exactly he did different in his preparations for the game and feel he has to replicate it.

“You might do something one week and then you’ll play well and it’s like ‘f***, do I have to do that every week?’ Any little thing like that you’ll pick up on.”

At the end of it all is a basic desire to add a fifth All-Ireland medal to his collection.

Losing the Allianz League final to Kerry hasn’t helped though Flynn says, on one level, it has hardened their stare on the big prize this year.

“There’ll be a good cut to training now over the next couple of weeks, that’s for sure,” said the Fingallians man. “Everybody will want to put their name on the jersey.”

• Paul Flynn was speaking at the GAA/GPA announcement of an additional product to their existing partnership with Glanbia Consumer Products, Avonmore’s chocolate protein milk.