The county man’s journey home may not always be smooth

By John Coleman

As the sun begins to set on the inter-county summer, thoughts turn towards the heart of the action — the club scene.

This weekend will see a surge of club championship games across the grades as players who have lit up our summer return to where it all began. However, adapting from one world to the other isn’t always easy.

The demands put on inter-county players these days mean they have played little and trained even less with their club colleagues.

The professional nature of inter-county activity, coupled with the regular flow of inter-county games, means that the contrast between club and county has never been as glaring as club players have sat idle, waiting for the show to begin again.

Declan Quill won two All-Ireland medals with Kerry in the noughties and the Kerins O’Rahilly’s man is now involved with the CPA, trying to make life fairer for all. He has seen both sides of the debate.

“I always found it difficult to readjust to club football when the inter-county season was over. Also, I always felt that the team found it hard to adjust to the inter-county lads coming back playing with the club.

“They were always guaranteed to have their place on the club team and on a lot of occasions we only had one or two training sessions under our belts with the club before playing in the county championship. It was very hard to know what plan or tactics the club team had and to try and integrate yourself into that plan was always difficult.

“At times I felt the return of the inter-county players disheartened the club players, who were training every bit as hard as we (the county players) were, playing all the league games and then, suddenly, they find that they lose their place for the championship because the county players have returned. Another thing that I found difficult at times was speaking in the dressing room. I felt that it wasn’t my place to be giving advice to fellas that I barely played with all year.”

These sentiments are shared by Ballincollig’s Paddy Kelly who departed the Cork panel in 2016. “For a lot of my club career, we’d come back from Cork and you’d play championship six days later with your club. More often than not, we lost the very next week having no preparation done with the club.

“For a long time, we were more of a hindrance than anything as we are away so much and slotted back in. It was very hard to come back in on a Tuesday having probably not even played a league game after the first round of the championship. It’s very false, and it’s very unfair on everyone.”

Shane O’Connell and Josh Keane are right in the middle of their inter-county careers with the Tipperary footballers. They ply their club trade with Golden-Kilfeacle in South Tipperary and are adjusting to the club scene after a winter and summer training with Tipp.

As O’Connell puts it, “it’s a different level. You’d be used to a higher standard with the county. You come back and there’s that ball that shouldn’t be dropped that is dropped, or there’s a player that’s not getting to the pass as they should be. You get a bit frustrated.

“There’s a complete jump there, it’s on two different ends of the spectrum. They’re completely different worlds. It’s gone so professional at county level, it’s crazy. With the club you’re rocking on 15 minutes before training and you’re going in just having the craic with the boys. In county, it’s a completely different kettle of fish altogether.”

Keane touches on how much the modern inter-county game can take from you mentally. “You’re training for six or seven months and you’re drained when you go back (to the club) but you have to put the head down and get on with it.

“To be honest with you, it is hard going back, like, with mental fatigue.”

John ‘Tweek’ Griffin is no longer involved with the Kerry hurlers but this

weekend his club, Lixnaw, will be taking on Causeway in the county semi-final. He captured the essence of the differences between a club and inter-county dressing room.

“You know your clubmates inside out — the lads who are interested and others who may not be so interested and you do your best for them hoping they’ll give it what they can also. You have to accept, like any dressing room, that lads have different interests and different personalities.

“But that brings different conversations and makes the dressing room more interesting. The banter with your clubmates is something that’s really special.”

And that’s something that stands out for all players.

Returning to the club may have its difficulties, but it’s home.

A place that’s comfortable, warm, and welcoming.

Griffin says: “Modern inter-county can be difficult with the expectations and pressures involved so I know a lot of lads enjoy going back to their club to get away from those pressures to perform week in, week out.”

For O’Connell, it’s “a joy to get back with the lads you grew up with”, while Keane looks “forward to going back in a way because there’s less pressure on you and you enjoy it more with the club as there are less roles. You’re playing with more freedom. There’s less tactics, less training, and you’re just going out and enjoying yourself like when you were a young fella.”

For Quill, it’s the simple things in the club that stood out. “Although difficult at the beginning, I always loved going back playing with the club. It was a less pressurised environment.

“The craic after training was always great. We had a few right messers in the dressing room, the likes of John O’Connor and Brian Moran, and you had to be on your guard when they were around. I used to love heading into the club bar, where we’d sit down for a cup of tea, plague Tom O’Shea for a few free biscuits, and discuss everything and anything that was going on around town or in the club itself.”

You might think that being a county player would create more pressure for them when playing with their clubs, but all of the players speak only of how they enjoyed that element.

Spare a thought, however, for Keane and O’Connell. The male dual player is all but extinct at inter-county level these days. This is not the case at club level and the Golden-Kilfeacle men are having to find their hurling touch after six months of total football. Keane is finding it a bit harder to get to grips with both than he used to.

Keane says: “When I was younger it was very easy to do both because I’d a lot more free time. I wasn’t training four or five nights a week, going to the gym and all of that stuff, so I was always out pucking at home. But I’ve less time to do both now and it takes me a lot longer to get back into the hurling. When I was younger I could go out pucking for two or three hours and I’d be back to normal whereas now it’s taking three or four weeks to get back to where I’d like to be.

”It’s frustrating in that way as you want to be playing well for the club in hurling, but it takes you a bit longer to get back into it.

“When I was younger I thought there was a symbiotic relationship between the two; if you were playing well in the football, you’d play well in the hurling and you could feed off both of them. There were things you could take from one that would work well in the other.”

O’Connell’s experience is similar. “I’m hurling training since we stopped with Tipp in late June, early July and I’m only back getting to grips with hurling now. The lads are training since February and they took a small bit of a break in June and July, but they were still hopping off the sod when they came back. I was only playing catch up. I’ve been in with Tipp for three years now and I’ve felt myself that my hurling has gone way back.

“But look, it has to be done. When you’re playing hurling and football you must just soldier on. Do that little bit extra on the field, make sure you’re at every training and try and catch up to the boys.”

Players will be soldiering on all over the country at all different levels.

And, after the week we’ve had, let’s give them a bit of respect for the effort they put in.