‘It is a tough deal’: Charlie Smyth and the necessary cruelty of competition
Charlie Smyth of the New Orleans Saints. Pic: Chris Graythen/Getty Images
With an eight-year Raiders stint at an end, Daniel Carlson landed in New Orleans after midnight on Monday and faced the national media for a full interrogation on Tuesday. He is one of three fighting for one spot. This is the precarity of their profession.
The 31-year-old NFL kicker, with three kids and another on the way, was hoping for a landing spot close to his Auburn, Alabama base.
By American standards, the five-hour spin to New Orleans was a manageable commute.
He was still getting lost in the training facility and non-committal about where the franchise ranked among his ideal new teams – “almost at the very top” – but the reality of his predicament was clear.
The Saints are holding a kicking competition this summer. Tanner Brown and Mayobridge’s Charlie Smyth have been vying for the starting spot. Evidently, they wanted to cast the net further, so they turned to Carlson.
He will have one practice season and potentially one pre-season game to stake a claim. All you can do in this ruthless trade is be ready.
“You can only control what you can,” he said.
“I’m familiar with all the other specialists right now. It is a pretty small world. You know, it is a tough deal for those guys. It is a tricky situation, but everyone has handled it great.
It is about controlling what you can and the opportunities you get; you have no idea how that will shake out over a pre-season game. As a kicker, sometimes you get ten kicks and sometimes you get zero or one. Whenever the opportunity comes, you have to take advantage.”
This is the brutal arithmetic of life on the margins of the gridiron. Brown missed a field goal in a pre-season game against the Rams. Smyth missed one in the pre-season opener.
This combined with some uneven returns in training camp, where alert beat writers watched Smyth go 4/6, led to questions about his consistency. On Thursday, Carlson and Brown went 3/3 in practice. Smyth was 2/3.
Every manager in every team sport craves one precious commodity for his squad: competition. How they manufacture it, though, varies enormously.
Not every individual responds well to perpetual try-outs. There are those who need backing even if form dips or mistakes multiply, because it is part of their development. The art of creating competition is knowing when competition raises the level and when it merely raises the anxiety.
For Smyth, the turn has been particularly cruel. It was only December when he was kicking game-winning field goals, receiving congratulatory game balls and hearing dressing rooms chant his name.
American football is a different beast. The sport is built upon a next-man-up culture: you must perform. Bill Belichick’s famous instruction – “do your job” – comes with an unspoken afterword: or we’ll find someone who can.
It was a defining part of the greatest Gaelic football side the game has known, with Jim Gavin ensuring that Dublin always felt a pressure from inside their own walls. The average age of the team remained remarkably stable as he filtered in younger prospects to fuel the competition.
They built depth without deference to reputation. Diarmuid Connolly returned to the panel in the middle of their five-in-a-row championship run but didn’t see game time until the final round of the Super 8s.
Bernard Brogan’s first minutes came in the same fixture. Dean Rock was kept out by Cormac Costello until they played Roscommon in Round 2. He scored 1-11, 1-1 from play.
Of course, competition comes easy when there are obvious alternatives. The NFL is made up of just 32 teams. There are over 100 credible candidates orbiting all of the time. Dublin had two golden generations overlap.
For all the attention that came when Kilkenny goalkeeper David Herity told the remarkable story of Brian Cody munching a scone and telling him, straight between the eyes, that he was too old in a brutal one-on-one, his other quotes were just as revealing.
“A lot of lads did crumble. They were dropped for a match and pushed aside and never seen again. But you had a conveyor of young lads coming through non-stop.”
For the players themselves, this internal race cannot be allowed to turn a team-mate into an antagonist. There is a constant tension in elite teams: convincing players to compete like their livelihoods depend on it, while ensuring the only true enemy is the one outside the gates. Sometimes that is as cold as accepting your place. After the 2011 World Cup, Ronan O’Gara realised what his new reality was.
Conversations with Declan Kidney made him see it plainly.
“I had to be realistic,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The team had to move forward and I wasn’t going to be much good to them unless they needed a get-out-of-jail card, somebody with a bit of experience.”
It is why such selflessness is a rare trait. The player who can lose out and still uphold standards, still support his rival and still do what he can to make sure the team prevails is a precious team-mate. Even if all of that ultimately makes them redundant.
For Smyth and others operating in a binary business like kicking, there is little room for even that.
Saints sideline reporter Jeff Nowak has him at an 81 per cent conversion rate, behind both Brown and Carlson, but with the majority of his misses coming from 50-plus yards.
There is only one response to the uncertainty of competition. No matter the session, the phase or the circumstances, put yourself in the best place to do the one thing that settles every contest: deliver.
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