AIDAN FOGARTY’S STINT on RTÉ’s Dancing With The Stars finished on a bizarre note last weekend.
Kilkenny’s eight-time All-Ireland winner, and a favourite for the dancing crown, was preparing for the semi-final stage of the show with his dance partner Emily Barker.
But just after midday on Sunday, with only hours to go before curtain, they were informed of a significant change in the schedule. The semi-final idea had been scrapped and the four remaining pairs of contestants were now heading for a straight final.
The show’s organisers were following the recommended guidance surrounding the coronavirus outbreak in Ireland.
“All our heads kind of dropped,” Fogarty tells The42 a few days on from the finale where Lottie Ryan and Pasquale La Rocca were crowned the champions.
“We didn’t know what to think.
Then it was the final and there was no crowd at it and I’d be used to a build-up for a final in hurling. I’m not saying I was going to get to the final but if I was, it’s just managing the build-up and the text messages coming through.
“You’re getting prepared for a huge night and that just didn’t happen.
“And then with the coronavirus and everything, it’s a bit mad.”
Fogarty’s life was a packed schedule at the height of the show. Daily practice sessions lasted for hours to perfect the dance routines with Barker. Towards the end, he was starting his training at 9am and not leaving for home until 10pm that night.
Apart from a good luck text message from former Kerry star, and previous DWTS winner, Aidan O’Mahony, Fogarty came into the show with no knowledge or experience. He may have been light-footed in a Kilkenny jersey, but dancing was not his bag.
This was a new performative art for him and he wanted to be thorough about getting to grips with it all. But while he was concentrating on memorising steps, something huge was happening elsewhere. The world he left for DWTS was not the same one that he returned to this week.
It’s like being in an Apocalyptic film. Even when I was driving home the other day, there was a Covid-19 sign on the motorway and it was like I was escaping out of Dublin.
“I don’t know what to do with myself. I have so much time now and I literally didn’t have a second for the last four months. It is a bit weird, very strange.
A gorgeous Viennese Waltz from @taggykk and @emilybarkerwork. What a great opener!
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) March 15, 2020
26 points#DWTSIrl @DWTSIRL pic.twitter.com/jGKn7szelb
“It absolutely consumed me. I was off work, I didn’t have time to be reading messages or taking phone calls.”
Fogarty called time on his inter-county career in 2014 but he’s still representing his local club Emeralds in Urlingford. But due to the GAA’s blanket ban on all hurling and football activity means Fogarty’s return to the small ball game will have to be put on hold for a little longer.
There’s no Kilkenny games for him to attend either. Sport is normally his sanctuary and it would have been the right tonic for Fogarty after the sustained intensity of DWTS.
But these are unprecedented times and Fogarty has to adapt.
“The hurling field is blocked up, you’re not allowed in,” says Fogarty of the protective measures they’re taking in Urlingford to keep their club members safe.
And I’m not even going back to that. I’m going back to nothing. It’s hard to explain how busy I was and how crazy it was, and now I’m not going back to anything.
“Dublin is even strange. Shops are closing and it’s just mad. I didn’t realise how serious it was because I was just so consumed by the dancing and what I was doing. It’s only after hitting now. They’re closing the borders and one of the professional dancers has to go abroad.”
While the rest of the world waits for this coronavirus nightmare to end, the GAA must consider their options for how to plan the rest of the season. At this stage, it’s likely that the national leagues will be scrapped and marked down in the record books as null and void.
As for the championship, various suggestions have been put forward. One recommendation involves stripping the football and hurling competitions back to straight knockout contests.
Fogarty believes that, under Brian Cody, the Cats would thrive in that kind of all-out warfare environment.
“I think knockout is when it comes down to crunch time and I do think matches get better with knockout. You go hell for leather and the matches are better because your life is on the line.
“I think it would suit Kilkenny because they do always go out to win. It’s your preparation and build-up for that game. You’d be having meetings about the team and dissecting it and going through it. That’s how you know something big is coming. So knockout for us, we knew what was coming, we knew we were going to play a huge game because Brian Cody would be a different animal.
Kilkenny always do it that way. I think they’d be ruthless and they wouldn’t hold back one bit.”
Cody is now in his 22nd year at the helm with Kilkenny. His decorated record in management is well documented, as is his merciless approach to running his team.
Some of the best players to ever play hurling have been frozen out when Cody deemed them surplus to requirements. Fogarty enjoyed a successful 11-year stint in a Kilkenny jersey, but he too suffered under Cody’s hand at times.
He recalls being dropped for an All-Ireland final as “one of the worst days of my life.” But despite his cut-throat ways, Cody will always have Fogarty’s respect for the amount of success he engineered for Kilkenny.
“He does have his manager hat on all the time and rightly so,” says the former Kilkenny forward Fogarty.
“He’s one of the best managers in GAA history. He’s the Alex Ferguson of hurling and he is ruthless. And it makes sense. There’s no one person bigger than Kilkenny or bigger than the team.
“That’s what kind of makes Kilkenny successful. No-one gets ahead of the game. Brian would have talked a lot about being humble and keeping grounded. Back in my day, lads were coming in with All-Stars, Hurlers of The Year [awards] and it was easy to lose track of yourself. But Brian kept everybody grounded and everybody on their toes and hungry.
“Tommy Walsh said to me once, ‘you have to be playing well all the time to be on the team.’ And I looked at him thinking he’s one of the best hurlers I’ve ever seen and he’s talking like that.”
Many of Fogarty’s former Kilkenny team-mates have moved on to the next stage of their GAA careers. Eddie Brennan and Derek Lyng are among those who have veered into coaching, with Brennan in charge of the Laois hurlers while Lyng has been entrusted with managing the Kilkenny U20s.
Others have taken up roles in punditry, including Tommy Walsh and Jackie Tyrrell. Fogarty is happy to see his former hurling colleagues impart their expertise to the next generation.
“I think it’s great to see people going into coaching,” says Fogarty.
“The lads are giving back a little bit and giving back a little bit of knowledge and are doing very well. Eddie is doing super with Laois and Derek is one of the best coaches. He’s my own clubman in Emeralds and would have trained them as well. He’s a fantastic manager and why not do it when you have the experience and the knowledge.”
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