THERE WAS A dominant underage Gaelic football team around these parts some years ago. They accumulated trophies through the age groups at a prodigious rate, barely losing so much as a 50-50 ball along their way. Long before they reached adulthood the side was handed that original moniker of “the dream team”.
Success did not follow to senior level. Few players made an impact beyond the underage ranks, and many dropped away from the game when it had been assumed they would lead their club to an era of silverware.
“What happened there?” I asked somebody who would know.
“Too much was made of them,” he said
This, I thought, was a glib answer. Over the years I’ve come around to its succinct wisdom. Everywhere there are people of whom, through no fault of their own, too much was made.
Looking down from the far-back seats at Lansdowne Road on Tuesday and Saturday past, you couldn’t help but feel that some of the Irish players struggling most for form were those who had been hyped to infinity in the preceding months and years.
Evan Ferguson, Gavin Bazunu and Nathan Collins for example – though the latter had his best performance in green in a long time on Saturday and the former two are of an undoubted standard and will, you’d imagine, get back to their optimum before too long. They’d probably find their rhythm more swiftly were they a little removed from our gaze.
That, of course, cannot happen. They are key figures in big football clubs and mainstays for a well-supported international side with a big media following its every move and, on the managerial front, lack of moves.
If anybody is culpable of over-hyping young talents, it is the likes of myself, a tiny cog in the big wheel of sports media and social media. We’re all a bit anxious for success, or at least signs that brighter days may be ahead, so we’re liable to jump on young players. We’ll profile prospects before they have played a Premier League or even a Championship minute.
I’m not sure I need to know as much as I do about Andrew Moran. For his and our sakes we’d be better off ignoring him until he’s a more established senior footballer.
It is natural to speculate on who might be the next big thing, human nature dictates we’d like to have spotted the next great talent before others. And we need a bit of hope as Ireland supporters, wherever we can get it. There is, though, a downside to the trawl for gold. Anybody that falls short of the expectations we have set for them can be dismissed as prematurely as they were lauded.
The noise around Moran is hardly audible compared to what we had with Troy Parrott when he was firing in Uefa Youth League goals for Tottenham. Over a year ago I wrote here that I believed Parrott would still have a career at a high level of the game, a view I’d still hold. As soon as he moved to Excelsior Rotterdam I was more confident; out of sight of all of us, he is far better placed to make progress.
There’s a touch of the overbearing parent to the way we treat our young footballers: outsized pride in their achievements, eager to talk them up, and prone to flights of fancy about where all of this abundant potential could take them.
Every parent in the end learns that the kindest thing you can do for your kid is to get out of their way. Give them the opportunity to do things and then leave them at it. Be there for the inevitable bumps.
It’s even harder for the modern young players to avoid all of this pressure. Richie Partridge and Willo Flood and 1,000 others could tell you that over-hyping young players is not a new thing, but the internet and its aggregate of apps and communities have given it all more horsepower.
When you’re an up and coming footballer who has been praised throughout childhood and teenage years and then you see articles about yourself on sites like this one and every other, next to thousands of Instagram or TikTok messages attesting to your Godliness, then that has to have an effect.
What is most remarkable about the likes of Bazunu, Ferguson and Collins is how grounded they remain despite this madness – yet it must have a toll. No human brain is built to begin to process this amount of attention and scrutiny, no person can easily come to terms with this level of adulation and criticism, and there hasn’t been a zen monk born yet who has the discipline to remain oblivious to it all.
In time, they seem to become better able to cope with the attention they get, and that attention does diminish when they turn out not to be Ballon d’Or shortlist material.
By that stage, the collective focus will have switched to the next high-achieving adolescent of the day, as we dream big dreams on their behalf and they struggle to make it all real.
