WEXFORD DUAL STAR Lee Chin has been told he needs to be his own man when it comes to making decisions on his playing future.
Chin faces another wall-to-wall week, starting tonight when he captains the county’s U21 hurlers in their Leinster semi-final against Carlow.
He then has two days to recover before potentially facing a double dose of senior Championship action, with Wexford playing Carlow in Phase I of the hurling qualifiers on Saturday and Meath in the Leinster football semi-final on Sunday.
The 20-year-old’s packed schedule comes just weeks after he made headlines by lining out in both codes in the space of 24 hours and then topping off the weekend with a studio appearance on The Sunday Game.
Redmond Barry was one of the people Chin turned to before committing to a dual season. In the early days of his own career Barry was one of Wexford’s most prominent dual players before he decided to focus solely on football. Now 31, he’s passing on some of his lessons to his young team-mate.
“All I told him was to make your own decisions, don’t let anyone make your decisions for you, that was it,” Barry said yesterday.
“I suppose trying to serve two masters you can be bullied into doing this and bullied into doing that and before you know it you’re not worth a shit to anyone. That’s all basically, just don’t do stuff for the sake of it, make your own decisions.”
Redmond Barry in Croke Park yesterday (INPHO / Donall Farmer)
With Seán Óg Ó hAilpín now retired and Eoin Cadogan committing to the Cork footballers this season, there are less and less inter-county players spreading themselves across both codes. Barry says that the mental toll persuaded him to cut back his involvement in the end but as long as Chin can keep up his performance levels on the pitch, there’s no reason for him not to continue.
“Personally, I just found it mentally more than physically too demanding. You had twice as many defeats to deal with over the year. And you train so hard in the year, to be beaten twice is hard enough without having to be beaten four times a year in the Championship.
“If you were in a successful county and you were doing it and winning Leinster titles or All-Ireland titles, even one of them, that would make it a lot easier to go back. You can keep doing it until your performance says otherwise. How long that is, two or three years, whatever, it’s kind of on an individual basis.”
Sunday’s football semi-final against Meath has Barry’s undivided attention this week. Under Jason Ryan Wexford established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in Leinster, testing Dublin on more than one occasion.
Ryan is gone now — he’ll be in Croke Park on Sunday as part of the Kildare backroom team when they take on the Dubs — and in his place, Aidan O’Brien has taken the reins.
His first league campaign in charge ended with relegation to Division 3 but Barry says the time for a fair assessment won’t come until the end of the season.
“You’re five years with the same manager, it’s a whole new learning process when the new man comes in. The only thing is that as new men have come in, we have responded and have upped it.
“It was a case that maybe we had got a little bit into a comfort zone or maybe a little bit lackadaisical as a group of players because we knew Jason so well, but we won’t really know that until the end of this year when we can sit back and reassess the year and see how it has panned out. Only then will we know if we’ve progressed or regressed.
“We played some great football in the league, and we played some awful football in the same half of football never mind the same game. But all said and done, when the year is over only then will we be able to assess where we are.”
