WHEN WINTER IS smuggling night into late afternoon and pint-drinking has lost its sense of truancy, you know the club GAA season is over. So now, for a small but significant and widely ignored class of player, the cold war begins.
How the hell do I quit this thing next year?
This, I concede, is not the experience of the majority, who play for their club out of some mingling of obligation, pride, enjoyment, and satisfaction.
But there is another class of person out there who plays solely out of a grudging and guilt-ridden obligation, whom we will call The Reluctant Club Player.
The Reluctant Club Player usually just can’t be bothered with it all: it is either too physical or too cold or too difficult or too boring or too unsuited to their qualities. The Reluctant Club Player is usually kept around to make up the numbers, as the club would struggle to field a team without them.
They are far more numerous at underage level as, by the time they get to senior football, there’s usually enough safety in numbers to break for the border. But any attempts to quit before at least U21 level are usually tortured and then frustrated. It’s easier to leave the Church. Text a GAA coach in January to tell them you’re not playing this year and your desire is received as heresy.
I write with authority here as I was a true Reluctant. The only thing to which I was truly committed was my own, exquisite reluctance. This reluctance wasn’t plotted on a stable graph: it diminished slightly during my Junior Cert but rocketed on Champions League nights.
I was a pretend-to-my-parents-training-was-cancelled-if-I-can’t-fake-sickness Reluctant, a once-reliable ploy then scuppered when my Dad became one of the coaches.
I occasionally styled myself as a kind of chubbier Frodo Baggins: chosen against his will to carry around this great burden in service of something greater than me. Okay I wasn’t going to Mordor, but I did occasionally have to go as far as Edgeworthstown.
The Reluctant is both blessed and cursed with an outsider’s perspective. They can clearly comprehend a GAA Drinking Ban for the for the ersatz Catholicism it is, embedding as it does manic abstinence and wild indulgence. But the Reluctant is cynical too to the camaraderie and the joy in which the majority share. Yes, they can comprehend and even understand it, but it pales with the bloody effort of it all.
But I was one of the luckier Reluctants, because I was crap. I had very little talent and, as advertised, no interest in mitigating against it by working hard. I’ve always felt that the most doomed player of all is the Reluctant with talent. How on earth would they be allowed to quit?
I at least had the dignity to be as useful as I was interested. I started playing in primary school – I don’t remember being given any alternative option – and was cast as a lumbering and timid-tackling corner back.
We played nine-a-side, and I distinctly remember our coach telling us before a Cumann na mBunscol championship final in sixth class that he worried about the lack of pace in our three-man back line. We won anyway, fuelled by grievance as our opponents had beaten us in a league final earlier that year. On the morning of the game, our wrists were stamped with the letter ‘R’ to remind us that this was a revenge mission. I’d have interpreted it as standing for reluctance if I’d known the word.
The ties that bind weren’t quite as tight in secondary school, so I managed to cry myself off that team by second year. But I continued playing with my club, still a corner back defined by a lack of pace and exceptional generosity to whomever I was marking. The step up to full-size pitches at least gave me enough room to turn.
There were occasional efforts to address my chronic lack of pace, and one coach who had been in the army talked about getting parachutes with which to do sprints, to improve my running power. Even the non-Reluctants around the club understood this was insane, and the idea was dropped.
But I couldn’t be dropped: this is the Reluctant’s torment. As we stood up through the age-groups we still barely had the numbers to field a team at 13-a-side, so the team had to continue to accommodate itself to me. I had a brief spell at centre-back, as one coach misinterpreted my lack of pace for an ability to Read the Game. He quoted the Franz Beckenbauer line at me, that rather than try to get from point A to point B, you should start at point B. I didn’t ask the obvious question: Where the fuck is point B?
Great players often move further back down the pitch as they age, but in eloquent testimony to my quality, I went the other way. My final years were played out as a space-creating corner forward, sent out to the touchline to ensure our brilliant full-forward had some room in which to play. Thomas Muller has become known as a Raumdeuter - a space creator – for Bayern and Germany, but maybe I created the role before him. Though in fairness to Muller, he finds space on a football pitch. I was pointed to space and told to stand there. It was a brilliantly effective tactic so long as nobody had seen us play before. Repeat opponents realised I didn’t exactly need man-marking.
Those repeat opponents were sometimes my own team-mates: another reality for many Reluctants is when your team have a surfeit of players for a challenge match against a team who are short a player, you’re the one sent to play with them. This happened to me a few times, and I can’t ever remember being motivated to play well, even out of spite.
I played a year at U21 level until I moved to college, at which point the wider player pool allowed me to sink happily without a trace.
It would be disrespectful to some of my coaches to say this whole thing was a waste of years that could have been spent watching television: there were some genuinely good moments when I could bask in the afterglow of my team-mates’ achievement, but these were usual mantled at the time by my sheer reluctance to go training. Who wants to spend so much time doing something they are so bad at?
It’s not that I hold the idea of the GAA Club and volunteerism in contempt. Even the Reluctant can perceive it is broadly a force for good in Irish life. And I’m not against returning to it some day: in some of my headier and more vainglorious moments, I believe I would make a cracking PRO.
But I haven’t kicked an O’Neill’s since, and I won’t again. To my fellow Reluctants I say: there is a way out eventually.
I’ve left and have gone on to write about soccer. This is probably an issue to talk about with a therapist, but I am reluctant to go.
