WHEN STEPHEN CLUXTON heads out onto the pitch on Sunday to tend goal for the Dublin senior football team, every tiny thing he does will be entirely deliberate.
The man who recruited the dentist who made gumshields for the Dublin team to refine and adapt his kicking tee, is one of the most methodical and analytical players that Gaelic games have ever seen.
The few stories about Cluxton are now hackneyed in the absence of any engagement with the world at large. However, after winning the Footballer of the Year in 2019, he did grant a number of interview requests.
Weed through the quotes and you soon decipher something about him.
“When I look back to 2001 and up to 2010, the ups and downs that we had throughout those years, they were very turbulent,” he told GAA.ie.
Look back at when his career started, and remember how Cluxton got into the Dublin team almost by accident.
Tommy Carr was the manager. They had Longford in the Leinster championship and goalkeeper Davy Byrne was injured.
He was going to dip into the U21 team for young Cluxton, but at the same time, wanted a few whiskers and a stray grey hair around the dressing room too. So even though John O’Leary was 40 and had been retired for four years, Carr wanted him there as a wise old head on the bench.
Cluxton started. They gave away a cheap goal to Paraic Davis late on, but he survived. Nobody shunted him out of the team. Even though he spent three years away from it, nobody could adequately replace him, and so he came back.
“You have to understand that for the first eight years he was on the team,” said Pat Gilroy two years ago, “Dublin took a lot of flak and they got a lot of praise and probably neither was fully deserved. He saw way too many times how Dublin teams had a big fall after they got good press and so his whole view of it became, ‘Well, there’s nothing in this that will help me so I’m just going to stay away from it.’ It is purely to stay focussed.”
His aversion to journalists is one thing. But if we were to grab hold of our amateur psychology hats for a second here, we imagine the events of 20 years ago, to this weekend, may have had a profound effect on him.
Dublin were playing Armagh in Round 3 of the qualifiers in an overcast and moody Croke Park.
Armagh had a wretched start to their defence of the All-Ireland title in losing the preliminary round of the Ulster championship to Monaghan.
They might have beaten Waterford by 19 points but were sluggish in the next round, getting the better of Antrim by just three.
At half time, they were 0-8 to 0-4 down. Soon after the restart, Paddy McKeever was sent off for throwing thumps at Darren Homan.
Four points and a player up, Dublin did what Dublin did back then. Armagh ratcheted up the pressure, and Cluxton swung a half-hearted kick at Stevie McDonnell.
Red card from referee Pat McEnaney, his brother, Seamus ‘Banty’ being on the post as one of his umpires.
Dublin were put in a spin. They only scored three more points and Armagh nailed eleven from there to the finish line to reignite their season.
So you ask the question to Steven McDonnell: What did you do?
“Ehhh… You can’t be giving away secrets now. But, well, he was antagonised, put it like that,” he says reluctantly.
“I got a kick. He lashed out over what I done. Many a player would have done the same.
“But I remember after that game, Tommy Lyons put the full blame of their defeat on the shoulders of Stephen Cluxton. I thought that was unfair at the time too.”
That’s the part most people remember. To recap, this is what Lyons said afterwards to the media: “They tell me that Stephen Cluxton threw a kick and if he did, he deserved to go as well. It was ridiculous stuff – your goalie getting sent off. It turned the whole game.
“They (Armagh) carried the ball well in the last 20 minutes and were taking it forward in their shuttle breaks – we just had no answer to them,” he lamented.
“We can’t say they didn’t deserve to win, but if Stephen Cluxton did not get sent off, we would have won the game.”
Naturally, there was significant blow-back on Lyons for not defending his man. A week later, his selector, Paul ‘Pillar’ Caffrey was in the newspapers, ahem, ‘correcting’ the record in saying, “There seems to be an agenda to blame Stephen for the defeat but that’s not a view shared by the management.
“Of course a sending off has an impact on a game but there is a difference between having an impact and being the reason for the defeat. We stand fully behind Stephen Cluxton.”
Even 20 years on, McDonnell can still recall how bemused the Armagh camp were at that reaction. Their manager Joe Kernan would certainly not have succumbed to it.
For McDonnell’s money, he reckons that Cluxton might have “learned an awful lot from the incident.”
He adds, “Not only that, but he had a serious campaign for them that year in 2003.
“For the barren spell that it was for Dublin before then, I think they won their first Leinster title in 2002 for seven years. And Stephen was a huge part of that.
“There was a group of young players coming through that team that – they probably hadn’t much experience, but they were making the breakthrough. And when you are doing that as a 20, 21 year old, you have to be given a bit of freedom.”
In time, McDonnell and Cluxton would become close teammates with the Ireland International Rules teams, two of the stronger performers in that sport.
“He was like any other teammate when you are sitting beside him in a dressing room,” says McDonnell.
“It’s often been said that he likes to portray an image, but I’m not sure of that. If you do no talking to media whatsoever, then how are you trying to portray anything?
“But when you are in a dressing room, he speaks when he has to speak. He is also spending time focussing his mind.
“I was always of the opinion he was a top-class fella and teammate and one that you could really rely upon and trust.”
On Sunday, Cluxton will take his place in goal against Mayo, the team that defined the great Dublin side of the Pat Gilroy – Jim Gavin era. His only other red card in a 22 year inter-county career came against Mayo in 2014.
As happened in 2003, Kevin McLoughlin stood in front of a kickout. Cluxton had a nibble. A red card was produced.
Only this time, the managerial assessment was kinder from Jim Gavin.
“I haven’t spoken to the player so I need to see what happens,” he said.
“Life is full of mistakes. We all make mistakes in life. The most important thing is to learn from them and to grow from them. That’s the way we’ll approach it.”
Is McDonnell surprised Cluxton is still going?
“Stephen would always have been very particular about how he looked after himself and his regime anyway,” he says.
“One thing that sticks out in my mind was 2011 when he first won the All-Ireland. The following weekend, he was back in training with the International Rules team.
“It wasn’t a case that he was away and celebrating, having time off for himself in the immediate aftermath. And that was also their first All-Ireland too.
“He was back at it, training with us five days’ later on the Friday night.
“That struck me as one determined fella. One that was keen to keep improving and setting standards. He’s still doing that.”
