I’d like to see the younger Basquel back in dubs panel …
Gavin’s not winning anything with Kildare or cork. It was the combo of him and huge overfunding. Along of course with all of Dublin’s other advantages.
Will the dubs be looking for another 5 million of taxpayers money to compete with Kerry going forward?
You mad bastard. Gavin is so good he’d win a hurling all ireland with Cork.
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Edgy.
I’d say we’re not too far away from that poster claiming Jim Gavin was behind 9/11. I mean he’s an aviation regulator with legendary attention to detail…
Anyone able to post Roy’s thoughts on it all?
It’s probably one of the porter laureates best pieces outstanding journalism but even though you’ve gone out of your way to annoy me lately I won’t be petty and will fire it up.
Return of the Mac a victory for self-expression over slavish adherence to join-the-dots coaching manuals
A shot of tequila against the back of the throat, a human sugar-rush, a figure advancing in such an absurdly rapid Sky Blue blur that the absence of a trailing flare of rocket flame seemed like a contradiction of the laws of physics.
This is not about whether you are a fan of Dublin, or the GAA, or even if you are a disciple of team sport.
It is more about the phenomenon of fast movement, that visceral, endorphin-releasing exhilaration of seeing a human or an animal or a machine fizzbombing across the horizon.
Don DeLillo gets to the nub of it in his frequently quoted line from the novel End Zone: “Speed is the last excitement left, the one thing we haven’t used up, still naked in its potential, the mysterious black gift that thrills the millions.”
It is Usain Bolt surging along a track of vulcanised rubber; Coolmore’s mating of thoroughbred genes in pursuit of the perfect racehorse, one that moves like the wind; the reason Lewis Hamilton is paid $40m dollars per year or that Top Gun: Maverick is the box office hit of 2022.
Speed thrills.
Elite sport is, of course, primarily about winning.
But it is also about moments, unforgettable, life-affirming cameos that sear to the consciousness, that make you feel so giddy and alive, so overloaded with adrenalin and wonder that the only appropriate reaction is to emit some kind of loon-ball primal scream, while laughing uproariously and high-fiving anybody within a ten-yard radius.
Michael Jordan dancing on currents of air, his body snorting at gravity as he elegantly slam-dunks a basketball through the hoop. Diego Maradona, slaloming through England’s defence all those years ago, re-imagining Terry Butcher and friends as helpless mannequins melting under the Azteca Stadium sun. Tiger Woods, fist-pumping in Sunday scarlet, doing Tiger things.
These are the moments that carry sport – and the human spirit – to another dimension.
You can love Gaelic football and still find the endless lateral passing, the minutes of going nowhere, the suffocating defensive systems, as too much of a sleep-inducing study in choking caution.
Expand Close Dublin’s Jack McCaffrey celebrates his 19th-minute goal in front of Paul Mannion and Kerry’s Paul Murphy during the 2019 All-Ireland SFC final. Photo: Ray McManus/Sportsfile / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Dublin’s Jack McCaffrey celebrates his 19th-minute goal in front of Paul Mannion and Kerry’s Paul Murphy during the 2019 All-Ireland SFC final. Photo: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
McCaffrey was different, gloriously different: a leather-jacketed, rebellious James Dean gatecrashing a Zoom call of po-faced revenue auditors.
Unorthodox, fearless, utterly devoted to the team yet still lost in the rapture of his own movement.
There is a glorious image from the Czech writer Milan Kundera which to me sums up McCaffrey’s state of mind as he raced down the verdant Croke Park highway like somebody had pressed the x30 fast-forward button on the Sky remote control.
“The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut out from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear.”
In other words, he is free.
McCaffrey uncaged, a two-legged cheetah in full flight, achieved that state of absolute liberation and self-expression. And in so doing, he lifted those watching out of slumps and slouches and made them, too, feel unshackled.
On those days he was a damburst of joy.
Recall him, chortling among all the stern, tense, glacial faces in the pre-match parade, his personality simply too alive to embrace the robotic dogma of the age.
Perhaps it is because his work as a doctor – dealing with authentic life and death issues – persuaded him that All-Ireland finals were days to savour and smell the roses.
McCaffrey, both because of his talent and body language was a singular ray of sunshine.
The news that he and Paul Mannion are returning to the Dublin panel feels like a victory for self-expression over slavish adherence to join-the-dots coaching manuals that diminish the spectacle.
Here are a radically imaginative design team arriving to give a jaded old building a face-lift.
There were powerful signs of renaissance at the end of summer in the rewards reaped by the triumphant daring of David Clifford and Shane Walsh and Seanie O’Shea, artists emerging from a defensive dystopia to reclaim the stage for the entertainers.
Dessie Farrell’s jolting Sunday night announcement will surely accelerate the trend.
McCaffrey and Mannion – two bright men, strong personalities with rounded world views - will have been away a combined five years by the time Dublin suit up again.
There are no guarantees that McCaffrey can again showcase the electrifying combination of speed, ambition and skill that saw him elected as the 2015 Footballer of the Year.
Likewise, though Mannion has been an untouchable force on the club scene with Kilmacud, knee and ankle issues remain a challenge for the three-in-a-row All Star.
But this is no geriatric flight of fancy. Both are in their late generational talents in their athletic prime. Mannion turned 29 in May, McCaffrey joins him on that mark next month.
Jack Mac is some 16 years younger than the still standard-setting gridiron legend Tom Brady.
In his previous life as a Dublin footballer, his bullet train swallowing of the ground made other exceptional athletes look like they were running in treacle or tethered to a stake.
Opposing managers were unsure of whether to double-team the flying doctor, deploy tyre-shredders, or beg the cops to issue him with a licence-revoking 12 penalty points.
And now he’s returning for a sequel.
Football, it seems, can brace itself for another intoxicating tequila sunrise.
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That’s an outstanding article by Roy.
I haven’t read it, but I’m certain it’s fantastic.
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Gobshite
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Thanks pal.
Roy has the 2022 MacNamee award sown up with this piece
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Brian Mullins in very poor health at the moment i believe.
Best wishes to him
Heard likewise a few days ago. Got a shock when I was told.
Heard same recently - tbf he has looked a bit shook for last few years
GAA | MICHAEL FOLEY
Paul Mannion and Jack McCaffrey return to Dublin with legacies already secure
Sunday September 25 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Mannion, left, returns after two years out while McCaffrey, right, is back after a three-year break
MORGAN TREACY/INPHO
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It was the sort of week in Kerry where those faint late September winds annually signalling the demise of another summer cut through the late afternoons a little more acutely than usual. The Sam Maguire Cup was on show at the Listowel Races, traditionally a stopping point in the celebrations that might follow the winning of another All-Ireland and a place back the decades where a handful of the vanquished might also be found, suffering the commiserations of the locals.
This time the whole occasion took place months out of season with other matters butting into every footballing conversation. On the week Paul Mannion and Jack McCaffrey were slipped back into the Dublin panel by Dessie Farrell it was impossible to escape the parallel in Kerry with Mark O’Connor — their anointed 21st century fear láidir around centrefield — still in exile in Australia.
Yesterday morning O’Connor won his first Grand Final for Geelong against the Sydney Swans, dropped into the squad at the last minute. If it wasn’t for injury, he was a certain starter. A Geelong flag hanging at the top of the main street in Dingle last week, O’Connor’s home town, reflecting the uneasy peace the county has made with his success. They wish him well while wanting him back. No one expects his return any time soon.
For all the success of this year, Kerry will need every available talent to defend their All-Ireland title. O’Connor away in Australia, McCaffrey and Mannion adding depth and threat to Dublin’s squad, the Sam Maguire Cup visiting old haunts and lapping the globe with no guarantee of a long stay: these are the gripping realities with which Kerry must now live.
But the return of Mannion and McCaffrey is also the type of plot twist that will stoke the fires for Jack O’Connor all by itself. The Dubs can now add to the widely-held view that Dublin would have beaten Kerry if the match had gone to extra time, that last year’s All-Ireland semi-final was a game lost without Mannion, McCaffrey and Con O’Callaghan. Their return alone and all the meaning therein should help sharpen the blade prodding Kerry forward into next year.
For Dublin, the news of their return dropped as gently as anyone would have expected. Talk of Mannion’s return had already been floating around on Sunday morning before the interview with Dubs TV was arranged for that evening, Farrell dropping their names into a conversation that lasted less than two minutes with no space or desire for a follow-up question.
The choreography was light enough — Seamus McCormack, Dublin’s media person was running safety off-camera — and Farrell’s in-house interviews during the club season aren’t unusual. The question was asked about potential prospects for Dublin, the answer was given. Everyone kept a straight face and the screen faded to blue.
That low-key piece of theatre took its place alongside the return in 2019 of Diarmuid Connolly, announced by then-manager Jim Gavin in an almost identical way. But like Connolly then, the caveats are obvious. Neither might actually get back to full tilt. Mannion’s injury profile over the years has troubled him with Kilmacud; McCaffrey finished Clontarf’s season as a water carrier while nursing an injury himself.
What are the potential effects on two players retuned to a lower level of intensity when their training loads ramp up? The demands on their time and head space that drove both of them away twice before hasn’t reduced. Both always epitomised the uneasy trade-off Dublin have sometimes made between keeping their most brilliant talents while adhering to the principles that underpin their entire value system. If someone doesn’t want to be there, they can’t be coerced. To be a good player, the best of their own personality must also be indulged and encouraged. That cost Dublin valuable years with Mannion, McCaffrey, Connolly and Rory O’Carroll while probably securing the years they did get with them.
The expectation will also be immense in every imaginable way. A couple of years ago the former Cork footballer Ciaran Sheehan talked about the challenges of coming back from Australia after six years and rejoining the Cork footballers. “People kept seeing the young buck in their minds,” he said. “An awful lot of things happened in my life in those six years. Some amazing. Some tough.”
Whatever talk might prevail now about Mannion and McCaffrey easing gently into the season, every performance will draw that particular level of scrutiny. But they’re good enough to handle all that.
Their greatest strength is the drive that compels them to bring the ferocious demands of elite football back into their lives, applied to the stellar ability that places them beyond almost every footballer in the country. In 1964 at the height of his brilliance as a player Mick O’Dwyer broke both legs in the space of 16 weeks and suffered another ankle injury in 1965. A second injury to his ankle in early 1966 somehow sucked away his apparently endless love for the game and prompted him to retire.
Two years later he ignored all advice and returned for Kerry. He was 28 when he retired and 30 when he came back in 1968, roughly the same as the Dubs now. By the end of 1969 Kerry had won another All-Ireland and O’Dwyer was named Footballer of the Year. His iridescent obsession with the game that shone through every part of O’Dwyer’s life is unique unto him, but other forces that drove him to return could apply to Mannion and McCaffrey.
“Several friends of mine, and especially my wife, kept telling me I was mad,” he said in his autobiography. “What more was there left to prove? But I missed football at the top level and wanted to be part of it again. My club form was good. My injuries had cleared up and the old hunger was back. Of course it was a gamble. If I flopped I would have been written off as a complete failure. Anything that had been achieved earlier would have counted for nothing.”
The gamble was probably steeper for O’Dwyer than Mannion or McCaffrey. By the late 1960s he had a couple of surprisingly poor All-Ireland final performances to drive him on; Mannion and McCaffrey’s recent history in All-Ireland finals is impeccable.
Would a failed pair of comebacks impact their legacy like O’Dwyer feared for his? Probably not. McCaffrey’s place among the greatest Dubs of all time was secured years ago. Mannion’s reputation as a rapier forward at his best is also enshrined among the most thrilling elements of the greatest ever team. The back of a Kerry jersey starting the season out front of them is also something Mannion and McCaffrey never saw in their years with Dublin.
Their way back is softened by a spin through Division Two before more of the same — or less — in the Leinster championship. They have time to fall in love with the scene. And all the motive and opportunity to prove themselves great once again.
@Spidey will be swapping the tasting menus for salutations
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Beo le Yoga. Bhfuil tada nach fèidir leis an bfhearr seo a dhèanamh?
Brian Mullins RIP. One of the greats.
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RIP.
Must have been a short enough illness. He was still managing Vincent’s last year and I’m pretty sure I saw him at a UCD game earlier this year.
Proper old school, gruff character.
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