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That’s a tough watch
Joe is in danger of getting over exposed.
I’m not at peace with retirement. I wish I could still play at Croke Park’
The greatest hurler of his generation opens up about finding an edge, the paranoia of the elite sports environment and surviving the civil wars of Galway hurling
Canning celebrates winning the All Ireland in 2017 with his niece Katie
STEPHEN MCCARTHY/SPORTSFILE
Sunday October 20 2024, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
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Joe Canning is talking slowly, hovering over every word like a surgeon making the first incision. There are long pauses. Each sentence is frisked before it gets sent out. It’s not like he’s being overly cautious about his book, but careful. Canning has things to say, that’s never the problem. Sometimes the issue is how people hear them and what happens next.
“My biggest fear is always that some media nowadays will create a headline out of nothing. Just to get a few clicks. That’s always my fear, no matter what I do.”
Where it comes from? The furious reaction in between the drawn 2012 All-Ireland final and replay against Kilkenny after Canning described Henry Shefflin challenging the referee as “unsportsmanlike” left him wary ever since of anyone carrying a dictaphone, but that’s the skin-deep stuff. Growing up in Portumna the hurlers were derided by the rest of Galway for living so close to Tipperary, reared on the feeling that no one respected them.
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“I grew up with my brothers having a chip on my shoulder. I never really thought why am I like this?”
It was his ghostwriter, Vincent Hogan, who pointed out the thread running through his life.
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“Do you realise this is how you were shaped?” he asked him.
“That kind of surprised me,” Canning says. “It was nice that I could relate to it: that is why I am the way I am.”
The self-belief from being anointed the greatest hurler of his age before he had even made his first holy communion might have elevated him above those mortal anxieties. That enormous and unrelenting expectation left him sharpening any line into an edge wherever he came across them.
Clickbait headlines online drove him mad. People assumed he was coining it from commercial deals. Canning reckons he knocked back 80 per cent of the work on offer. Last week, with his book tour in full flight, Canning shut everything down from Tuesday to clear head space for Portumna’s county senior B final against Athenry yesterday. “When you lose,” he says, “everything’s a problem.
“It’s a paranoid world when you’re in a group … it’s like the outside world doesn’t fully understand what happens. And media, they don’t actually have a clue what happens in the training ground. It’s a perception of what happens. That was always an annoying part for me when I was playing: they’re not there. How could they comment on something?”
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Sifting through some old newspaper clippings for the book he came across something by Ger Loughnane, written in 2007 before Canning had even played senior hurling for Galway and became a regular drive-by target in Loughnane’s columns.
He reckoned Canning was “way off the pace … listening to ill-deserved praise is going to do him more harm than good … I’d be very doubtful at this stage if he has what it takes to cut it as an intercounty hurler.”
“I’d say it was probably mam [who kept it],” he says. “She wouldn’t have taken that lightly. [She was] very, very strong behind it all. She shaped me a lot because I grew up around her a lot.
“She had a steely, quiet determination. You wouldn’t know she’s upset. She was hard as nails behind it all, even going through her sicknesses. I probably had a little bit of that from her. I wouldn’t have said too much out loud, but I’d prove people wrong.”
His mother’s death from cancer in 2022 left a huge void, but he feels her everywhere around him. When Canning’s wife Meg gave birth to Josie in May, naming her after her grandmother felt like another blessing.
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“It’s good to talk about her and keep her there. Even with Josie, that’s another thing to try and maybe remember the whole time. It’s a big thing for me to name the kid after my mam. That’s all I wanted to do. So that was lovely. And it probably helps in a lot of ways.”
She ferried him everywhere when he was a boy, witnessing his incredible unfurling as a hurler. After the four-year drum roll that began with the Galway minors as a 15-year-old, he started with the Galway seniors in Loughnane’s second year. Reviving the hellish training methods inflicted on Clare in the mid-Nineties didn’t click for Galway but toughening up the Galway squad was a constant theme through Canning’s time. His own analysis of their shortcomings always started with himself, usually harsher than anything anyone else came up with.
“A lot of stuff Ger said about us is probably true in most respects. Results speak for themselves in a lot of ways. You can blame this and that, [but] if you don’t go listen, are we actually good enough? When Anthony [Cunningham] left, I looked at myself: can I blame Anthony solely? No. So you have to back them.”
Canning misses hurling but is confident he made right decision in retiring
RAY MCMANUS/SPORTSFILE
When Cunningham left in 2015 after a protracted stand-off with the squad, Canning was among his supporters. The gap to the others wasn’t huge, but it was there.
“There probably was a little bit … like, I didn’t go on the team holiday. It was a bit of a shit show as well because county board didn’t really organise anything until the last minute.
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“There was a little bit of difference of opinion. I’d put it that way. We’re still all chatting and everything. It wasn’t as if lads were sitting over in one corner and the lads were over the other corner, nothing like that at all. You respected it in a lot of ways because there was a lot of things that I agreed with.
“But when it came down to it, I was like, did I do enough or did we do enough? Are we passing the blame on Anthony for something we lost on the pitch? We got to two All-Irelands in four years, so it can’t be all that bad.”
The managers that worked best with Canning? Dinny Cahill with Portumna, he says. Got them fit by playing hurling. To someone with Canning’s breathtaking capacity for genius, hurling is an inherently simple sport. Don’t complicate it. Sports psychologists were often a hard sell. Anything performative left him cold.
“I thought there was a lot of spoofing going on, to be honest. One person came in with [the idea] we had elastic band on our hand. If you done something bad, you’d just flick it and reset into the game. I’d be like, I’m in the middle of a match. I’m hardly gonna think about f—ing snapping an elastic band in my hand.
“It seemed the wrong thing to be thinking. If I’m clicking my band and I’m not running out to my position to my man and the ball goes out to him and over the bar, then what good is the band? Or “touch the white fence”. It was a Navy Seal thing. I just didn’t see how it would make me or the team better. It worked for some guys. I didn’t have much time for it.”
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What went right with Micheál Donoghue to win an All-Ireland in 2017 is harder again for him to figure. Being given more ownership of the team put the onus on the players to deliver in the way Canning had talked about before, but they needed to be ready for that. They didn’t train harder, maybe smarter.
“It’s probably a mix of everything. When you’re in a bubble, you have to trust the management. You think they know exactly what’s needed. If you’re thinking otherwise or questioning the management, then you have a problem. And there were guys that probably done that. Were we good enough personnel wise? We didn’t win too much. The record speaks for itself. That’s not having a go at anybody. That’s just the reality of it.”
Theories flew about the ferocity of the local championships making it impossible for any Galway squad to genuinely pull together. “Players always got on. But the county board never supported fully the players or management. They’ll tell you [we] got whatever [we] wanted. In fairness, it seems to be changing a lot in the last few years, but when I was playing … I wouldn’t have much time for any of them. One or two, but the majority no. I didn’t think they wanted what was best for us on pitch. They always had their own agendas.
“How can you be successful when Anthony’s in the dressing room naming a team for the weekend and a county board official goes out the door and puts a team up on Facebook and tells people that Joe Canning is starting at 14, but he’s gonna play eleven. This sort of stuff? Mad shit.
“And he’s doing that just to be everybody’s friend instead of actually thinking about the team and the management and respecting the players and the management. There was none of that at times. All that sort of stuff was just like, in the background.”
Defeat in 2018 All-Ireland final was hard to take
INPHO/TOMMY DICKSON
After Donoghue left Canning gradually concluded the new management had lost faith in him. A desperate catalogue of injuries limited how much he could train. In 2021 he decided he was done, knowing he’d never be fully ready to finish.
“Anybody that says they’re at peace with retirement? Not 100 per cent sure if they’re telling the truth. I wish I could still play in Croke Park.”
Could you?
“No. We all want to and because I experienced it, to replace that is really difficult.”
Everyone close to him assumed Shefflin taking over as Galway manager soon after Canning retired would flip a switch in him.
“Meg thought I’d be going back. We were only talking about the other day. I was like, no. I couldn’t. I knew, for that level, [I was] just slipping a small bit. You can never get out too early, but you can always get out too late. I never wanted that to be said about me. The stark reality is that if I honestly thought we’d win an All Ireland, I’d probably hang on. It probably made my decision.”
The challenges continue. With the county final against Athenry yesterday evening deep into injury time and Portumna trailing by four points, Canning reached into his back catalogue to unleash a ferocious shot from 20 yards that rocketed to the net. Athenry hung on to win. Portumna will go again next year with Canning still making his magic. There is no end.
Only new beginnings.
Joe Canning: My Story, Gill, €24.99
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Saucy enough
Was thinking that
The O’Connor’s not happy with Joe