Probably an all-time top 10 ten defender,on his record alone really.
he won all ireland colleges hurling medal with Dublin colleges didnt he?
dont think he pucked a ball again once he hit 19
He was a decent hurler and won a Leinster minor hurling with Dublin in 2007. But as you say he concentrated on football from then on. I doubt he regrets it.
didnt realise he had the leinster minor hurling as well
No regrets on his choice as you say
Ah he was always a better footballer
Colin Walshe and Drew Wylie have called time on their Monaghan voyage.
Both have given good service with Walshe being the better of the two although Wylie had a few heady moments bulling forward to rescue things.
Source: F/B - RTE sport…
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Why ‘ultimate performance ninja’ Jonny Cooper will leave significant void after Dublin exit
Jonny Cooper of Dublin consoles Mayo goalkeeper Robert Hennelly at the end of the 2013 All-Ireland football final at Croke Park. Photo: David Maher / Sportsfile
January 02 2023 02:30 AM
Of the various ways to experience the final whistle blowing on your first All-Ireland, Jonny Cooper’s wasn’t quite what he’d spent all those hours fantasising about as a child.
As Joe McQuillan sounded the last blast to end a frenetic, crushingly physical final in 2013, Cooper was hunched over, vomiting in the stands. An accidental clash of heads with Andy Moran had left him dazed, concussed and nauseous.
Minutes earlier, he had asked Alan Brogan and Paddy Andrews to keep him updated on how the game was going, such was his preoccupation with evacuating the contents of his stomach.
Then, one of the first things Cooper did was make his way over to Robbie Hennelly to console the Mayo goalkeeper with whom he’d won a Sigerson Cup with DCU the previous year.
A picture of the embrace went viral. Hennelly, head bowed in the immediate stages of grief from another excruciating defeat; Cooper, wearing a jet-black eye, offering sympathy and solidarity if unable to provide real comfort.
Given the obstacles he navigated to get there, Cooper would have been forgiven for exhibiting greater self-indulgence at that moment.
It seems odd, almost quirky, to recall now, after his unexpected inter-county retirement with seven All-Ireland medals and a fully merited reputation as one of the best defenders of the last decade, but the Dublin management wasn’t particularly taken with Cooper initially.
No underlying tension or reason. Pat Gilroy just didn’t seem to fancy him, even if almost everyone else did.
In 2010, Cooper captained the Dublin Under-21s to All-Ireland glory against Donegal.
Earlier that spring, he won the first of two Sigerson Cups with DCU.
His reputation was such that graduation to the seniors was considered a fait accompli.
But where Rory O’Carroll and James McCarthy skipped from that Under-21 team into the new-spec defence that Gilroy built his All-Ireland-winning team around a year later, Dublin’s breakthrough win in 2011 was a Jonny Cooper-less event.
The following spring, he made his debut in Croke Park during a turkey shoot of a league game against Armagh.
He kicked two points, but it was no great breakthrough and Cooper faded from view as the evenings lengthened.
For the All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo, Gilroy’s final game, he was given the number 33 jersey, the garment he kept as a souvenir, a reminder of his own shortcomings.
Ever the student, Cooper sought feedback from the outgoing manager.
“He just told me straight out I wasn’t good enough,” Cooper recalled in an interview in 2016. “I knew that anyway.
“He mentioned some areas, some technical skills. He mentioned awareness of space and marking things around me. I think that was kind of a penny dropping. I was like, ‘You don’t want to be a number 33, that’s not where I’m setting my stall here’.”
Quite how much that experience shaped him is open to interpretation. Jim Gavin had made Cooper captain of that Under-21 team and very clearly saw something in him that Gilroy hadn’t
Once Gavin succeeded Gilroy as senior manager, Cooper was always going to get a proper crack.
But it helped that Cooper is highly literate in the technicalities of his sport. He is, according to every coach with whom he worked, a sponge for information; the more minute and technical, the better.
“I love all the detail,” he once explained.
“I don’t know if other lads do. In fact, they probably don’t. But it helps me process what I need to do in a chaotic, real-time environment.
“I’m also quite interested in how a hand position, one way or another, can give you a slight advantage over somebody’s eyeline or eyesight.
“So I suppose I’m very interested in those small gains.”
According to Ger Hartmann, the renowned physical therapist who treated Cooper in 2019, he was – in the words of Jim Gavin – “clinically the most astute player on his team.”
Over the seven years, they worked together with the Dublin seniors, Gavin did not attempt to disguise his admiration for Cooper. He made him captain for the 2018 Leinster final in the injury-enforced absence of Stephen Cluxton.
Dessie Farrell appointed him to that role officially in 2021, but the injury that threatened to ruin his 2019 and the momentous occasion of Dublin’s fifth All-Ireland in a row proved a regular problem in his last three seasons.
The injury was plantar fasciitis, a disorder of the connective tissue which supports the arch of the foot, causing severe pain in both the heel and sole, but Cooper stayed in the team, albeit in a more suitable role as Dublin’s sweeper. That injury, and the initial struggle to make the grade, weren’t the only – or even the most potentially damaging – knock-backs Cooper had to overcome.
In September 2014, he was viciously attacked and mugged on Dorset Street after a night out, receiving nine stab wounds to his forehead, eyelid and neck.
A man with 62 previous convictions for assault, burglary and violent behaviour was later sentenced to five years in prison.
“Sometimes,” Cooper later revealed, “when you’re getting up early in the morning or your training late in the evening or you’re making such a commitment to the GAA, you’re sometimes saying, ‘Well, hold on a minute, it could be very different. You could have no sight in your eye and your hearing in one ear could be (gone) and you couldn’t be able to play’.
“Again, it’s all easy to say now but, certainly, it was a massive lesson.”
Cooper leaves the Dublin squad with medals but also the total admiration of his team-mates. That much is clear. In a tweet on New Year’s Eve, Michael Darragh Macauley credited Cooper with “single handedly dragg(ing) the standards of Dublin GAA up”.
Cian O’Sullivan said it was “difficult to describe the influence this man had on Dublin football these past 10 years or so”. He added that Cooper was “a phenomenal leader who lived excellence, pulling everyone along with him”.
There’s a scene in Bernard Brogan’s autobiography where Cooper, who he calls “the ultimate performance ninja”, is doing pull-ups with a 40kg weight attached to a belt on his waist.
“His eyes are popping out of his head,” Brogan writes, “the veins in his neck are bulging, his teeth are gritted, as he again manages to pull his chin over the bar.
“We’re all gathered around him, willing him on. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon! And another one! That’s it! And again!
“And when he does complete that third set, it’s as if we all did. There might be no cup, no crowd, but it’s nights like these and little wins like that which lead to them.”
At 33, he will be a significant loss to Dublin as a defensive organiser and sweeper on the pitch and as a presence, a prime example of the power of attitude and desire. Someone who dealt with rejection and became one of his county’s greatest defenders.
“I knew it was going to happen because I was going to make it happen,” he once admitted.
“I didn’t know if that was going to be a year on the Dublin team or five years or ten years.
“But I always knew. I knew I had the drive. And that if I got the opportunity and had the right level of preparation, I would make the most of it.”
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Lee Keegan 
Incredible player. Keegan and Mullin 2 huge losses for McStay.
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Best Gaelic footballer of the last 20 years.
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He was one of the greatest of all time
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He was a good one alright. James McCarthy just ahead of him in my opinion.
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Those All-Ireland final goals he scored were iconic.
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There wasn’t a player in the last 30 on the same level as him as an all rounder.
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Lee Keegan should go down as one of the greats of the game. Himself and James McCarthy would be shoe ins on the best 15 of all time.
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I don’t know how you could choose James McCarthy over Lee Keegan, fine footballer that he is of course
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The cowshit tinted glasses on here perhaps…
James McCarthy wasn’t even Dublin’s best wing back of his era
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