Belief what separates a Darragh from a Whelo

LOCKERROOM:The counties which do emerge to rival Kerry all do so behind the banners of messianic managers

WHEN THE genial Micheál Ó Sé headed back home from St Vincent’s in Marino to Kerry a couple of years ago people in Dublin GAA kept their ear out for news of him in the way that decades ago one waited for word of the prospering of a smart lad who had emigrated to Boston or New York.

It was said gently but definitively by Kerry people that Micheál, though wondrous in the air, was too slow ar an dtalamh. End of. We understood but still we waited. Surely a man good enough to be emperor of the air in an All-Ireland club final, as Micheál was in 2008 for St Vincent’s, would have a usefulness to any county team? Surely they would find some place for him. We would.

Micheál went home, taught last year with Jack O’Connor in Coláiste na Sceilge, playing a huge part in that school’s Hogan Cup win and then won an All-Ireland Intermediate club medal this spring with his native Castlegregory. But there were no days in the green and gold for him, and no raging debate in Kerry as to whether there should be.

In his wake Dublin club football has yet to produce a convincingly dominant club midfielder, let alone a county star and the intensity of the tug of love over Eamonn Fennell when eventually resolved offers no guarantees the hype will be justified on white hot days in Croke Park in August.

And it is for those days that Dublin football needs to find a midfielder or two. The certainty of the Kerry football cognoscenti about Micheál Ó Sé is instructive, though.

Perhaps conviction is all that matters.

On Reservoir Dubs last week the Ressers had an informal poll to mark the passing of Darragh Ó Sé. Who was better, they asked, Darragh Ó Sé or Ciarán Whelan? It was a brave thing to even ask such a question. There are those among us who don’t think ITV has ever recovered its credibility since deciding about a decade ago Kevin Keegan was a better player than George Best.

No matter how you rate Whelo a vote which placed his greatness above that of Darragh Ó Sé’s would have been a serious blow to the credibility of the Reservoir Dubs brains trust.

In the course of the discussion accompanying the vote though, somebody asked one of those questions which can never be answered but are still worth killing each other over in saloon bars. If Ciarán Whelan and Darragh Ó Sé had switched counties at the age of 18 how would things have ended up for them? The corollary is how would things have wound up for Kerry and for Dublin?

Hmmmm. At 18, Darragh Ó Sé and Ciarán Whelan were probably closer in terms of talent than they would ever be afterwards. Darragh started slowly, ceding a few inches to the Dub and declining to look like the genuine article until the 1997 championship. Whelo took those four points against Meath in 1996 and was never quite free of comparisons with Brian Mullins thereafter.

It is interesting, though, to wonder what would have happened if they had swapped places. Whelo trapped with linguistic problems up around Ard an Bhóthair, Darragh padding around Raheny village asking about bus routes. Like Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places.

The glib answer to the hypothetical question is to assume Whelo would have ended up with six All-Ireland medals and Darragh with none. Ergo Whelo equals Darragh. Put a good Dub into a team of Kerrymen and the All-Ireland medals will come. Put a Kerry legend into a team of Dubs and try as he might he won’t drag them to an All-Ireland.

It could just be true. The older you get and the faster time passes the more likely it seems Gaelic football and hurling at the top level revolve around belief more than anything else. The game of Gaelic football, for instance, has a finite number of skills and tactical possibilities. The city of Dublin with its playing population, its floodlit pitches its patient dedication to Go Games and development squads, its all-year surfaces and its thriving colleges, should be producing national champions maybe twice a decade. It should be a conveyor belt of quality and throwing up a truly great player about once a decade or so.

Except we don’t believe that. I don’t think we have ever believed it except during those crazy few years when Kevin Heffernan and Tony Hanahoe convinced a bunch of men with a predilection for overachieving All-Irelands weren’t just possible, they were inevitable. That Dublin team was unacquainted with doubt. No Dublin team since then, not even the 1995 crew which gave the city its only All-Ireland in the past 27 years, has been thus free.

But Dublin prepare as well as anybody else and put as much work, if not more work, into underage structures and preparation than even Kerry do. It’s belief, though. Conviction. The counties which emerge to rival Kerry all do so behind the banners of messianic managers, men of such certainly and passion that even when they are wrong they are more effective than any quiet, reasonable man who suspects maybe he is right.

I once heard Kevin Heffernan joke he had no time for men who could always see the other fella’s point of view. As a nostrum for good management it’s unusual but oddly appealing. Duly inspired players will fall in behind an O’Dwyer, a Boylan, an O’Mahony, a Kernan or a Harte.

They don’t buy into committees or dream tickets or double acts. They follow bloody-minded conviction. Up hill and down dale. Were they great beforehand or do they become great in the process? Who knows? Do they care? We will come to think of these players as greats of the game, when maybe all that separated them from the herd was conviction, the susceptibility to the belief that they and those around them were unbeatable.

Darragh Ó Sé had that, an unshakeable, bred-in-the-bone belief that the Kerry jersey was worth four or five points in itself. In his time he shared dressingrooms with Maurice Fitzgerald, Séamus Moynihan, Gooch Cooper, even a quiet but heavily-medalled talent like Mike Frank Russell. They were all geniuses in their own right but each had a distinctive picture in his mind of the role and the stature of the Kerry footballer.

Could Dublin have produced a similar number of true greats in that time? Physically, yes. In terms of the conviction needed? Probably not. In the last few years Kerry have lost Darragh and all the others names except Colm Cooper. And Tommy Walsh has been taken off Down Under. That should be that.

That gloomy word, transition, should be haunting Kerry for the next half a decade. Men will step up, though, and look like geniuses and we will wonder what they do in Kerry to produce such wonders.

In Kerry they know. Darragh always knew. In Dublin we hope. We wait and see. Would a Kerryman managing Dublin restore the swagger before he did anything else? Would an earnest Dub managing Kerry plant seeds of doubt where none had existed before? Like Darragh and Whelo we will never know. Nature or nurture? Maybe we are missing the point. Manager or messiah? Blind belief or learned technique?