Denis Walsh: Is the intercounty juice worth the squeeze for top GAA players?

In May the GPA held a weekend get together in Kylemore Abbey for a dozen intercounty players who had retired in the last year or two. A retreat, if you like.

The weekend was full of activities and workshops but, at its heart, was an opportunity for a group of strangers to talk about a common experience. For years, huge chunks of their thinking and emotional energy and time and self-image and expectations and ambitions had been wrapped around a pursuit that was no longer part of their lives.

Not every exit from an intercounty panel is the same. Not every player retires voluntarily. Not every player is ready to go. Every player who thinks they’re ready to go is open to second thoughts and regret. Some players leave it too late. Some feel a little trapped – even though there is no contract there’s some kind of emotional covenant. Every leave-taking is a wrench, regardless.

One of the activities was a painting workshop hosted by the former Roscommon footballer Neil Patrick Collins. He quit intercounty football in 2016 to pursue his dream to be a fashion designer in New York. A few years later, in an interview with Colin Brennan, Collins spoke about how challenging and necessary the decision had been for him.

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“It ran through my veins [playing football] and I was passionate as hell about playing for my county,” he said. “The jersey turned me into a man fighting for his life and it was a mad lot of fun. I loved it and I still do. I never won’t. Walking away was the most difficult decision of my life.

“Although I now know it was the right decision, and it changed the direction of my life, there are times when I look back and wonder, ‘what if?’ I left Roscommon because I wanted to take a chance on the world and see what it brought me, or what I could bring to it. I left it behind because I craved variety, the unknown, and I had a sneaky suspicion that there were things in me that could be brought to the fore in different environments.”

In different words, and with other feelings, a version of those thoughts must be coursing through the minds of intercounty players all over the place. Private, undeclared, suppressed, unresolved. ‘Why am I still doing this? For how much longer? What else should I be doing with my life? Am I mad?’

This is the time of the year when intercounty careers often come to an end, or are put on pause. In the GPA’s annual membership there is typically 20 to 30 per cent of turnover. Many of those retirements, or quiet exclusions from next season’s panel, never make headlines.

It is a more complex decision than it used to be, years ago, when intercounty teams trained a couple of times a week and played a match at the weekend. Or when it wasn’t a potential impediment to a promotion in work, or accepting overtime. When being an intercounty player was something you fitted in to your life, rather than something you fitted everything else around. A lifestyle choice is the designated label now.

So, players must decide soon about next year, if that decision hasn’t been made for them already. Intercounty teams are not permitted to return to collective training until late November, but like many rules in the GAA, it is more honoured in the breach than the observance. The GPA have had contact from players who returned to the gym in September to begin a programme from their county team’s S&C.

One of the many goals of the split season was to lighten the load on intercounty players, and compress that element of their GAA lives, but that intention has already been undermined.

In his address to their AGM on Saturday the GPA’s CEO Tom Parsons quoted data from 2022 which showed that only 8 per cent of male intercounty players felt that the split-season had improved their load management. It is hard to imagine that there has been a nationwide cutback in the last year.

In recent weeks, the Waterford hurler Austin Gleeson announced he was taking a year out; at just 24 years of age the Armagh footballer Jarlath Óg Burns is also taking a break for the coming season.

At the end of 2018, when the Kildare footballer Daniel Flynn stepped away for a year, he wondered aloud in an interview with John Fogarty “if the juice was worth the squeeze?” For intercounty players, that has always been the core question. Why do this? What for?

At every level of the GAA, just as in every other volunteer organisation, there is an element of personal sacrifice which, to an extent, is also where the gratification springs from: you chose to be here, spending your time with others who share your passion. You may end up being time-poor, or exasperated, or questioning your sanity, but the invigorating feeling of being in the thick of something is the trade-off. There is no shortcut to that feeling.

For intercounty players the difference, obviously, is scale. At what point does the willing sacrifice become an intolerable intrusion? The honour of playing for your county is still one of the most powerful and ennobling and romanticised aspirations in the GAA.

But as the lives of intercounty players became more cluttered by the demands of being an elite amateur athlete, the triangular relationship between honour, sacrifice and justification has become increasingly tricky.

Does it boil down to a question of compensation? If so, how much? Or how much is too little? Could it ever be enough? Has the honour become too onerous? What is the value of glory? How much glory is available? Is that motive sustainable?

Do they stop to interrogate any of those questions? Are they just wired to ignore them?

One of the quiet miracles of the GAA is the accommodation that intercounty players reach with all this. No matter how hard the road, no matter how intrusive, no matter how bogus the prospect of glory would seem to a cold eye.

So, it can’t be about the “juice”. There are too many thirsty mouths. Playing intercounty has always been about the “squeeze”. That is the part they must love. They know that too.