Dublin's Kevin McManamon prepared to do what it takes

At some point or other over the week just gone, Kevin McManamon will have made time to keep time. He’ll have called around to his younger brother Seán, sat on a bed or stool and picked away on a mandolin. They might have knocked out a couple of tunes together or it might have been no more than idle strumming while they caught up. But he wouldn’t be without it.

Most of the rest of his week was taken up with his head in a book. He’s ink-staining his way through his third university degree at the minute, leaving behind a BSc in business management and a masters in business strategy to pick and poke through a masters in sports and exercise psychology. His thesis is due soon, with the working title “Attitudes Towards Sports Psychology in the GAA”.

By today, he will know whether or not he is in Jim Gavin’s 15 for tomorrow. He didn’t know when we spoke but he knew he had a chance. The semi-final win over Wexford was only the second time in 22 championship appearances for Dublin that he played all 70 minutes. He didn’t score, though. Every other Dublin forward did. So did three of the subs. Eek.

Elite players

Like all elite players, football seeps into each separate room of Kevin McManamon’s life like smoke from the kitchen. Everyone finds a different way to keep a clear view. His takes work and it takes thought, more than he’d sometimes like.

“I often think I might think too much about what I’m doing or how I’m going to play. I know there’s fellas who don’t want to go too deep into things or who don’t want to think about it too much. I look at them and think, ‘I wish I could relax like that’. I nearly have to work at relaxing, if you get me.”

Music is a release. A creative flush of the mind. He kicks around in a pub band during the winter. The Solids, onstage – or what passes for one – in a local near you from October onwards. It’s not in his brother’s league – “He’s in five or six bands, always playing the festivals to big crowds; we only ever play to 40 or 50 at best” – but it takes a different part of his brain out for a spin.

Doing so gets more and more important to him as the years pass. Sports psychology got its hooks into McManamon long before he signed up for the masters course in Jordanstown. He’d read plenty about it before academia required it, had talked to a few different practitioners over the course of his intercounty life.

The more he learned, the more he wanted to learn. And the more he started to wonder at why some GAA people were so resistant to spending time exploring the mind. He could see it on a very basic level – time spent talking out things out was time taken away from traditional football or fitness training. Minds change slower than bodies.

“It’s like the difference between the accountant and the marketer,” he says. “The accountant is all about results and the bottom line and he’s able to say, ‘Well because of doing this, this and this, the result is this.’ The marketer can’t quantify it to the same extent. He can say, ‘Well if you do this, this and this, it will help you get to this point or that point.’ But the marketer is just as important, maybe more so.

Physical stuff

“If you look at the majority of athletes, it’s still probably the area they neglect. The physical stuff, especially in the GAA, has probably reached a level where the percentage gains probably aren’t really there anymore.

“It’s like the law of diminishing returns, isn’t that it? The amount of time you have to spend getting fitter and fitter, I’d say the results aren’t really worth it anymore. I just think that this is an area that can be neglected and that you can get a bit of an advantage.”

McManamon made his senior debut for Dublin in Killarney in 2010. At the time, it was probably safe to say that a particular amount of work needed doing on the mental side of their game. This was their first outing since the "startled earwigs" afternoon in Croke Park the previous August. It was Ross O'Carroll's first game at full back, Michael Darragh Macauley and James McCarthy got their first league taste as well.

He scored two points that day as Dublin dug out a creditable win over the All-Ireland champions. Since then, his career has followed an eerily similar path each season. A go-to guy in the early months, a bit-parter when things get serious.

Including that first day in Killarney, Dublin have played 40 league games. McManamon has featured in 35. He’s started 30. For the first three seasons, he never once came off the bench in the league, until he did so on his way back from a hamstring injury in early 2013.

But invariably each year, his status seems to change as spring gives way to summer. That first season under Gilroy, he started every league game but only lasted until half-time in their Leinster opener against Wexford. He was a substitute the next day against Meath.

In 2011, he started seven of eight league games, including the final against Cork where he kicked five points from play. Again, he started the first game in Leinster but didn’t see the final whistle and started every other game that year on the bench.

He lasted longer in 2012 – six out of seven games in the league as a starter, all the way to the All-Ireland series as well. But come the quarter-final against Laois, it was back to the pine.

He hasn’t fared a whole lot better under Gavin. That hamstring niggled at him all the way through last year so it was to be expected maybe. But after being Dublin’s best forward in this year’s league, starting seven out of eight games, it had to have stung to be dropped for the final.

“The funny thing is, I still don’t really know how I feel about it. I want to play, obviously. But the way the panel is under Jim, everybody has to play whatever part they get.

"I was talking to a clubmate of Bernard Brogan at one stage and he said that Berno was a bit worried about his place. He'd been taken off I think in one game and maybe was recovering a bit from an injury but even so, most people would just presume that this is a Footballer of the Year we're talking about. I remember being a bit, not shocked to hear it, but kind of going, 'well if Berno accepts that he has to fight for his place, then we all have to'.

The team

“I still wouldn’t be great straight away when I hear the team announced. But I know that once Sunday morning comes, I wake up and the only thing that matters is the team. You buy into it, you prepare to do whatever you’re asked.”

Gavin’s greatest trick so far with Dublin has been to convince an unseemly amount of quality players that they can all find their little piece of the quilt to sew and have them all be happy with that.

“There’s a kind of transparency in the way Jim picks on form so that it doesn’t really fester in anyone’s mind that he has his favourites or anything like that,” says McManamon.

“It would be very easy to get pissed off if it was the fact that somebody was playing even though he was injured between two games. Or if he obviously wasn’t playing well and he still got his game. There’s never been this attitude from Jim of, ‘well, so-and-so is a big game player and I know he’ll do it for me on the day’.

“There’s always that bit of hope. Even last summer when I had two hamstring injuries, the thing that would always have kept me going was the knowledge that once I got back fit, there was going to be a chance of a start in an All-Ireland final. It wasn’t a case of, ‘well look, you missed a good bit of the summer so you’re really only aiming for the bench’. I got my chance of a start like everybody else.

"It didn't work out for me in the end but it was something that kept me alive all the way through. It kept a lot of us alive. Like, Alan Brogan kept fighting and fighting to get back fit last summer and he was a whisker away from playing in the All-Ireland final.

“Knowing that Jim would give him a fair shout of making the final even though he had missed the whole year was definitely a big incentive. You always think there’s a chance.”

As long as he knows he’s not without a shot at a starting place, McManamon can live without being guaranteed one.

In this successful Dublin set-up, nobody has a lot of choice in the matter.