Old soldiers awaiting the call

Keith Duggan talks to Dublin's seasoned campaigners, Dessie Farrell and Jason Sherlock, as they reflect on past glories and how they have adjusted to their unaccustomed roles as substitutes as the next generation starts to shine

Dessie Farrell was in Leaving Cert year when Jason Sherlock arrived in St Vincent's. Sport and tradition gave the Glasnevin school a permanent gloss. The name alone carried an understated grandeur, a reputation of achievement.

Shyness, or first day nerves, would just swallow you up. Sherlock, brimming with energy and mischief and speed, stood out. He also had black hair and a different skin tone which passes unnoticed now but one that drew stares and cheap words when most of the city was pale.

Sherlock stood out and Dessie saw him knocking around, so tough and enthusiastic you could bounce him off a wall and he'd be back looking for more. Dessie was a senior, big man on campus and he had football and Friday nights and Shakespeare's sonnets to contend with.

"Ah no, he wouldn't have talked to me at that time," laughed Sherlock earlier this week "Jesus, it must have been years after that."

After Dessie left St Vincent's, Sherlock made his own noise, leading the school to an All-Ireland basketball title playing at point guard. He was a free spirit on the court, all feints and no-look passes, and full of running. But he was always a team player. His interpretation of Gaelic football was similar, unorthodox and thrilling.

Sherlock's aptitude for all sports and the way post-school life has of diminishing the age chasms quickly placed himself and Dessie on an equal footing. First they were Dublin team-mates, they played together with Na Fianna, became friends and equals. Soldiers of the urban scene.

And that's the way it will remain this Monday. Friends in the sky blue of Dublin. After their St Vincent's days, Sherlock would become the GAA's first and only true superstar, a kid with pop-idol appeal before pop idolatry was even in vogue. He was reborn as Jayo and lived to tell the tale and kept on playing the same style of game, free association and without borders.

Dessie established himself as, simply, the most consistent Dublin forward of the last decade and an eloquent front man for the rights of Gaelic players. Dessie would talk for Ireland, and friendliness just pours out of him. Age, and a few well-documented and disgraceful experiences at the hands of people who resented his sassy honesty, have made Jayo more cautious.

Still, they are friends and the Hill is their audience for another summer.

But this year has been different. This season, they have watched the team's parade with the rest of us and when Dublin won their first Leinster title since 1995, neither of them were in the official first-team photograph. Both men have been enlightened of a fact that all great sports people tend to blank during the happening years. The game rolls on, with or without you.

On the substitutes bench, Dessie and Jayo are experiencing intimations of their own mortality and found it a cold breeze.

"Personally, I find it very difficult," Jayo is explaining. "Ultimately, as a player you want to be playing. No matter how many times you say it's great just to be involved, you are dying to play. But you have to deal with that and get over it and make sure it doesn't effect your performance. Because you would still go on for the last 10 seconds if you thought it would make a difference."

Although the summer has been Arctic, Jayo is in shorts and tee-shirt. He looks almost as fresh as he did during the unreal summer of 1995, when there was a heat wave and Jayo-mania and when Dublin won an All-Ireland.

Dublin under Tommy Lyons have gathered near Parnell Park to meet the press. This is a new time and now Alan Brogan is the talk of the town, the future. Jayo and Dessie are getting vicarious kicks out of it all, watching the youngsters and seeing their former selves. That lack of fear that you have as a gift for a few years, the feeling that nothing can stop you until something does.

"In 1995, we won our fourth Leinster title and there wasn't much fuss about it," remembers Farrell. "But it's been such a long gap since that we all value this year's title. I suppose when you are not starting you do harbour notions that it's all just a right pain in the ass. But it just opens up your eyes to how fellas you trained with in the past but who weren't making the team might have felt. You just get on with it. There's no point in sulking because it's all for the cause really."

Neither can fully explain precisely how or when their roles have changed. They spent their winter, the off-season, slogging through an arduous and luckless club campaign with Na Fianna and when the county boys met, they were both knackered.

Dessie headed off for a bout of annual surgical tinkering with his knee. Jayo played a few games of pick-up basketball and lay low. Together, they watched Dublin's National League game against Donegal in the stands. Civilians, watching a different momentum taking shape.

"I suppose the full-forward line threw down a marker very early on and after that, Jason and myself were always going to be playing catch-up," says Farrell.

And so it has been. Tommy Lyons came in with his humour and charisma and certainty and

reminded everyone that when it came to reputations, he was as tough and unforgiving. Tommy would pick and choose as he saw fit and you either lived with it or didn't. So this year, they have watched the championship unfold through a strange prism. In a way, it has made kids out of them again.

"I think that every substitute automatically just becomes a supporter because you so desperately want your team to win," reckons Sherlock. "Naturally you want to make an input but at the same time, you want the fellas who are out there to do well."

"And then in the second half, you find yourself scrutinising the game differently," continues Farrell. "You'd look to see where the spaces are, where you might come in, what the defence is doing. You examine things a lot more closely really than you might have had when you were starting."

It is a lonesome thing, to step up on the sideline when Croke Park is seething and majestic. Until you cross that white line with the slip of paper in your hand, you are separate from the team on the field and also from the distinct camaraderie of the bench. You are in no-man's land and when you are Dessie or Jayo and the Hill sees you stretching and warming up, you are a highly visible target. They call you in, implore you to belong to them again but it is not that easy. You have to fight your way into a drama that doesn't want to have anything to do with you.

"It's all new to the pair of us," says Farrell. "And it is a concern but we learn as we go with it. You can be lucky and get the ball in your hands straight away and that's great. Or you can struggle to adapt to the pace, be amazed at how fast it all seems.

"Like, I would have predicted that we would have made a bigger contribution against Meath than it seemed. But in that game, I was on the field for 22 minutes and it was only in the last three or four that I got my hands on the ball."

Jayo nods. "Yeah, it's all pot luck. The last day, I was coming on as we kicked a 45 and we got a goal from it. The ball is kicked out, we go down field and score another goal. So, I was definitely the turning point in that game. Nah, but it shows how you have to adapt. I was about to go on thinking 'we need scores', because we were a few points down. Seconds later, I'm thinking about defending our lead."

When Dublin last played Donegal in the championship in September 1992, Jayo was standing in the Canal End.

"What was I, 16? Just remember Dessie winning the peno and then Charlie missing it. That's about it. But it was a lesson that was absorbed by all Dublin teams since then, not to get caught out the way that 1992 team did."

That first year Dessie and Jayo played senior championship ball together, that perfect year, it seemed as if they were much too young and clever for the world to ever catch them out. They were All-Ireland winners and it was simple. It made sense.

Everyone wanted a piece of Jayo and it was fun and he was innocent and ambitious and was happy to give. Now, the same demands are made of other young contenders but maybe the ground rules have changed.

"It's easy to talk about pressure on young players but only a very few come through at that age," says Sherlock.

" Take Alan Brogan, he is what, 19 or so now. If he has a problem, he can go to someone like Dessie and take advice or find a solution. Plus young players are a lot more aware of the pitfalls as well. Because people can exploit your goodwill, that has happened in the past and will again, except now, the realisation is coming that maybe given the time and dedication that GAA players put in, they deserve an equal footing with the likes of rugby or soccer players."

Dessie says that "the twilight days", as he calls them, makes him appreciate the football all the more. The 22 minutes he got against Meath. How many on Monday? He has neither asked for nor been given guarantees.

"I love the game and it is all the more precious. But maybe you get cynical about all the other stuff, fighting for fair returns. I always took a huge interest in it and perhaps I just wished when I was a young fella I had someone to take advice from."

Jayo's face stars on a billboard for this year's great advertisement promoting racial equality. The message is that he is from an ethnic minority. A Dub with an All-Ireland medal. They like that down the country.

Dessie appears on the television news periodically, fighting for the rights of young players to get something material from the game, for an end to the serfdom. He is a mild mannered revolutionary but as stubborn as they come.

Football or not, you reckon these two will be around for a while, Two smart lads, pride of St Vincent's.

On Monday, they will be pinned to the bench, cheering the new generation and waiting for the call they used to take for granted. And there are no promises it will come. It doesn't matter; they care about it all just as fiercely as when the Hill sang only to them. Dessie and Jayo. Their chorus may diminish but their class never will.