Tadhg Fennin says the Lilywhite veteran is not one for wallowing in self-pity, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

LOST IN the tumbling cascade of Kildare’s All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Donegal last July was a kooky little stat, the sort that makes you pause and rewind and play again a couple of times just to be sure. This was the day of Kevin Cassidy’s point at the death in extra-time, an afternoon of steel-beamed truth from two hard teams who were only separated after 101 minutes by a kick from the end of the world. The kind of finale that left no room for fine-comb scrutiny.

But trace your finger along the next day’s reports and it jumps out at you as if on springs. Johnny Doyle didn’t score for Kildare. He came off at the end of 70 minutes and rejoined the fray seven minutes into extra-time. It was his shot that came back off a post for Tomás O’Connor to score the square ball goal that wasn’t. But flags of green or white, there were none.

Against the name of almost anyone else, this would clearly not be noteworthy. But the sight of J Doyle with no figures in brackets after it just looks wrong, a typo made flesh. In fact, for the previous time it happened in a championship game, you have to go all the way back to August 28th, 2000 and a 0-15 to 2-6 defeat in the All-Ireland semi-final against Galway. Doyle was substituted after 56 minutes that day, sacrificed after John Finn’s sending-off left Michael Donnellan without a marker.

As a measure of his place in the world back then, it felt about right. It was his breakthrough championship summer and he’d failed to score in an earlier game against Louth already. He’d done his bit in the drawn Leinster final against Dublin and in the replay as well but when Mick O’Dwyer was in need of a forward he didn’t need for the endgame, Doyle was it. Gifted, willing, expendable.

Tadhg Fennin got one of Kildare’s goals that day, Dermot Earley the other.

Together, the three of them were the future, Doyle and Fennin the inside forwards and Earley the born midfielder. Crushed as they were in not making the All-Ireland final, they at least had the solace of a Leinster medal to take with them and build upon. Yet the occasional O’Byrne Cup aside, it was the last thing any of them won with Kildare.

“You win a Leinster early on,” says Fennin now, “you kind of think that you’ll win four or five more. And we never did that. A couple of Leinster finals got left behind us and you would look back at those and think that if a few small things had gone for us that we could have won another Leinster and after that who knows?

“But I think for Johnny, as time moves on, it will be the last few years that are hardest to take. The Donegal match last year, the Down match the year before – games that came down to tiny decisions and square balls and whatever else. He wouldn’t be one for wallowing in self-pity but those would have been tough to take. He’d shake it off after a week or so and get on with next year but how much longer that will last, it’s hard to know.

“You can’t go on forever.”

Maybe not, maybe so. Doyle is 34 now but he still has the lean and hungry look of the cross-country runner he was in his schooldays. This is a man, after all, whose father Harry played his last club game at the age of 52, a county league match for Allenwood one night when they were short on bodies.

At a time in his life when most players would be looking for a less-taxing job description, Doyle has reinvented himself as in inter-county midfielder over to fill the hole left by Earley’s intermittent absences. If the end is coming, he’s given no impression he’s in a hurry to meet it.

The past five seasons have been his best. Even if we take it purely on the numbers, the step up he’s made since 2007 has been boggling. Going into the summer of 2007, Doyle had played 28 championship games for Kildare and put together a total of 1-92. In the five summers since, he’s played 29 times for a total of 7-139. That’s a jump from an average of 3.4 points per game in the first half of his championship life to 5.5 in the second. Even allowing for the fact he wasn’t always the main free-taker in the early days, that’s still a remarkable bounce.

If they beat Tyrone tomorrow, he’ll finally get to lift a cup having been captain all the way through Kieran McGeeney’s reign. That said, Fennin isn’t convinced Kildare will be gunning for every last ball, with a little of the 10-day training camp in Portugal expected to be sitting in their legs.

In any case, an NFL Division Two medal isn’t going to change anyone’s life, least of all Doyle’s.

“Above all else,” says Fennin, “it’s the All-Ireland that’s keeping him going. Every new manager comes in with ideas and they need leaders to implement them. I think Kieran saw Johnny, who was there for so long, as a natural-born captain. And Johnny saw what Kieran was trying to do and saw a man who was only after the All-Ireland. There were a good few lads on that Kildare team who were waiting for a manager to come along with that sort of ambition and drive. Kieran made them believe it was possible. Johnny’s doing his level best to make sure he’s there for it.

“There are better players than Johnny Doyle who went through their whole career with Kildare without an All-Ireland medal in their back pocket but not many. And he’s determined not to be one of them. Guys just look up to him because of what he’s done. The scoring he’s done over the last number of years, his All Star, the way he’s regarded throughout the country. Guys follow that very easily. He’s Johnny Doyle, the main man. What he’s done precedes him.”

So he didn’t score against Donegal last July – so what? It didn’t affect his standing, didn’t lessen him in the eyes of anyone. When the last game of the league came down to the last kick of a ball and Kildare needed someone to nail a penalty and get them promoted, it was Doyle’s shuffling gait that came forward with the ball. Still gifted and just as willing as ever.

But expendable? Not for a long time now.