Alone he stands without regrets

A botched punch and trouble over a referee meant an eventful summer for Anthony Masterson but now he wants a Leinster title, …

A botched punch and trouble over a referee meant an eventful summer for Anthony Masterson but now he wants a Leinster title, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

THE WORST of it wasn’t the own goal going in. It was bad but it wasn’t the worst of it. Anthony Masterson used to have this habit of making a big show of sitting on the ground and sulking once a goal went past him. It was a young man’s conceit, an affected cri de coeur to show the watching world that he took every goal personally. Let the word go forth – cut him and he’d bleed Mikasa dots.

It was all facade though and he grew out of it in time. These days he makes himself get on with the kick-out as quickly as possible. No dwelling, no moping. So when the worst came to the absolute worst in last year’s Leinster final and he wiped out Wexford’s two-point lead by punching Mossy Quinn’s dropping ball into his own net off the knee of his full-back Graeme Molloy, he was able to suck it up pretty quickly. He even nailed his best kick-out of the day once he went and retrieved the ball.

“We were still in the game at that point,” he says. “It was after James McCarthy got the second goal that the game started getting away from us. We were four points down going into injury-time and then we got it back to three. And even though I was praying that we’d get a goal, I had a few minutes then for it to start to hit home. Actually, I was even fine when the final whistle blew but then the players started coming over to me and Jason (Ryan) came up to me and then the tears just came.

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“It’s terrible. Your team-mates are trying to help, they’re telling you to keep the head up and that it’s not your fault but sure it’s not helping at all. You’re just feeling worse and worse. We got to the Stillorgan Park Hotel for the meal and by that stage I thought the tears were all dried up but sure then I met the mother and the girlfriend and I went again. There’s a group of about 200 people, Wexford supporters who would follow you everywhere, to London, to Antrim, everywhere. They were there as well and every one of them was clapping us into the hotel.”

That was the worst of it, right there. A first Leinster title since 1945 spilled in a moment of pure slapstick and still they applauded. Nobody broke ranks, nobody threw a beery wisecrack his way. It was all just sympathy and two-handed handshakes and don’t-let-it-get-you-downs. Everybody meant well and in their position he’d have said exactly the same words. But he hated every minute.

“Everything was in place for that game,” he says. “I was never as full sure that we were going to win a match. Nobody could tell me different but that we were going to beat Dublin. I didn’t care if they had Alan Brogan, Bernard Brogan, Michael Dara Macauley, whoever. We were Wexford and we had the players and we had the experience. So when it happened, the emotion just poured out of me. I couldn’t stop it. This was what everyone in the dressing room wanted and I felt I had taken it from them.”

In the end, it took his brother Tommy to splash water on his face and lift him out of his stupor. On the bus on the way back to Gorey, he finally turned on his phone and waded through the torrent of sympathetic text messages that lit it up. Tommy’s one was the first all day that didn’t break his heart.

“Why didn’t you catch the ball????” He laughed for the first time since it crossed the line.

Such is the life, of course, and Masterson wouldn’t have lasted on the high wire if he was spooked by the occasional wobble.

He remembers playing in cup matches in soccer and praying his own team wouldn’t score in extra-time so he’d have the chance to be the hero if it went to a shoot-out. The flipside was obvious but it never bothered him.

He actually got thrown into goalkeeping by accident when he was 14, told to stand in nets one day for an under-16 championship match when the regular goalie didn’t turn up. There wasn’t strictly a vacancy in the position but when it turned out that he had a hefty kick-out on him, he kept the job full-time. Although he was a decent outfield player – and still is, playing his club football at full-forward line for his club Castletown – his ticket kept getting punched all the way up along the age groups.

In 2003 he was a 19-year-old apprentice electrician when he got called into the senior panel. The then Wexford manager Dom Twomey brought him in as John Cooper’s understudy. Any immediate adrenaline rush dissipated over time – it was 2008 before he saw a minute of championship action.

“I played three O’Byrne Cup games and two league games in five years waiting for John to retire,” he says.

“It’s a strange situation because you’re the one player on the panel who can’t really play his way onto the team. I feel sorry for Tom Hughes who’s behind me now but you have to be selfish about it too. I sat in that position for long enough myself. I remember going to Croke Park for the first time as a player in 2004 and being delighted to get to go there. You’d usually being going there on a school tour or something like that and here I was part of the panel. But after three or four times going there, I was just sick of the place because I wanted to be out there on the pitch, not in the stand.

“Being deadly honest, when you’re a sub keeper, you do feel a bit distant from it. You find it very hard to stay disciplined to your diet, to your social life, to everything. You’re part of the squad but you’re not really part of it because you know deep down that you haven’t a hope of playing unless there’s an injury and you’re not going to wish an injury on the main keeper because you become real good friends with each other.

“You’d have the manager of the club onto you saying, ‘Sure why are you bothering?’ I suppose I can tell him now that this is why I was bothering.”

Jason Ryan joined the fray in 2008 and Masterson was one of the bristles on the new broom. That was the year Wexford freewheeled all the way to an All-Ireland semi-final, a trampoline bounce of a first season for Ryan that crashed to earth a little in 2009 when Roscommon put them out of the qualifiers. Brick by brick they kept building, only going out to an All-Ireland-seeking Cork in 2010 and coming damn close to mugging Dublin in the Leinster final last year.

It was the subsequent qualifier against Limerick that got Masterson in all kinds of trouble. A cloudburst of a game against Limerick was level at 1-17 apiece in injury-time when an Ian Ryan free was waved wide by one umpire but given as a score by the other. The Limerick players complained that it was over the bar and after referee Derek Fahy went in to investigate, the point was awarded. Masterson’s version of events claimed that the umpire who had originally waved it wide didn’t argue his point and in the course of a spitting-nails interview on RTÉ radio, he called Fahy “the world’s worst referee”.

The next day, he got a phonecall from Joe Shaughnessy, a fellow Castletown clubman and a member of the Leinster Council. A letter was being sent to the Wexford County Board for his attention, telling him that if he didn’t apologise for what he said, disciplinary action would be taken. Word had it that an eight-week ban was sitting waiting with his name on it, ruling him out of Castletown’s attempt on the Wexford county championship.

“My first reaction was, ‘I’m not writing any letter. They can feck off.’ But then when I found out I was going to be suspended, that changed it. Someone even wrote out the letter and gave it to me to sign. But when I saw it, I wasn’t happy with it because it was too nice. It made me look like a fool.

“I left most of it the way it was but I made sure to tack on to the end of it the fact that while I was sorry for saying what I said about the referee and I shouldn’t have done it, I still believed there was a discrepancy here. We were still out of the championship and to this day I’m still baffled as to how it wasn’t reviewed, given that one umpire said one thing and one umpire said another. So I wrote that in the letter and a week or two later I got a letter back from Croke Park saying, ‘Your letter of apology has been accepted.’ My friend Colin who works with me had it stuck up on the notice-board in the office for six months.

“I wouldn’t have sent it only it only for the fact that I had to play club football. We were out in the county quarter-final a week or two later and I was looking at an eight-week ban. I had friends and family telling me not to write it and saying I’d be stupid if I wrote it. They thought I wouldn’t be suspended. But I couldn’t take that risk. So I wrote it and sent it off. I genuinely was sorry for the fact that I called him what I called him. Genuinely, I was sorry about that. But I wasn’t sorry about the fact that I came out and spoke about anything else.”

What’s said and done has been and gone and if he meets Fahy and his umpires along the way this summer, he’ll offer handshakes all round and let bygones go by. Longford are the first lilypad on the lake tomorrow. Glenn Ryan’s side took them in the Division Three final at the end of April and Masterson knows they could do the same again this time around so he gives them their due and more. But part of him is standing back too, looking at a bigger picture than a Leinster quarter-final.

“Make no doubt about it,” he says, “if we don’t win a Leinster title, we’ll consider it a failure.

“We all believe we have as good a squad as there is out there. We’ve gone past the stage of getting big days out, we’ve too many players who are quality. And we have some guys who are coming close to the end, who’ve given 10, 11 years at this stage and who’ll just regret it so much if they walk away without having won a Leinster title. Dublin are after another All-Ireland and they can have it. We just want to win a Leinster title and we’ll take whatever comes after that. That’s our holy grail.”

The road to reach it starts here.