Blending in while still standing out

This afternoon you know where Jason Sherlock will be, so you can tell him yourself what you think of him. You can send you insults vaulting at him down through the terraces and the stands. Pirate! You can hurl your edgy words at the television. Waster! You can tell him he's too small, too greedy and he's just passing through. You can read out the whole dubious rap sheet on Jayo, the bile-stained list of resentments his name stirs up.

Or you can stand and you can watch and you can wonder. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

But take your time. Consider first his week, just seven days in the life: Mull over the fact that Dublin travelled to Thurles last Friday afternoon and after a famous game of football they came home on Saturday night . They felt they'd crossed their Rubicon perhaps but Jason was up on Sunday morning studying the game on video, not liking the amount of ball he kicked way in the first half.

Later, the team met at a swimming pool on the Malahide Road. They'd initially arranged a further meeting and some grub for later but the boys said they'd rather get away from each other for a while. Jason and his partner Louise went for a meal with three others on the team and their partners.

Football form dawn to dusk.

Monday, the team were at the pool again in the afternoon. That was followed by a long meeting. Jason left home at four, got home at 11. Yes, it was a very long meeting. His daughter Caoimhe was asleep by then.

On Tuesday he went for treatment for his ankle and a few other knocks he's been carrying around. Then to training in Parnell Park in the evening. Wednesday was a day of routine maintenance. He went to the pool with his old friend Mick Galvin and then went for treatment again. Ditto Thursday. It was treatment and Parnell Park for training.

And through the week he was driving around Dublin and Kildare and beyond working the GAA summer camps for the Leinster Council. Yesterday he travelled with the Dubs to Thurles. Today they play again. Tomorrow, they travel home. That's the working week that was.

You want more?

It should be said that he doesn't want you to know all this. He'd prefer to keep his head down but you've cornered him in Parnell Park and asked him for an interview and immediately he looks haunted and you wish you could seize the words back. He doesn't want his head out above the parapet, not again, he doesn't want them saying what they'll say: "Ah, one big game and Jayo is back in the papers. Guy can't run his mouth, see."

But he says that he'll check with Tommy if it's ok, he says he'll do it because he knows you and he's that sort of guy. Wouldn't see you stuck.

Again and again, though, he wants you to know, he doesn't consider himself anything special. All stories apply to all players in a way. He knows he says that he might end up being the one to say something which Pβid∅ ╙ SΘ will stick on a notice board and point to. He knows that happens but he doesn't understand it anymore.

"It's hard enough, the training and the playing and the time. We're all out there, amateurs filling stadiums, not getting anything for it except the satisfaction, so I have real respect for any player that's out there doing that along with me, no matter what colours he's wearing. We're in it all together.

"There's comradeship so I wouldn't be worried what anyone is quoted as saying but maybe some lads would be."

Comradeship. You ask him about SΘamus Moynihan's tackle on him late in the game last week. It looks as if Jason's head could have been removed from his body but why sweat over it. "Ah it was nothing. Looked worse than it was," he says. "He's a great player and I'd have no complaints about SΘamus Moynihan."

He has few complaints anyway. RT╔ haven't recommissioned Rapid, the TV series he co-presented for three years, so he's looking for work next month but those three years were more worthwhile experience to crumble into the stew of his life. He's mellow about that, about the times he's had and how they make him what he is now.

In a way, Jason Sherlock, who inspired so much adulation and so much resentment back in 1995, is just a number now and all that lingers is the backwoods resentments still channelled at him. That's fine.

He plays down his own story constantly. All the lads do the stuff he does. Take Collie Moran, he started a new job two weeks ago and has had to ask for halfdays the first two Fridays. That's tough. Or Ian Robertson, all that pain and injury which has plagued him and now people put it in the headlines that he should be dropped. Everyone has their own story.

You've still got a problem with Jason Sherlock though, haven't you?

He's the epitome of Dublin flash, he's the one-season wonder, he's soccer swagger and basketball shapes and he's TV presenter glamourous and his face doesn't fit and none of his story is racy of the soil, none of it is pure GAA. Not to you. And when you get to the end of this piece you might just scribble one of those nasty letters that arrive here from time to time when Jason Sherlock's face makes these pages.

Tsk. How wrong could you be? How wrong? A few years ago Jason Sherlock took stock. He's relentlessly critical of himself at the best of times and this wasn't the best of times. It was a few years since he'd won an All-Ireland medal at the end of his fifth championship match and he was still riding the hog.

He had an Irish under-21 cap for soccer sitting on his Ma's telly, he had a tidy wage from soccer too and in the summer months he had the sun-drenched glamour of being a Dub.

Something was seriously wrong, he decided. "I realised I was happy to just be playing for Dublin instead of contributing. A couple of years went by when I didn't start in the team when the championship began but I got in by the end of it. And I was getting satisfaction from that. It was wrong. The lowest point was being with Na Fianna in the All-Ireland club final, being a well-known face or whatever and making no impact in the game, no contribution.

"I said to myself this isn't right. So I gave up soccer. I met with Damien Richardson at Shamrock Rovers and told him. I knew I would be better off. No regrets."

He wasn't going to be better off in his pocket though, the Dublin County Board aren't going to assume the fiscal responsibilities towards him that Shamrock Rovers had. He waves his hand, swatting the thought away. "It did involve that, but every player has their own sacrifice be it finance or time or family. That was my kind of sacrifice and I'd no problem with it. I've never felt I was making a bigger sacrifice than anyone else. I left Rovers. I didn't get paid anymore. I didn't want to be paid."

He thinks, looking back, that maybe he was never committed enough to soccer to be able to make it anyway. He remembers at 15 making a Dublin representative side and choosing to play basketball for Leinster instead. He should have known then perhaps.

Should have known when he spent all those halcyon summers playing in under-age hurling and football championships with Ballyhea in Cork. Should have known when his Dublin minor team of 1994 knelt in front of the Hill like boys on prayer mats saying we are not worthy, we are not worthy. But daydreams don't work that way.

So here he is. Midweek, between two of the biggest games of the summer and he's contributing more to Dublin than ever before. Look at the eight goals they have scored this summer. Sherlock's deft hand has been the creative key in five of them. He's a different player now than he was when he began. Less flash, less unpredictable, less likely to make them sing the boom boom let me hear you say Jayo song that was his baptismal hymn.

Kerry. It's full circle for him in a way. Back in 1994, October 30th to be precise, he got his first league run for Dublin in a game in Killarney. He was a bag of tricks back then. He sold dummies, he made a delightful chipped pass to Vinny Murphy and he conjured a goal towards the end which was the score of the season.

Dublin lost and Jason travelled back on the train, sitting beside Dessie Farrell and staring forlornly out the window. He hates to lose. It's all history now and he has buried it well. He's not the kid who travelled to Killarney that day. He doesn't play like a high roller anymore, he's on square street paying his dues.

"I don't know. Being a corner forward you gamble with every ball, try to make the most of it. I'm on the ball more now, I don't feel I have to force it. I'm more of a typical football player than I was. I'd rather be that way rather than just be someone 'liable to score a goal at any minute' but maybe never touching it. I'd rather be involved.

"When we'd wind up losing games, I'd say 'what could I do differently'? I realised I always had the ready-made excuse for myself, 'if they'd just put in ball into the square and put a target man near me I would have scored this much and done this and done that'. That wasn't good enough. A team can't live with that. I was making myself a luxury.

"I had to earn the bit of freedom to go out and win balls and get on the ball. I had to go back and prove that I was worth a place in the squad, never mind the team. I still have to do that."

So he worked on weights and he slogged in January mud and he grew with Tom Carr's team until now this is his team more than 1995 was, he likes the informal democracy of it, the fact of them having endured failure and criticism and crisis together as a bunch.

"I feel comfortable. I don't mind talking in the dressing-room. Nobody is saying who the fuck is he to be talking, he's not here a wet day, where was he in January. We're all at same level. A few years ago I would have been reluctant to talk in the dressing-room because I wasn't there during the winter. Now we're all equals." That's how they tumbled into their dressing-room in Thurles last Saturday afternoon. It was a crossroads for many of them. Sherlock thinks the mood that descended was inevitable, part of the journey they have been on.

They'd been hammered in their first Leinster final three years ago, should have beaten Kildare in the Leinster final last year but hadn't the moxie to come back, they were better than Meath in this year's final but couldn't nail it. Half-time last Sunday, what else could they have said to themselves?

"I remember going in and thinking all our excuses were there on the table for us. We could go out in the second half and get hammered and still we could say: Well, if Dessie and Collie's chances had gone in we'd have had a different game People would have slapped us on the back. I said, the excuse is there, it's whether we want to take that road."

And they came out and found their passion, found what it means to them. Hearts swelled. They dug for their inspirations, collective and individual. Unlikely sources. A rugby team helped. As a team they watched the three Lions test games in Australia this summer.

The first and last games they viewed in McGovern's pub on the Malahide Road, the middle one in Dundrum during a training weekend in Tipperary. For Sherlock, Brian O'Driscoll was an inspiration in the way Michael Jordan used to be.

"Just watching him, seeing him doing it in such a way that nobody else could. O'Driscoll's try in the first Test when he'd been almost written off, there were questions hanging there in terms of how good he is in world terms. And he pulled that out.

"We watched the three matches together and last weekend we watched the Lions video from 1997. We could put in the parallels for ourselves. The idea of people from different backgrounds together in a team, the criticism, the idea of taking the positives out of things."

And a doctor - David Hickey. Last Monday, when the team got together again, the great star of the 1970s was there again to speak to them. A wonderful speaker, he has been an occasional feature of the Dub's season, talking to the team, cajoling them and encouraging them.

"It's not that he says a lot that is different, it's just who he is, the positive things he has to say, his belief in us. That's been huge." He's talking about inspirations and what it means. His friend Mick Galvin came into the dressing-room after the game last Saturday. Hugs, handshakes and a few words.

Mick is 39 now and Jason talks about him spending hours walking along Dollymount Strand knee-deep in cold water so he can keep his legs going for another championship with Na Fianna. Fourteen years younger and the thought of that commitment stirs him.

The last 10 minutes last week, he can't be objective about it at all. It's about those things nobody should be objective about. Friends. History. Passion. Jason remembers Mick back in 1995 and his son Mikey was three or thereabouts, a toddling presence through that magic summer. Time shuffles on though.

Mick has gone from the Dublin team. Jason has a three-year-old of his own who goes to the matches now and, for Mick Galvin's younger son Ben, the Dubs are less familiar for Ben than they were for Mikey so Ben asked Jason for his autograph the other week and the smiles from above could have blinded the child.

Friends. History. Passion. Love too.

Jason met Louise McGreel back when he was a minor footballer in 1994. He'd known her to see and to admire from afar. When he'd played basketball Colβiste Eanna were the Sharks to his Jets. Louise would turn up with the Sharks, a beautiful distraction.

Then, during the hazy summer of 1994 when he was a minor, the Dublin team got into the habit of going out to Rathfarnham for their rest and recreation after games. And there she was. He ran into Louise again and it was on and off for a while and then on again.

As luck would have it, Louise came from a football-loving family. Her mother Pauline and her sister Paula were devoted Dubs, setting out like pilgrims to every game. Jason's presence in their lives was a novelty. After matches, Louise's Ma would debrief Jason. It never stopped surprising him just how much she knew about football and how shrewd her calls were.

Then life dealt them a haymaker. Paula went to Thailand last year and was killed in a bus crash. Her loss has left the sort of pain from which a family never truly recovers. The world turned grey. Pauline stopped going to matches, the old haunts and the familiar blue on blue of the team were freighted with too many aching memories.

Last week, though, because it was Thurles and because it was novel and because they knew in their hearts that Paula would really have wanted it, Pauline travelled from Dublin to see the team play. It was an afternoon of tears and some laughter. The passion play of the last 10 minutes gave it a good ending. Jason talks quietly about it now anxious to explain the thoughts but not exploit them.

"All the time when Pauline wasn't coming it didn't feel right without her there. It made the loss bigger. She'd always gone to all the games and I've always liked that. I like having her at the games because she knows football well but I could understand why she stopped.

"But I think we knew Paula would want her at the games as well, she wouldn't have wanted it all to stop, especially last week. So to have Pauline go last weekend was brilliant. That's there everytime you go out. You represent who you are and what people you have around you. The older you get the more you realise this. That's what matters and knowing it, kind of adds to it all this year."

So life started up again and Jason took the meaning of it and the warmth of it and placed it in his heart. These things are what it is about, this home game. You wonder where it came from those last 10 minutes. Well, they all have stories and perspectives like this.

"When I look at Tommy Carr," says Jason softly. "I can't help remembering that he was at Paula's funeral. I remember seeing him there and that meant so much to me and it meant so much to Louise's family. I thought when I saw him there that's not a football manager that's come, that's a man, a decent human being.

"I'm sure when he started in the job he had his critics for keeping me around, but it's something I have in here in my heart that I, and I'd say all of us on the team, want to do it for Tommy Carr. I looked at him coming onto the pitch on Saturday and it showed how much he cares."

On Tuesday, in Parnell Park, they got back to kicking footballs. The sky was dark by the time they finished up. They all have their stories about what it is and what it means, their reasons for being tangled up in blue.

Dessie Farrell is last off the pitch toting two big bags of footballs. Dessie, whose childhood Sundays were passed watching his Dad, Paddy, play junior for St Brendan's, Dessie comes with the bags. He won't need the footballs on Wednesday night, he's going on his own to do a little kicking up in Na Fianna so he gives the balls to Liam McCarthy.

Long ago, Liam was watching Charlie Redmond kicking frees and noticed how Charlie spent half the time fetching the football's afterwards. He suggested that maybe his young fella could help out. So, for half his young life, Wayne McCarthy has been coming here to Parnell Park for reasons of football.

Liam takes a bag of balls from Dessie. Wayne and Declan Darcy, Dublin's freetakers, will be practicing on their own on Wednesday night. Declan, whose father Frank brought him to Baloinmore every weekend to watch Aughawillan. So, on it goes, through a pyramid of lives which have led them to here.

Jason leaves with the bunch, no longer a kid apart. He's changed but on his own terms and if you have a problem now or had a problem then it's because you never understood..

"Maybe," he says, "some people see me in a different light now but if somebody had that opinion of me, so what. I don't do things to make them feel better. I'm my own person still. I wasn't conforming to somebody's opinion of the way I should be. I made mistakes but you can't fix the past you just have to look after the future."

And he turns his face and heart towards Semple Stadium once more.