Ciarán Murphy: Shane Walsh transfer tug-of-war is a well-worn tale

The Venn diagram of people who have played against both clubs currently embroiled in the Shane Walsh transfer saga cannot be very large, but it is nevertheless a cohort of people I find myself a part of.

If I was setting off to play a game against either of them tomorrow, I’d need plenty of help from the map. Crokes have, after all, 14 different venues listed on the ‘pitch locator’ page of their website.

Finding Kilkerrin/Clonberne’s only, immaculately-appointed, home ground can be a struggle too, because it’s not a place on the road to anywhere special. Turn right at the Arrabawn Co-op, keep an eye out for the pub on the corner, and then it’s on the right.

The GAA pitch is the physical centre of the entire community, the heartbeat of the place. Without it, it would barely qualify as a village.

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And yet, as well as their intermediate men’s team, this is the home of the All-Ireland ladies football club champions. It is the most incongruous combination of GAA clubs, and here they are, in a tug-of-war over one of football’s most luminous talents.

And that is exactly how Kilkerrin/Clonberne see this, a tug-of-war.

[ Shane Walsh’s virtuoso display did not deserve to end in defeat ]

Speaking to David Connors in the Tuam Herald yesterday, club chairman Ian Hynes said: “I think we need to emphasise that this isn’t Kilkerrin-Clonberne versus Shane Walsh and his family, or anything like that.

“It’s a small rural club against a really big club in Dublin. This is fully Kilkerrin-Clonberne against the likes of Kilmacud Crokes. We were taking a stance for all the small rural clubs in the country and that’s who we want to stick up for.

“Something needs to be done by Croke Park to stop transfers like this where huge Dublin clubs can come along and hoover up the best players in rural clubs.”

The rule book, as reported widely this week, might offer some hope that they can hang onto Walsh if it can be proven that he is only in Dublin for third level study. But it feels like the toothpaste is already out of the tube.

For all that people in Kilkerrin/Clonberne want to lay the blame squarely at Crokes’ door, I still find it at least as likely as not that the initial approach here came from Walsh himself, and that it was motivated by something other than the inducements people think are on offer from big Dublin clubs – motivations like a better work/life balance, less travel for at least 3 or 4 months of the year, injury prevention, and a new footballing challenge.

Once he made the decision to move to Dublin, it is not a massive leap of faith to suggest he would then decide to join a club in Dublin. And if he’s living in the southside of the city, reasonably convenient to where they might train, then why wouldn’t he pick up the phone and call the current county champions?

I have heard from a Kilmacud Crokes member who swears blind to me that there’s no money involved in this case. I believe him, for what it’s worth.

Stories have circulated in the past of wealthy members of other clubs acting off their own bat to offer benefits-in-kind to players who were thinking of joining their club. That gives the club involved not just plausible deniability, but actual deniability. There’s no point in insisting this stuff doesn’t happen, and not only in Dublin.

[ Galway ratings: Shane Walsh puts in one of the great losing displays in a final ]

But we’re dealing with a club in Crokes who were sufficiently worried about the continuous stream of transfers into their club that I’m told they set up a specific sub-committee to try and regulate it, to ensure that graduates from their gigantic academy were given an opportunity to become senior players with the club they grew up playing for.

They and other Dublin clubs have already made their own, informal, decisions in recent years to limit inter-county transfers. Three of the four semi-finalists (including Crokes) in last year’s Dublin senior football championship had no player in their match-day squads who hadn’t played juvenile football with that club, according to journalist Conor McKeon. That doesn’t happen by accident.

People will say Walsh has been training in Galway with the county team all year so what’s another few weeks of travel down the road west? But this drastically understates the influence players like Shane Walsh have on their intermediate clubs.

A player of that stature will find himself compelled to attend every medal prize-giving, weigh in on every decision relating to the club’s team preparation, even on occasion help to sound out potential new coaches and managers. Not every inter-county player would volunteer for that level of responsibility, but it’s my understanding that this was Walsh’s experience.

If he felt that stepping off that merry-go-round of commitments might help his studies, and maybe help him prolong his inter-county career too, then he can hardly be blamed.

I have deep sympathy for Kilkerrin/Clonberne. I have deep sympathy for the hopelessness they feel at a country that is racing at high speed out of rural areas and into large towns and cities, a demographic shift GAA clubs everywhere are trying to wrestle with. They have helped mould one of the most beautiful footballers I’ve ever seen play the game, but I cannot agree that he owes them his very last drop of sweat.

It feels like something transgressive to how the whole GAA enterprise is supposed to operate has happened here, but a person from the country moving to a city to live and work, and to play a bit of sport while they’re there, is not transgressive. It is the story of the last century, and the next century, of the nation.