One last hurrah: When players are not yet ready to call time on their career

In the first week of January 2021 Colm Boyle fielded a call from James Horan. Only a fortnight after Mayo had lost the All-Ireland final to Dublin, the Mayo manager was turning the page: new year, same resolution. On that ghostly night in Croke Park there had been no place for Boyle in the official squad of 26. Most of his season had been lost to a cruciate ligament injury, and though he recovered in time for the midwinter championship, he was omitted for the Connacht final. In the short time that remained in that telescoped season, he couldn’t change their minds. Boyle was 34, an honoured veteran of 13 campaigns. What more could he drain from the glass?

Before Boyle could say anything, Horan seized the conversation. “You’re not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?” he said. They both knew what Horan meant. The tone in the manager’s voice was both the opening bid and the tipping point. Boyle didn’t want to stop, he didn’t feel finished, or hollowed out from years of unhappy endings. But by staying, what could he expect?

“I thought I’d be able to do enough to get back in,” he says now. “Looking back, I don’t think I could have done any more. I didn’t miss a minute of training all year, which for a 34, 35-year-old was good going. It felt like I was pushing really, really hard. For whatever reason, it just didn’t happen come game day.”

But he didn’t come back to be a dusty antique on the shelf, and the last thing Horan needed from Boyle was quiet resignation. He made one appearance off the bench in a 24-point rout of Leitrim in the Connacht championship, but that was the sum of his game time. Along the way, he pushed the manager for answers.

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“You’d have conversations. When you didn’t come on, you’d be asking the manager the following week, ‘Why? What do I need to do?’ I was given encouragement, definitely. Every time I spoke [to Horan] it was always a case that ‘you’re close’ and ‘you’re going well’ and stuff like that. If you felt you were a million miles away you’d be thinking, ‘Why am I bothering?’ But then, obviously, you’re thinking, ‘If I’m going well, why aren’t I getting in?’”

At the end of that summer, he had no further questions. Just like Alan Dillon in 2017, and Keith Higgins and Tom Parsons in 2020, Boyle had finished his Mayo career as an unused sub in an All-Ireland final. Donie Vaughan and Séamie O’Shea had reached the end in 2020 without even making the squad for the final. For all of them, that was the risk in hanging on.

At this time of the year, that element of personal jeopardy stalks every dressing room. Somebody will have stayed to give it one last shot, without any form of indemnity against crashes or falls. Patrick Horgan in Cork, Aidan O’Shea in Mayo, Séamus Callanan in Tipperary - what does the season hold for them? Henry Shefflin started no championship match in his final year; Tommy Walsh started one. Their back catalogue of brilliance didn’t buy them any extra time.

“It’s such a personal decision,” says Paddy Andrews, the former Dublin player. “I was fortunate. I didn’t need to hang on. We were blessed, we won everything we wanted to win. I remember having a chat with Andy Moran about it and Andy would still be going now if he could – because they didn’t get over the line and that drives you on.

“You see Jonny Cooper this week. Jonny doesn’t owe anyone anything, so it’s easy for him to walk away with, whatever, seven All-Irelands, eight All-Irelands. I don’t want to be flippant about it, but it doesn’t really matter [whether it was seven or eight]. It’s such a different call to make when you’re still chasing it.”

And yet, in the all-conquering Dublin squad of the last decade, nobody left early. Jack McCaffrey, Rory O’Carroll and Paul Mannion went and came back, but different dynamics were at play there. In all of those years, big-name, big-game players lost their places and stayed. Winning, and wanting to be part of something momentous, had a blinding magnetism too.

Bernard Brogan and Michael Darragh Macauley, for example, were dropped for the All-Ireland final replay against Mayo in 2016 and, in Brogan’s case, he never started an All-Ireland final again, despite being on the panel until 2019. Including replays, Macauley was on the panel for five more All-Ireland finals and started just one. How did they feel about their new role? It is clear from Brogan’s autobiography that he was tormented. But he stayed. One more year. Then another. Then another.

None of these impulses are new. There is a famous picture of the Kerry bench for the 1988 Munster final, Mick O’Dwyer’s second-last as Kerry manager. Sitting there were Páidí Ó Sé, Ger Power, Denis “Ogie” Moran and Eoin “Bomber” Liston, the holders of 30 All-Ireland medals between them. Liston was young enough to continue with Kerry for another while, but for the others it was their last day in the jersey, at the end of one season too far.

Andrews finished his Dublin career on the fringes too. For Jim Gavin’s last match in 2019, he sat alongside Brogan, Diarmuid Connolly, Philly McMahon, Cian O’Sullivan and Kevin McManamon, among others, on the most-decorated bench in the history of the GAA. At other times in Gavin’s reign, it would have been unimaginable for Dublin to contest an All-Ireland without those players on the field, but they weren’t discarded, they were re-purposed - “finishers” is the buzzword.

Keeping experienced players involved and motivated and hustling was another energy source for the group. “There were always two or three guys changed every year. Jim was brilliant at this. The beauty for Dublin was that we had the raw materials to do that. Jim didn’t have to go back to me or Paul Flynn or Michael Darragh Macauley and say, ‘I need you now.’ He didn’t.”

But even after Dublin completed the five-in-a-row, and Gavin stood down, and it felt like the end of a cycle, and even though he was no longer starting and his body felt “knackered”, and he had won everything, Andrews stayed for one more year. He met Dessie Farrell, and asked him straight: in or out? “He’s like, ‘No – 100 per cent I want you stay on,’ and that was it. Twenty seconds sorted that.”

Did it end liked he dreamed it? No. His hamstring caved in during the league, and when the Covid-delayed championship cranked up in the winter, his hamstring went again. He made the match-day squad for one game in the Leinster championship, but not for the All-Ireland.

“It’s easier looking back now, but I wouldn’t have been blasé about it at the time. I do remember times [in later years] when, f**k me, it was hard going [not starting]. But you look back and say, that’s just the nature of it. You have to be a good team-mate. The team has to come first. I’d like to think that was my mentality.

“Very, very few people in any sport get to go out at the absolute peak. The end for me was sitting in an empty Croke Park with Cian O’Sullivan, watching the [2020] All-Ireland final and just going like, ‘What?’ He never played again either. Or Michael Darragh Macauley or Rory O’Carroll. There were three or four of us. We knew that was the end. It was just a weird ending.”

Tony Griffin, the former Clare hurler, is a performance coach with the Kerry footballers now, having filled a similar role for Jack O’Connor in Kildare and with the Dublin hurlers under Anthony Daly. Over the last few weeks he has fielded calls from players looking for his advice about whether they should go back for one more year. It’s such an intensely personal decision that all he can offer them are signposts: have they thrashed out where they stand with the manager? Do they have the humility to accept not starting? Are they prepared to do something different to stay in the hunt?

In his case, it was straightforward. “I wasn’t inspired by the environment any longer. I said to myself, ‘I don’t think we’re going to get any further next year.’ In my last year, I knew I wasn’t going back so I was constantly mentoring John Conlon and looking at other younger players. That was the only service I felt I could give because my form wasn’t where I wanted it to be. So, I said, ‘What can I do?’”

Ultimately, in his final season, Boyle found a way to make a difference too. “I felt I was contributing hugely to training, and on the day of a game, which was nearly satisfying in itself at the time.

“But it is very difficult. You can find yourself in a mental battle as much as anything else – almost trying too hard to impress and get back to something like you were or doing stuff that you don’t need to be doing. I didn’t really speak to anyone about it at the time, but looking back I should have done.”

If he had known how the year would pan out, would he have quit a year earlier? No, he says, emphatically. The impulse to go again was too strong. At the end, he needed to have no further questions.