Brian Fenton: ‘For sure I’ll be back next year. I’d love to do 10 seasons for Dublin’

A few weeks back, Brian Fenton was on stage at a fundraising lunch for his club Raheny. Dave McIntyre was the MC and had already induced a sharp intake of breath around the room when he asked Mayo goalie – and now Raheny clubman – Robbie Hennelly if his intercounty career was over. Straight out. Just like that. “I was laughing,” Fenton says now. “I was like, ‘Jesus Dave, no mercy there…’”

He was just getting started. When it came time to grill the most decorated player in the club’s history, McIntyre made no allowances for Fenton’s stature or surroundings. Raheny have only been to one solitary Dublin senior final in their 65-year history. The last time they so much as made a semi-final was 2002 – and even then it was by default after Na Fianna used too many subs while beating them in the quarter-final.

They have Fenton and Hennelly. They have Brian Howard. They have Seán McMahon, who came off the bench in the All-Ireland final. And so, McIntyre wanted to know, with all this talent at their disposal, will Raheny ever win a senior Dublin championship?

“You’re in front of the whole club,” Fenton says. “And you’d love to just go, ‘Of course we will! We’ll f**king win it this year!’ And you’d get a big cheer from the crowd and all that. But I’m a bit of a realist.

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“I know what it takes. I’m aware of what goes on behind the scenes. [Kilmacud] Crokes have their big Beacon Hospital sponsorship. We do our best but like, Raheny players are still paying their 20 quid a month subs to play for the club. I’m wise to what goes into winning these big competitions and I don’t think we’re competing at that level. So that’s what I said.

“Now, that was after we lost a group game to Thomas Davis and now we’re about a month down the road and we’re in a semi-final so maybe I was being a bit pessimistic. But at the same time, if you go around telling everyone that you’re going to win a senior championship, then you can create the perception that we’re doing everything right and that we have everything sorted here. But we don’t.

“We have so much more that we need to do to get up to where the big clubs are. We still have mix and match physios turning up to sessions and games. Which is what the GAA is all about and it’s great. But we’re still amateurs compared to those clubs.”

An hour in Fenton’s company flashes by. Raheny’s run to only their third ever Dublin semi-final has, he says, taken him by surprise. So much so that he fully intended being in Paris this weekend. He had tickets to the Scotland game but the club run has forced him to sell them. He’s going to hop in his camper van and head over next week instead. He will happily take your quarter-final tickets off your hands, since you ask.

Coaching, standards, fundraising, facilities – that’s all stuff that we’re behind in

These are the good times. For him, for the Dubs, for Raheny. He and a few of the players brought the Sam Maguire to the Cedar Lounge in the village a few weeks ago and he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of locals who wanted to buttonhole him about the quarter-final against St Vincent’s. Normally, the Dubs eat everything whole. But Fenton can sense the community around their small swatch of north Dublin getting into it now. It’s been a while coming.

“When you have three intercounty players, we should on paper be competing,” he says. “But there’s so much more behind the scenes that you need. Coaching, standards, fundraising, facilities – that’s all stuff that we’re behind in and that we’ve always needed to get better at.

“We try our best. We’ve never had outside managers. I remember doing a St Vincent’s lunch a few years ago with Darragh Ó Sé. Brian Mullins asked me to do it. And I was sitting there going, ‘I’m raising money for Vincent’s here, how come we never do anything like this?’ I find that other clubs have been more progressive than us in the business side of things.

“We’re getting better. We’ve started doing good fundraising in the last few years. About 10 years ago, Clontarf redeveloped their side of St Anne’s Park and we haven’t done that. We’re still using old nets and all that. Obviously we have great volunteers but we need better expertise. We need to be better at going out getting grants and putting on events, raising 20 grand for this and 10 grand for that.

“We’ve never had a big scalp. We’ve always been third in the group. We’ve had a nice draw this year – it was a tough enough group and we had some great wins. But it’s great. If I ever look back I’ll say, ‘Look we got to a semi-final’. And look, I hate mediocrity, obviously I want to win as much as I can. But at the same time you have to be realistic and point out where our club is, compared to the big guns.”

[ Ciarán Kilkenny: The ‘central casting’ Dublin forward is showing no signs of slowing down ]

If those words look defeatist written down, his tone and bearing when he says them convey something else entirely. Fenton has won enough – and lost enough – to have built up a profound respect for what goes into it, on both sides of the coin. He has no appetite for undermining any of it with airy-fairy talk of what might be. He’d rather deal strictly in what is.

He tells a story from the summer of 2022. Dublin had waltzed through Leinster again, winning their three games by an average of 16 points. In between the provincial final and the All-Ireland quarter-final, a gang of them went to see Dermot Kennedy play in St Anne’s Park. It was a small indulgence, a fortnight out from the Cork game. But when he spent the winter smarting over losing to Kerry in the semi-final, it was one of the pebbles he felt rattling in his shoe.

“We needed to get rid of a lot of bad habits that were happening. When we looked back at the Dermot Kennedy gig, we were going, ‘Would we have done that in other years?’ Look, it was local to me, only over the road, so I’d have gone anyway probably. But it was just the kind of thing that you were going, ‘When we were winning, did we do those things?’

“That’s what complacency is, I think. It’s not taking other teams lightly, it’s not going to training and only going at 90 per cent. Nobody was skipping training or missing gym sessions or cutting those kinds of corners. You’re still giving it everything you have when you’re in it. But it’s just the small, societal stuff like that.

“Maybe enjoying an extra pint. Maybe enjoying the summer that little bit more. The schedule changed so whereas you used to have three weeks between games, you now had two. And those weeks were in the middle of summer so the games were coming thick and fast and here was us trying to enjoy a bit of a summer. You really have to go gung-ho at it while it’s happening, now that it doesn’t go until September and there isn’t the space between games. You used to have time to manage your life a little bit but now it’s a bit more all-in.”

From the outside looking in, the Dublin story in 2023 was simple enough. They lost to Kerry in 2022 by the weight of a last-minute free. They added a fit Con O’Callaghan and brought back Jack McCaffrey, Paul Mannion, Stephen Cluxton and Pat Gilroy. They beat Kerry by two in the final. A+B=C. Right, Brian?

“To some extent, maybe,” he says. “I think for the players who had been there through 2021 and 2022 – myself, Ciarán [Kilkenny], John Small, James McCarthy – the hurt that we had built up meant that even if no one had come back, I think we would have had a bounce this year. Just internally we were like, ‘You know what? F**k this.’ I was like, ‘Fenton, you’re gone a bit shit now. What’s the story with you? you’re only 29.’

“We were back early last year – it was the best preseason I had ever done. We went running in the Phoenix Park, something we had never done in all the time I’ve been with Dublin. Every Saturday down in the Phoenix Park, for four or five weeks.

“And it wasn’t even an organised thing, there were never any communal sessions, we had our own running to do during the week. It was just a few of us are going for a run, whoever is around is around. Dessie came and walked his dog. Con was away, Brian Howard went travelling for a few months. It wasn’t like, ‘Right, Dublin training for the year starts here and everyone has to get on the train and put the shoulder to the wheel.’ It was a more organic thing than that.”

Would it have been enough without all those All-Ireland winners coming back into the dressingroom? Maybe. Maybe not. What he does know is that everyone had to sew their own corner of the quilt and every stitch counted in the end.

[ James McCarthy left out of shortlist for 2023 Footballer of the Year ]

One night towards the end of March, he was walking into training in Parnell Park and was met by a smiling Niall Scully. “See who’s down there,” Scully said, nodding at the far goals. Fenton squinted and saw the familiar figure of Cluxton, doing the goalies’ warm-up in his long training tracksuit. He burst out laughing.

“The most random thing ever,” he says now. “None of the players had a clue. I had been texting him for ages, basically going, ‘You bollox, I haven’t seen you in ages, when are we going for a pint?’ I just wanted to catch up with him – he was probably purposely keeping his distance when he wasn’t involved.

“But I’d be going, ‘Come on, we were best mates, you can’t just be disappearing on me.’ And I actually texted him that Wednesday to see was he around on the weekend and we’d do something. But he knew by then that he was coming back the next night and he didn’t reply to me.

“He’s just a shark around the place. And Pat Gilroy is a bit like that too. Jack, less so – he’s just that bit more social. And Mannion the same. Whereas Clucko is straight in there. Literally that night, we were having a meeting afterwards, just a generic meeting, maybe a review or something. And there he was talking straight away! Part of me was even going, ‘Bit soon there Clucko.’

“Because the reality was, when he was away, none of us were all that sure why he wasn’t with us. It was up to him, obviously. But even though we’d be close, there was still a bit of me that was going, ‘You left us high and dry, kind of thing.’ But straight away, that first night, you were like, ‘He’s the GOAT, he’s back, this is great.’”

The other assumption we all made was that it was a one-and-done kind of thing. That they all came back for one last job, got McCarthy up the steps of the Hogan and will now spend the winter melting back into civilian life, their duty all ended. Not so fast, says Fenton. McCaffrey has told him he’ll be back and he hasn’t heard anything definitive from anyone else yet. There was even a rumour that he would be doing a runner himself, loading up the camper van and heading off with his girlfriend. He’s happy to take this opportunity to kill that one off, at least.

“For sure I’ll be back next year,” he says. “Absolutely. I started in 2015 – next year will be my 10th season. And I’ve always had it in my head that I’d love to do 10 seasons as a Dublin footballer. Now, whether I do 11 or 12, I don’t know. But I definitely want to do 10. I’d love to look back and go, ‘I gave a decade of seasons to Dublin.’ That’s a very insignificant personal thing, obviously. But it’s something I’ve always had in my head.

“Winning always helps. Those years, the holidays, the weekends away that we just take ourselves as friends. That winning feeling. It all feeds into a kind of, ‘Why would I leave this?’ Physically I’m good, thankfully. So coming back next year is a no-brainer for me. Absolutely in the future, travel is part of the plan. We did the camper van thing, we’d love to do another big stint in Europe on the road. That part of my life is still ahead of me, hopefully.

“But I always look at it and go, ‘I’m so lucky.’ How was I lucky enough to be born in this generation? To play with this team? I look at Ciarán Whelan, a generational player. Came on to the Dublin panel the year after they won an All-Ireland, played for 13-14 years, retired two years before they won the next one. The timing, like.

“I’m so fortunate. Obviously there’s self-sacrifice and behind the scenes training and everything else that goes into it. But I’m so fortunate. It’s made my life.”