Setanta Ó hAilpín turned 43 last month. This is distressing news. Most of us of a certain age will assume it’s simply not true. Setanta will always be 20 years old, tent-pole thin and bug-eyed. Pumped with adrenaline after scoring another goal for Cork, screaming at everyone to calm down and play it cool. Setanta can’t be 43. Unacceptable.
If you weren’t around in the summer of 2003, the phenomenon of Setanta Ó hAilpín is nearly impossible to convey. He was tall, good-looking and adorable, whipping goals in every big game Cork played. Munster final, All-Ireland semi-final, All-Ireland final – a feat matched by only one other person this century (Seamus Callanan in 2019). The attention ballooned through the summer and yet Setanta still kept scoring, as if it was no big thing.
Most of all, he was young. So young. He was tall and gangly and hadn’t filled out, which made him look even younger again. He was daring and unguarded and willing to try things that older players would think better of. He ended the summer as the Young Hurler of the Year, beating no less a hero than Tommy Walsh.
And then he was gone. Disappeared as suddenly as he’d arrived, spirited away by the Aussie Rules child-catchers over the following winter. One minute he was the future of Cork hurling, the next he was lining out for Carlton, never to be seen again.
READ MORE
There was talk – later confirmed by Donal O’Grady – of moves within Cork hurling circles “to sort him out” with some unspecified kind of arrangement that would keep him at home. But it was all a ball of smoke. Setanta Ó hAilpín played 88 games in the AFL across nine seasons. He lived the life and did the thing and never looked back.
Watching Kobe McDonald’s goal for the Mayo under-20s on Wednesday night, it was impossible not to think of Setanta. The skill, the bouldness, the nose for goal and nothing but the goal. The whole sequence from kickout to green flag is only 15 seconds long but it’s like a David Fincher film. Every time you watch it, you see something new.
The spin move he does to get out and in behind his midfield marker while the ball is in the air. The way he goes up one-handed and taps it to himself, cleaning out the next Galway player as he flies through the air. The growing distance between himself and the closest defender over 40 metres, even though he has to hop and solo the ball while the defender can just put the head down and sprint.
And above all, the finish, not breaking stride while whistling a low scudder past the Galway goalie. The best bit is the Mayo wing back who sprints alongside Kobe most of the way, offering himself as an option, before giving up as they reach the 20m line. He knows he isn’t getting a pass. Best to stand still and watch.
[ ‘He’s a hyper-talented boy’: Andy Moran on Kobe McDonaldOpens in new window ]
As with Setanta all those years ago, you can’t move now for talking heads saying Something Should Be Done to keep Kobe out of the clutches of the AFL. Pat Spillane wants the wealthy people of Mayo to come together and work something out. Owen Mulligan was on about it during the week as well, saying if it was Kerry and David Clifford, “there’d be boys fighting to give him money” not to go. When Mayo played in Tralee last month, there was a banner up saying, “AFL – Hands Off Kobe. Breed Your Own”.
Breed your own. Like he’s a prize steer, fed twice daily and given soft bedding, all so he can go to work in the fields for you. A young boy who hasn’t even sat his Leaving Cert yet and he has to play a game knowing that someone – among his own supporters, no less – has taken the bother to make it clear that Kobe is a commodity. Mayo property, before all else.
GAA people are terrible for this stuff. High and mighty about the amateur ethos when it suits them, pointy-elbowed and proprietary all the while. Andy Comerford caused a stir in Kilkenny a few weeks back talking about lads gone travelling – he didn’t name them but everyone assumed he meant Huw Lawlor and Billy Ryan.
“I don’t know what the scenario is with these Australian guys,” the former Kilkenny captain told Community Radio Kilkenny City. “I was in Australia. You see the Sydney Harbour Bridge and you see the beach. There’s a beach in Tramore. These lads are in Australia. You’re only going to get one crack at an All-Ireland here. Wouldn’t it be a great uplift for the panel to see these lads coming back?”
Lawlor and Ryan both turn 30 in the next few months. They’ve given the whole of their 20s to hurling for club and county. Lawlor has put so much of himself into it that in three out of the past four years, he’s been the All Star full-back. Not since Leonard Enright for Limerick in the 1980s has a player won three All Stars at full-back without an All-Ireland medal to go along with it. They’ve earned their trip to Bondi and beyond.
This notion that players owe their clubs and counties every last drop of sweat that can be wrung out of them is such an odious conceit. People talk about all the work that goes into coaching a Kobe McDonald or a Huw Lawlor or a Billy Ryan or a Setanta Ó hAilpín, as if it automatically places the player in hock. In its own way, it’s every bit as tawdry as the AFL coming and picking them off for profit.
Kobe will be what he will be, whether it’s in the colours of Crossmolina, Mayo or St Kilda. The GAA doesn’t own him, the GAA didn’t make him. No matter how many hours of coaching went into him, he’s the one who did the work. Some day he’ll be 43 and the breeders will be claiming somebody else.
Go well, Kobe. Wherever you want to go.
