Where do I park . . . what, no Garda escort!

THE MIDDLE THIRD: DARRAGH Ó SÉ WEEKLY COLUMN:Darragh Ó Sé is still getting used to going to matches as an ordinary punter. He's played on most major grounds in the country but don't ask where best to park his car – and it's an expensive day out too

I THINK I’ll probably head up to Clones on Sunday to see Armagh play Derry. Ordinarily I’d go to a game closer to home but since it’s the only one on, I won’t have much of a choice. Armagh will most likely come through it – they’ve been the best Ulster team I’ve seen so far. Derry always remind me of the cow that filled the bucket for you but kicked it over when you weren’t looking. Plenty of talent but forever finding new ways to squander it.

Going to games now is a new experience and I’m still only getting used to it. It’s funny, when you’re an intercounty player for so long you miss out on the whole experience of what the championship means to the majority of people. I’ve played in most county grounds in the country but I couldn’t tell you a good place to park your car near them.

To tell the God’s honest truth about it, I probably couldn’t direct you to half of them either. I spent my life being taken there and back in a bus – the route was somebody else’s responsibility.

You take so much for granted when you’re a player. On a day when, say, Kerry were playing Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, all I’d have to worry about really was turning up and playing. If the game was at four o’clock, we’d be fed at around 11am in Killarney and then we’d hop on the bus and get on the road. Traffic was no concern of ours no matter how many people were going to the game because as soon as we’d hit Macroom, there’d be a Garda escort to take us to the ground. We’d be there in plenty of time too.

Now that I’m my own logistics man, I’m starting to realise how spoiled we were. I’m left working out permutations I never knew existed before. Half the time I’m not even sure when I should leave the house to give myself enough time to get there. Or when I get to whichever town the game is on, I’m stuck for a place to park. How far from the pitch should I leave the car so I’m not sitting in traffic for an hour afterwards? And what the hell happened to my Garda escort?

It all stems from the fact I never went to many championship matches as a spectator when I was playing. I went to the odd hurling game in Thurles alright but otherwise they were few and far between. It was just a matter of rest, really.

Once you get into the middle of the summer, you’re training three or four times a week and you really have to use your downtime well. Sitting in a car for a few hours isn’t using it well.

The three most important things you have to do as an intercounty footballer between matches are train hard, rest easy and hydrate well. If I’d done all that when I was 20 instead of when I was 30, I might still be playing. I look at fellas like Pádraic Joyce and Tony Browne now, men that know their body and take care of it so well. You can be sure they rest properly between games. Your rest is nearly more important than your training at this point of the year and your hydration is vital.

You’d need to be taking on three to four litres of water a day to be at your best. I always had a bottle of water at my desk and especially in the car. It might sound odd but I actually preferred warm water to cold water – it had less of a bite to it and I found it easier to drink. One way or the other, if I happened to find myself tied up for the day doing something and maybe only being able to get a couple of litres into me, I’d fairly feel the fatigue that night.

Life moves on, though. I don’t have to worry about how much water I take on during the day anymore. Now I’m more concerned with how far it is from Tralee to Portlaoise and where’s a good place to stop for grub on the way home. And ticket prices too. I saw it cost €30 to sit in the stand in Thurles last Sunday. If you’re a man taking a family of four down from Limerick to sit in the stand out of the rain, by the time you’ve factored in petrol and food, you’ll be talking close to €200. That’s without getting a pint in along the way.

The GAA do a lot with ticket prices at different games but they’re still very high, considering the way people are living now. I know the weather was bad on Sunday and that didn’t help but there were only 15,000 there for what turned out to be a great game. Faced with the choice of taking a €200 chunk out of your weekly pay and sitting in the comfort of your own home with the TV on, it’s hard to blame people for staying away.

Last weekend was a quiet enough one in the football championship. I thought Wexford were very impressive in giving Westmeath a hammering, a really fit team putting a fairly ordinary one away without many problems. Ciarán Lyng scored some fine points but the player who really stood out for me was Redmond Barry. His skill level and composure on the ball were a cut above the rest.

Up north, I have to say I’m really impressed with what Jimmy McGuinness has done with Donegal. We can criticise their style of play all we like but people should remember McGuinness was taking over a county you could just never rely on. Donegal were always good for one serious performance against a bigger team but they could just as easily slip up against a weaker one. Playing Cavan in Breffni Park would have been a real banana skin for Donegal of old but they went there on Sunday and did what they had to do.

Say what you like about how they set up but McGuinness has taken that element of danger out of Donegal. There is a much more professional feel about them now, the players are happy with their manager and he's loyal to them. Having a lash at The Sunday Gamelads won't do him any harm within his squad and you can see they respond to him. While everyone has been concentrating on how ultra-defensive they are, I think we've been overlooking how united they've become. That wasn't always the case in Donegal and I think McGuinness deserves huge credit for it.

I hate to be going on about referees the whole time here but we saw some terrible mistakes made again on the weekend. The worst error was made up in Breffni Park. I actually think Marty Duffy is one of the better referees around but nobody who saw the Michael Murphy incident on Sunday could agree he deserved a red card.

There’s no mystery either to why the red card came out – it was purely to balance the books after he had sent off Ray Cullivan for Cavan right at the start of the game. It was as straightforward a case of evening the thing out as you could ever see and a complete misjudgment on Duffy’s part.

When a referee sends someone off that early in the match, you can be sure he’ll be thinking about it for a while afterwards. It will have a big effect on the game so he has to be certain he did the right thing.

In the case of Cullivan, he definitely did. He was right on the spot and saw the kick into Kevin Cassidy’s chest from only a few yards away. But maybe there was a small bit of doubt in his own mind. It’s only human that there might be.

When Cavan corner-back Patrick Carroll went to ground after Murphy hit him a shoulder off the ball, at the very most, that was a yellow card. I don’t even think it deserved that but if he had to take action, yellow was all he could have gone for. How he could decide Murphy deserved red but the Cavan full forward only deserved yellow for his clothesline at the end of the game just makes no sense.

But in these situations, sometimes sense doesn’t matter. The second Carroll went to ground and Marty Duffy came walking over, you knew Murphy was for the line. It was like he felt obliged to send him off.

I watched the game on Sunday night with a few friends, some of whom wouldn’t be the keenest observers of the game and even one of them went, “Oh, he’s gone here . . .” when they saw Marty walking over. When it’s obvious to the untrained eye that a fella is going to get the road for a completely innocuous incident, you know you’re in trouble.

The one thing I’d say in Marty’s defence is he got no help from the players on Sunday. The amount of diving and rolling around on the ground we saw was desperate. It’s the way the game has gone, sadly. The Cavan player who was on the receiving end of Murphy’s shoulder would need to look at himself. It was he who threw the first shoulder and to go diving on the ground like that when Murphy came back at him was only a bit of play-acting to try and get his man sent off.

A referee’s job is twice as hard when he’s faced with that sort of carry-on.