Leave The Kids Alone

I was talking to a boy who was on his way to the gym earlier in the week. He was a well-known inter-county footballer from Derry and not fond of referees. I enquired as to why he was bothering with something like a gym when this time of year is for resting up after a long season from the year gone by. I can remember from my own playing days that no one ever trained from late August until the following Easter. By the time the end of the summer had arrived, your club was either out of the running for any silverware that there was no point in running around a field twenty times on a Wednesday night, or they were playing enough league and Championship games to keep you naturally fit anyway. Training was only for the early part of the season to trim down the belly and get the lungs at full capacity. Teams still won All-Irelands and county championships back then so it must have been an alright strategy.

Nowadays the pressure is on young lads to train eleven months in the year. The player I was talking to said his individual training was vital as if he didn’t do it, the management would know. He said they take a blood sample, urine sample, hair sample and a photograph of you naked to make sure you’re alcohol and drug free as well as toning up your body. That’s a world gone crazy. I’m led to believe that Canavan is a great man for the drink abstinence of his players at Errigal. I’d say the same boy was living it up rightly in his early twenties running around Omagh or Cookstown at the weekend. These middle-aged managers are some craic, forcing some kind of Chinese military regime on their players when they themselves were half cut at throw-in.

What has happened to the carefree days of seeing how many cowboy suppers you could fit in, in a week, without piling on the weight? It was some feat, back in the day, finding a balance between calorie and alcohol consumption without the manager suspecting an over-indulgence. I know of a few players on the great Monaghan team of the 80s who had the diet of some kind of American Texan oil baron and still managed to make the weight on any given Sunday. I’m told that nowadays that personal gym training you have to do in January is a litmus test for modern managers. They apparently attend secret training sessions that inform them of how to read eye and body language to spot the spoofers in the camp.

I’m also led to believe that Baker Bradley can look at a man from ten paces and tell if he carried out his two-dozen bench presses within the last 24 hours. The likes of Bradley, O’Rourke and McCartan are as good as the mind-readers you get on the television. It’s the first think county boards look at before they appoint a manager; do they have supernatural powers. Chancers haven’t a hope of hoodwinking these lads. I don’t know how true this is but apparently Mickey Moran used to condemn anyone caught neglecting their personal training to his Room of Shame. In there, he’d tie the spoofer to a chair and encourage the locals to berate him with insults regarding his playing ability, manhood and family history dating back centuries. Muldoon subsequently never missed a gym session til Moran headed off to Mayo.

But that’s the way things are and rarely to sports revert back to how it used to be. The fear is that things get worse in terms of preparation and what is expected of our young playing members. I hope we don’t suck the individuality out of them. I fully understand the need to self-assess and improve though. Take the Gaelic Life newspaper for example. It is roundly viewed as a good read on a weekly basis. But editor Bogue should maybe be looking at how to move it to a level of greatness. And how to you do that? – monitor his team. Bench presses and the like are no use to pen-pushers but abstinence from harmful substances can clear the mind and help create moments of great clarity and insight. It wouldn’t be an altogether ridiculous idea to perhaps invest in some kind of physical assessment on a Monday morning with the threat of disciplinary action hanging over their weekend activities. I’d include Brolly, Devenney and Burns in that although the Mullaghbawn man will be a hard one to nail He’s keeping his nose clean for bigger fish. You wouldn’t catch him making disparaging remarks about female lineswomen. There’s a skeleton there somewhere, we all have them, but it’ll take a bit of digging to reel Burns in.

But you see what I’m getting at. Our young lads are often criticised in the media for being self-obsessed, lazy and mannerless. Little do you know what discipline they possess in order to earn a starting jersey every Sunday at all club levels. Whilst you have the Loup’s full forward running a lonely 10k on a Saturday morning for the love of a game, Ronan Scott is ordering a Variety Meal from KFC to soak up his hangover before driving to Keady to watch a MacRory match on soft seat thinking about his hourly wage. There’s something wrong there.