Austin Gleeson: ‘It’s hard not to react sometimes. In the end, I’m the one that looks stupid’

The last time Austin Gleeson played in a Waterford county final, he was 19 and he was sent off. Ballygunner gave his Mount Sion side a right old-fashioned pasting in the 2014 decider and he picked up a second yellow card late on. It was one of those ones – the game long gone, the day a dead loss, nothing much in the foul only a final spill of temper that had nowhere else to go. Nobody held it against him.

How could they? He had been phenomenal at centre back when the game was still a game, staunching the flow of Ballygunner possession and playing human shield to the Mount Sion full-back line. If anything, the double yellow was maybe a tick in the pro column – even when there was nothing left to play for, he was still out there giving it holly. You wouldn’t take any young lad by the ear for that, never mind the future of the club.

Smash cut. Eight years zip by. Waterford are a million up in a league semi-final against Wexford in a game where Gleeson has been everything they hoped he’d be when he was a teenager. Two first-half goals, both coming on the end of thoroughbred sprints in from the left, both drilled across Mark Fanning before the goalie had a chance to wonder why he was doing it the hard way. A total of 2-3 for the day, the likely man-of-the-match.

You know the rest of it. He and Simon Donohoe get in a tangle over the endline. Gleeson trots out to take his position for the puck-out but flicks back with the butt of the hurley on his way. Catches Donohoe in the abdomen. The Wexford man sinks to his knees. Referee John Keenan flashes red. The TG4 camera picks out Liam Cahill on the Waterford sideline, looking like he’s about to go into the neck-wringing trade.

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“That was stupidity on my part,” Gleeson says now. “I wouldn’t mind, I’d be friendly enough with Simon. We would have played together in college on the Freshers team and we would have gone on a good few nights out together. I had been playing well throughout the game and would have had a good bit of confidence coming out of the game. And it’s a team game – the lads went on and had a great win over Cork in the final so that was all that mattered in the end.

“We spoke on Monday at a recovery session and I talked to the management and we decided not to go about it or go looking about an appeal. There would have been too much hype around it and it would have taken the focus off winning. Thankfully, that’s what we did.”

Gleeson turned 27 this year. The leeway people were minded to give him when he was 19 has long run out. His reputation both inside and outside Waterford isn’t complicated at this stage. A brilliant hurler, one of the few genuine off-the-cuff players in an increasingly regimented game. But mystifyingly prone to taking out his toes with a tracer bullet.

“Ah look, it was one of those stupid moments that I have,” he says. “I don’t know why I do them, to be honest with you. Just a stupid moment. To be honest, they’re probably things I should be thinking back on. But at the end of the day, I can’t change the past. I just try and move on and try to focus on the next thing and the next thing.

“If I was to be held down by the stupid things I have done, I probably wouldn’t still be playing because I have done a fair few of them. But I have learned. I have improved over the years. To be fair, there are moments in every season where I could have gone and done the stupid thing that maybe people expect of me but I haven’t.

“I’ve tried to get it out of my game and I think I have done that to an extent. I don’t react to most of the punishment I get. I know everybody gets punishment in the game and you can’t react. But it’s hard not to react sometimes. In the end, I’m the one that looks stupid. I’m the one going, ‘Look at what you’re after doing.’ But you just have to move on with it. It’s something you can’t change once it’s done, you know?”

As it turned out, that spring week where they routed Wexford and Cork in the space of six days was the high point of Waterford’s season. They went from second favourites for the All-Ireland to Munster also-rans in double-quick time, confounding themselves as much as the outside world. They tried everything but it was as if their season had become knotted – the harder they pulled, the more intractable it felt.

We can’t be turning around and saying, ‘We deserve to win this and we deserve to win that.’ Because we haven’t proven it

“We still don’t really know what happened,” Gleeson says. “If it looked bad from the outside, it was just as bad on the inside. The long and short of it is that we’ve played 12 matches in the Munster round-robin now and lost 11.

“We fully believed that we had learned from previous years and that we could go the whole way. We were building on the previous two years and we felt we had our game plan nailed down. For whatever reason, that [championship] structure hasn’t suited Waterford. We have to fix that.”

The day their championship ended, Liam Cahill was asked if expectation had caught up with them. In the debris of another defeat – this time to Clare in Ennis – he wasn’t inclined to hold it up as the over-arching reason for his team’s season crumbling to dust. But he did address it in typical Cahill style – right between the eyes, not a tooth put in it.

“The bottom line is, if you’re going to be one of the best teams in the country, you’re going to have to cope with that and just get on with it. These players are going to have to learn how to deal with it because they will find themselves back in this position again.

“Talent like that doesn’t just go away. They’re going to meet that obstacle again and if we do, we’re going to have to deal with it that bit differently. You can’t just curl up and die under it like what has seemed to happen over the past two or three weeks.”

For Gleeson, his whole hurling life has been about expectation. Jewel in the eye at Mount Sion all the way up along, the natural heir to the immortal Ken McGrath. Star of the best Waterford minor team in decades. Hurler of the Year and Young Hurler of the Year at the age of 21. All that – but no All-Ireland. Expectation is a tricky thing to define, trickier again to satisfy.

“Maybe it did set into a few people’s heads, I don’t know,” he says. “But at the end of the day, we have nothing to be expecting. We have won very little in our history. We can’t be turning around and saying, ‘We deserve to win this and we deserve to win that.’ Because we haven’t proven it.

“Maybe there is something to it. Maybe we were a small bit naive or maybe we got it into our heads that we were going to win a few games because we won the league. And maybe Liam is right – I do know that I prefer going into a game as an underdog. There’s less pressure on you. and I suppose being favourites in a couple of those games mightn’t have helped us.”

Summer came too early but he found a use for it all the same. One of his best friends was getting married in early June and he attacked the stag weekend with a full heart. His sister’s wedding was the weekend of the All-Ireland semi-final and he enjoyed not needing to have that conversation. He left his hurley down for a month before going back to the club – even though he was captain for the year, they gave him all the time he needed.

So life has been simple for the past few months. He’s been training the under-15 team in Mount Sion and that takes up the time he isn’t playing or training with the seniors. Eight years is a long time to go without making a county final but they’ve found their way through at last.

I thought we’d be back in finals plenty of times after that first one but we’ve run into Ballygunner in semi-finals and quarter-finals a few times and they’re just so impressive

The Ballygunner they face this weekend isn’t the one they met in 2014. Back then, their opponents were hurting from a lost final the previous year and hadn’t won the title since 2011. They’ve since gone on to eat Waterford whole – champions every year since, dominant at all grades, no rational argument for an end in sight.

“They’ve built and built and built,” Gleeson marvels. “I thought we’d be back in finals plenty of times after that first one but we’ve run into Ballygunner in semi-finals and quarter-finals a few times and they’re just so impressive. They’re not All-Ireland champions by accident. It was richly deserved and the conveyor belt is not stopping.

“We have to put in savage work to get up to their level. The whole of Waterford hurling has to. Ultimately, what they’re doing and what they’ve achieved is developing Waterford hurling. I was watching their intermediate team one night and Harry Ruddle was playing wing forward for them. That chap scored the winning goal in the All-Ireland final last year and he’s only making their intermediate team. Young Patrick Fitzgerald is there too. That’s what they’ve built and fair play to them.”

Mount Sion will turn up, all the same. And they’ll give it a go. If they stay in touch and make it interesting coming down the stretch, we can be fairly sure Gleeson will have had his impact.

One way or the other, you won’t want to take your eyes off him.

Waterford SHC final

Ballygunner v Mount Sion, Walsh Park, Sunday, 2.30pm – Live on TG4