So it’s Kilkenny and Limerick in the All-Ireland final on Sunday week. Everybody else has to spend the winter wondering how far they were off, going looking for the changes and improvements that need to be made in time for next year. But for the two panels in question, they know one of the biggest days of their life is coming. Win or lose, your career is defined by what happens in finals.
I played in five — won one, drew one, lost three. The one upside to losing an All-Ireland final is that you get to spend that night with the people you want to spend it with. In an odd kind of way, it’s nearly more enjoyable than the night you win one. Maybe enjoyable is the wrong word there — but you definitely have more control over who you’re with and what you do.
The night you win an All-Ireland final, everyone wants a piece of you. In Citywest in 2017, there must have been 2,000 people wedged into the place. Everybody’s in good form and everybody’s happy. But if you’re a player in that scenario, all you want to do is share this moment with the people who got you there. The team, management, family and friends. It’s the pinnacle of your career but you struggle to grab five minutes with the people who mean most to you.
Instead, you’re spending it with people you don’t know. Or worse, you’re spending it with people you do know — and the reason you know is that you saw them slating you on social media a couple of months beforehand. You’re a great lad now but it’s only a matter of weeks since you were a waste of space.
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Winning an All-Ireland can harden you that way, especially when you’ve already lost a couple of finals. You’re the same person both times but the way people talk to you, the way they interact with you — it’s all completely different. That can make you a bit less trusting of people. It can cause you to question whether or not people are genuine and make you that bit more cynical, which isn’t a good way to be at all.
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Whereas when you lose a final, all those extra people disappear from view. The night of the 2017 All-Ireland, I remember looking around and thinking, “Where would all these people be if we hadn’t won?” Probably in the Waterford hotel!
At least when you lose a final, you have all the time in the world with the people who mean the most to you. Because nobody else wants to know you. There’s no big large crowd in your hotel, you’re able to find your family and sit with them for a while. You’re able to have conversations. They might not be particularly fun conversations, but at least you have the choice. It’s the one consolation of defeat.
Losing an All-Ireland final is something that stays with you for a long time. I lost three of them in my career and each one of them had its own unique aftermath. There’s always some sort of fallout, I guess because everybody cares so much and because you came so close to the ultimate goal. Once you get within touching distance of the big prize, it’s never easy to come to terms with the fact that you didn’t get it.
The one game in your career that you never properly analyse is an All-Ireland final that you win. You’ll watch it again at some stage but that’s a different thing to going back and asking hard questions about it. Whereas an All-Ireland final that you lose is something you’ll dissect for weeks and months and even years.
You question everything. If it was close, you zone in on one or two mistakes here and there. If it wasn’t close, you ask why not. What happened to all the things we said we were going to do? What did we do wrong? What did I do wrong? What could I have changed?
Personally, I never wanted to drag out the days after a lost final. You do the night of the game and then the journey back west the next day and the homecoming night. By the time Tuesday came around, I usually had enough. If I could at all, I’d get away.
After we lost in 2018, I headed off down to Kerry on the Tuesday and stayed there for the rest of the week. I wanted to get away from the disappointment of letting people down. I didn’t need any more match talk. I wanted to go away and feel sorry for myself in my own time and not have people coming up to talk to me about losing.
The reality of losing a final is you have to look at yourself in the mirror. That’s what it comes down to after all the initial talking is done, after all the deep dives into what went wrong. You were there, you had your responsibilities — how close did you come to live up to them? You have to do that first and foremost.
It isn’t really a time for reflection. It’s more about self-criticism. You have to be your own worst critic in general but that’s especially true after you lose a final. You have to be ruthless with yourself. Because otherwise, you have no business looking at anybody else. Unless you have done that really honest look at your own performance, nothing you say about anybody else really holds water.
All-Ireland finals are such heightened experiences. They’re such unique days in the lives of everyone involved. As a result, when they go wrong, the perception of who you are and what you did gets magnified.
Even something as simple as the team of the year gets decided on a point or two either way. We lost the 2018 final by a point and got three All Stars that November. Limerick won it by a point and got six. I had a free in the last seconds that dropped in the Limerick square and Tom Condon came away with it — if one of our lads had whipped it to the net instead, what would that have done to the All-Star team? A selection that is supposed to be based on a whole season would presumably have been turned on its head by one puck of a ball.
That’s why you have to sit down and really look at what went wrong after you lose a final. You have to be careful not to let the perception of what happened become the accepted truth of what happened. Because more than likely, you actually weren’t that far away at all.
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I’ve been around people in the aftermath of finals who were saying things like: “Sure ye might as well have lost in the first round as lose in the final.” That sort of talk can seep in and badly affect guys, players you are going to need the following year. A proper analysis moves you away from that kind of stuff.
It’s vital you do it because you can be sure that in the outside world, stories and rumours are going to start flying and you’re not going to be able to control any of them. The madder the better, the juicier the better. There was one year a story found its way back to me that Davy Burke and I weren’t talking to each other and couldn’t bear to be in the same room with each other. That would have been a bit awkward all right, given that we lived together for five years!
Losing a final sets everybody on edge. After we lost in 2012, I spent the next while asking myself if it was my fault. There had been a big media storm between the drawn game and the final when something I said about Henry Shefflin as a compliment was taken out of context and presented as me having a go at him.
It was all anybody wanted to talk about in the build-up to the replay and then when we were well beaten on the day, all I could think about was whether or not I was to blame. I know plenty of Galway people were thinking that. Maybe not blaming me but at least thinking I should have known to keep my mouth shut.
But in the cold light of day, it really had no effect. That replay was our third time playing Kilkenny in the space of a few months and they were improving with every game. The game was lost on the pitch, the outside noise had nothing at all to do with it.
This happens with finals though. Emotion gets involved. Perception gets in the way of analysis. Losing to Kilkenny in 2015 eventually led to Anthony Cunningham being pushed aside from the Galway job. That always tarnished that year for me.
The trap you can fall into is to take a final defeat as a sign that something dramatic has to happen. Either you need to make wholesale changes to the team or the manager has to go or whatever it is. But a game can go against you for loads of different reasons. There’s nothing to say that if you played the same team again the following week, it wouldn’t work out in your favour.
I have no doubt that we wouldn’t have won our All-Ireland in 2017 if it hadn’t been for the years that Anthony was over us. There’s a perception out there that his time with Galway was a failure because we lost two finals but that’s never the way I’ve looked at it. He changed so much about our culture, training and mentality. He did so much with the players before Micheál Donoghue arrived. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have won it so quickly with Micheál.
When you win a final, everyone assumes that everything was right. When you lose one, everything gets magnified and the bones get picked out of it. But really and truly, if you’ve made it to a final — or even if you go very close in a semi-final — you’re probably going in the right direction.
The key is the analysis you do afterwards. Limerick lost a semi-final to Kilkenny by a puck of a ball in 2019. Did they change an awful lot afterwards? Not really. A couple of positional switches here and there but that’s about it. They didn’t get carried away by emotion and start fundamentally changing who they were. They mostly just did what they had been doing, but did it better.
Losing on the biggest days tests you. How you respond is up to you.
