Sunday morning has turned into Sunday afternoon, and I’m in a coffee-shop with my wife, eating some lunch. “I might head into town after this for a wander around . . . I presume you’ve got some sport you need to watch?”
This is the sort of question she is well and truly tired of asking, but she’ll ask it nevertheless. I’ve given her some fairly pathetic answers to this question in the past, and ‘going home to watch the Waterford hurling championship quarter-finals live from Dungarvan’ is about as watery an answer as I’ve ever given her.
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But there’s a human interest angle that might make me sound less pathetic (I’m not offering information to convince her to watch it with me, merely an answer that won’t make her think even less of me than she currently does). “Well there is a hurling game on, at 2.30″, I proffer. “Do you recall a man by the name of Dan Shanahan, he used to play hurling for Waterford?”
“Dan The Man”, she replies.
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“Well he’s playing for his club today, live on television, and he’s 45 years old.”
“Ah, you’re looking for some inspiration then, I see.”
This is not strictly true, but let’s face it, if us over-40s don’t look out for each other, who will? I go home, turn on TG4′s coverage and the first face I see is Dan warming up, the cameras focused on him for what seems like well over a minute. He’s wearing 17, but he’s starting the game alright, at full-forward.
Mount Sion have the aid of the breeze in the first half, with a man stationed pretty much directly in front of Dan as a sweeper, and are a much better team in any case. At one stage midway through the half Iarlaith Daly went powering through the centre of the Mount Sion defence, with the sweeper forced to go to him. A simple hand-pass would have played Dan through, and it could have been a goal chance, certainly a ‘gimme’ point. Instead Daly carried it a further 10 yards into contact, and promptly lost possession.
When Dan didn’t come back out for the second half, I felt a huge amount of sympathy for him. He made his debut as a 16 year old in the 1993 county semi-final, a championship which Lismore would go on to win for the third and most recent county title in their history. That’s 30 championships ago. To say he owes that jersey nothing is the understatement of the year.
People tell players like Dan to keep playing for as long as you enjoy it, and that’s obviously the primary reason why anyone over the age of 37 or 38 would continue to do it. And in ways it seems like a story with no downside - the club will keep picking a guy for as long as they think he’s of use to them, and a veteran with nothing left to prove, his years of service already well clocked up, will only do it if he still enjoys it.
But of course there’s a downside. No-one enjoys being taken off, but a former hurler of the year, a man who was about as well-known a face as there was in the game for a few years, will have a sense of pride in his achievements that most of us can only dream about. It’s no stretch to say that pride may have been wounded on Sunday afternoon, when the TV cameras were in town.
My own personal experience of playing into my forties - at a much lower level, and with obviously a laughably smaller amount of credit in the bank than Dan has with Lismore - is that there’s always the nagging suspicion that you’re in danger of making a fool of yourself. That there are lads in your own dressing-room thinking ‘why the hell doesn’t this auld fella just pack it in’ on days when it hasn’t gone your way.
There’s always also someone willing to put forth the idea that older players should stand aside and let the next generation through - the same people, of course, who would be saying that you let the club down if you walked away too early.
And Dan only made himself available for Lismore this year after a run of injuries, coming on against Roanmore at the start of last month in the group stages. “With his first touch”, according to WLRfm that evening, “he scored an overhead point when a free from Jack Prendergast bounced in his direction. The veteran full forward also won a penalty off Frank McGrath and assisted a point for Oisin O’Gorman.”
To still be able to exert that much of an influence, in a club championship that contains the All-Ireland champions, is an extraordinary feat for a 45-year old.
As Dan watched Austin Gleeson glide around the pitch for Mount Sion, hitting 1-6 and controlling the game almost effortlessly, he would have seen plenty of reminders of his younger self. Gleeson is a young man utterly in thrall to the sport by all accounts, but he will do well to be a better club man than Dan Shanahan has been for Lismore.
