For all the glory and silverware Michael Darragh Macauley accrued from Gaelic football, it has always felt that basketball was more rooted within his soul.
So perhaps it is little surprise the eight-time Sam Maguire winner, who works with North East Inner City (NEIC) project, has helped establish a new basketball club in Dublin’s city centre.
The NEIC Trojans train out of Larkin Community College and St Laurence O’Toole Recreational Centre in Dublin 1, with the players gathered from a wide range of diverse backgrounds.
“It kind of dawned on me a couple of years ago when I was talking to some kid that wanted to progress in the sport,” recalls Macauley, who himself continues to play basketball. “He was saying, ‘I would love to play for a club, where do I go?’
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“I was like ‘Jesus you’ll have to go to . . . there’s one in Glasnevin, or else Sutton. He ended up going out to Clondalkin. I was like, ‘Jesus, why isn’t there a club in the inner city?’
“It’s such a densely populated place and it’s a sport that has traditionally grown in urban areas. And in any area where we mostly struggle to facilitate Gaelic football, we don’t struggle to facilitate basketball.
“That’s when I suppose the cogs started turning on getting a basketball club going. We are at the beginning of this journey. We will have four teams, boys and girls, this year. And then we are going to look to push on every year.”
Pushing on. The Dublin footballers have in recent weeks had the cut of a team pushing on, jaded and bereft of any real spark. Their more experienced players have been getting them over the line, just about, but in general the team has lacked vibrancy.
The outlier has been Jack McCaffrey. It’s still very early days in his comeback, but the Clontarf man doesn’t seem to have lost any of his energy or desire to smoke holes in defences by snapping on the afterburners.
Macauley was waiting for a flight in Amsterdam earlier this month when McCaffrey made his return to Dublin colours in Cork.
“I was in the airport watching it on a tiny little screen, waiting to board the plane. It was great, he was flying it. Jack does what Jack does, which is great,” says Macauley.
“It is the way I used to try and play football, I would not compare myself to Jack, but just try and make some bursting runs and just to see Jack do that again was just refreshing.
“He has that natural bit of go in him, which a lot of us envy. He will be a big asset if he can keep making those runs, they are just so hard to stop.”
And while he was able to catch the Cork game on his phone, Macauley had to follow Dublin’s late rally against Clare last weekend by pushing the refresh button.
“Somebody texted me and said, ‘Did you see the Dubs, they are six points down’. I went through every channel on my telly and I couldn’t find them,” he says. “So I followed it on Twitter and I saw they made the comeback.”
It is still difficult to make a judgement call on exactly what we are seeing from Dublin. If their sole objection was to secure league promotion, then Dessie Farrell’s men are well on their way to achieving that goal. But if they were hoping to blaze a trail in Division Two, fire out a few warning shots, that kind of thing, well Dublin are falling well short.
However, Macauley reckons it will take a little time and patience for this group to find its mojo.
“Look, I think it’s inevitable that things are going to change with the amount of players that have been coming and going for the last while,” he adds.
“It was always going to take a while for that team to fall into a bit of a new rhythm. In fairness, there are new players in the team at the moment. It’s a good thing when I’m looking at that team-sheet and I don’t know one or two players, that I don’t know where these players are coming from, that’s a good thing.
“Because it’s probably been the same old faces for a while, so you need a bit of new blood at all times, even when you’re successful you need new blood coming through all the time, getting lads worrying about their positions and all that sort of stuff.
“There really can’t be any reliance on old players. I’m sure that will get talked about in the dressingroom, that this is a new team and whatever happened in the past is history, and it is.
“If the team starts getting settled and goes on a run of winning a couple of games again, then the whole narrative will change. It’s just too early for assumptions at the moment.”
Michael Darragh Macauley was speaking at the launch of the new North East Inner City Trojans Basketball Club, where he is a founding member. The club are supported by AIG.
