The various sports news aggregator sites know they’re on to a winner with me when they report on stories like Shane Long’s return to Junior C hurling in Tipperary last week. I will mash my phone into a bloody mess until I get to read every last detail. I’m the easiest mark in the world for the likes of that.
It wasn’t just them though – the US-based Men In Blazers podcast tweeted out the news of his reappearance on the GAA fields of Éireann to their 317,000 followers on Twitter/X. They mercifully didn’t include the name of his club, Gortnahoe-Glengoole, as that would surely have given rise to claims that the whole thing was a poor attempt at paddywhackery, like a Saturday Night Live sketch about Aer Lingus.
It’s not difficult to see what happened here – last Monday week, Long played in the annual Hurling For Cancer charity match, a game broadcast live on TG4, in which he scored a point from about 45 yards out. Someone in Gortnahoe, or indeed Glengoole, took one look and thought “there’s a man we could use this weekend”. A phone call is tentatively placed, and before you know it, he’s coming off the bench and helping them to a surprise 1-18 to 1-14 win over a Thurles Sarsfields team that had Lar Corbett in its midst.
Is he now in the team’s WhatsApp group? I have this idea of him putting his agent’s phone number in there, just to answer the polls about who’s going to be attending training. And I hope someone has checked in with the few lads who sat unused on the bench, overlooked for a lad who, yes, played a bit of minor for the county, but who disappeared off the scene for 20 years only to swan back in, with no training done, and get a jersey.
It is a racing certainty that there was one fella who was vainly trying to make exactly that point at some stage on Sunday night, if he could find someone who’d keep a straight face long enough to let him finish. “Listen, Shane’s a great lad, but I’m just trying to make the point here – are we picking it on form or what are we at?”
He was a man who did more than just play a bit of minor, though. He got 2-1 in the Munster Minor Final in 2003, when Tipperary beat Cork 2-12 to 0-16 (Aisake Ó hAilpín topped the scoring for Cork with five points), and then came back a year later and got 2-2 as Tipp lost to the Rebels 2-13 to 3-8. Four goals in two Munster minor finals is fairly incredible shooting.
Regardless of that kind of underage pedigree, there’s never really any bitterness about losing lads to the dream of top-flight football. Even with a player such as Ben O’Connor, who was excellent for the Cork under-20 hurling team last year but who announced immediately after winning the All-Ireland final against Offaly that he was joining the Munster Rugby set-up, there’s a realisation there that it’s professional sport and it’s worth pursuing.
It also boils down to the fact that for all that we retreat into our little camps from time to time, GAA fans are also rugby fans. Cork fans are also Munster fans. Tipperary fans are also Ireland soccer fans. They don’t need to be told about the dream these lads are chasing. Most of us dreamed of the same.
It’s a strikingly unoriginal point, but that’s the difference between losing kids to Aussie Rules and losing them to the other most popular field sports in the country. We just don’t respect the idea of professional sport when it’s a sport we don’t really watch or understand – which is why the imminent retirement of Zach Tuohy might not get the coverage it deserves.
He has been an exceptional sportsperson for almost two decades, he is the Irish player with the most appearances in the history of Aussie Rules, and according to an Australian journalist I was speaking to this week, he has still been the best Irish-born player in the league this season.
He won a Premiership with Geelong three years ago alongside Kerryman Mark O’Connor, and he’s not finished looking for a second one either – Geelong are fourth in the standings going into the last round of the regular season, and are very much in the hunt as they head into the playoffs. His adaptability, and longevity, mark him out as a supremely talented athlete.
When we hear AFL, and increasingly the women’s league, the AFLW, players coming back and maybe sneakily coming on for a club game or two while they’re home in winter, there can sometimes be an unspoken sense of “well, that’s the bloody least they could be doing, after they left their poor club high and dry”. It’s natural to feel disappointment in the immediate aftermath of a player making the decision to go to Australia, but once the decision has been made, we can surely all agree to just let them try and get on with it?
No one in Gortnahoe-Glengoole felt the man who scored the goal that beat the Germans owed them anything, which must have made last Sunday a lovely occasion for all concerned. And they finished top of their group, so let’s just see if Shane can prolong the holidays another few weeks.
