GAA fans have been brought face to face with the concept of the irreplaceable player this week. The announcement of Nickie Quaid’s cruciate knee ligament injury is desperately sad for him and poses questions that even John Kiely and Paul Kinnerk might struggle to answer. There are better players than Quaid on the Limerick team, but are there any who are harder to replace?
Predicting dire consequences for Limerick on the back of a star player’s injury has been a fool’s errand in recent years. They absorbed the loss of Cian Lynch and Declan Hannon in consecutive years, and if you were drawing up a top three of their irreplaceable players, they’d probably be on it.
But goalkeepers, and particularly this goalkeeper, exist in another category. The brilliance of his shot-stopping is matched only by the coolness and composure of his puck-outs. Trying to plug someone into that level of detail is going to be extremely challenging. But at least Quaid will be there to help the next man up, while working back to fitness, and the possibility of his return to the team after the Munster championship means this is still a blow that Limerick could absorb.
[ Limerick goalkeeper Nickie Quaid suffers ACL injuryOpens in new window ]
Far greater is the hole that now exists in the Dublin senior football team at midfield. Losing James McCarthy felt sad, but inevitable; losing Brian Fenton this week is a crushing blow. We spoke to his former team-mate Paul Flynn on the Second Captains podcast this week and he was unsparing in his view of the devastation this wreaks on Dublin’s chances.
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“If they had lost four or five players, I still believe they could have built a competitive team with Fento at midfield. You could actually regenerate the squad with him there because he is so good. He would at least have a presence in midfield, fill in the centre roles and you can carry a couple of players. With him gone, it’s catastrophic, actually unrecoverable.”
He repeated the word later — “unrecoverable”. That is a high bar. But without McCarthy and Fenton, the gap in midfield is a chasm. Tom Lahiff and Peadar Ó Cofaigh Byrne have played plenty of minutes for Dublin over the last few years, but they are nowhere near the level of the two men who started against Galway in Dublin’s last championship game of 2024. That’s hardly a knock on them, as McCarthy and Fenton might be two of Dublin’s three greatest footballers, but that’s the reality.
Irreplaceable nearly feels too small a word. Players only appear irreplaceable when they leave at the peak of their powers. When a player gets to the back end of their careers, calling them irreplaceable is an acknowledgment that you either haven’t looked, or haven’t found, anyone even remotely capable of being rotated in and out to give your star player a rest.
James McCarthy has missed plenty of football over the last three or four years, and so Dublin have had plenty of chances to get used to the idea of him being absent, temporarily or permanently. Brian Fenton, on the other hand, played 56 straight championship games in a row until he was suspended for the Meath game this year. According to Maurice Brosnan in the Irish Examiner, he had missed 35 minutes in total in that 56-game stretch. Once he was in the team, he never left. Forget about the championship, he had also played in every league game under Dessie Farrell. If we can’t imagine a Dublin team without him in the really big championship games, it’s because we haven’t even seen glimpses of it anywhere else.
Nickie Quaid has started every single championship game for Limerick under John Kiely, but I’d be inclined to give Limerick a pass if they haven’t tried too hard to find a replacement. He’s 35, but would anyone be surprised to see him play on until he was 38 or 39 … even into Stephen Cluxton territory?
Limerick have had plenty of practice replacing key cogs in their machine, but they’ve done that by repurposing highly efficient players into slightly different roles. That won’t cut it this time. Another individual will have to step into the breach, and whether that’s Mary I’s Fitzgibbon Cup winner from earlier this year Jason Gillane, David McCarthy, or Conor Hanley Clarke, they will have to operate under intense pressure. But that’s the ball game.
When Cluxton, McCaffrey and Mannion came back to help Dublin win in 2023, it was looked on as a last hurrah. For those who weren’t sure it was the right thing to do, this was an acknowledgment the future didn’t look bright, and so to hell with developing the next generation — let’s win the All-Ireland in front of our fans.
They sacrificed medium-term planning for short-term glory. I didn’t hold it against them then, and it’s hard to say even now that they were wrong. They weighed up whether, with the proper development, a new Dublin team might be capable of winning in 2025 or 2026, against the very real probability that “getting the band back together” in 2023 would get them one last big score.
Whatever the future holds, Brian Fenton won’t be a part of it. And for two incredibly successful teams, we’re about to see what irreplaceable really looks like.
