Tom Parsons will be hearing a lot of soothing words this week, so many of them that he'll be nearly wishing someone would give out to him. Best wishes are great and everything but they lose their meaning after a while. Everybody is sincere and they all want you to feel better but the world moves on at the same time. You're a great lad when you're no threat to anyone.
Will Mayo miss him? No doubt about it. Will they do all they can for him as he recovers? Absolutely. Will they spend the next few weeks mourning his loss? That's not how it works.
Mayo have no game now for four weeks so to a certain extent, this week will be about looking after Tom. He’ll get lots of encouragement and texts and visits and everything else. But it won’t be long – a matter of days at most – before the size of the job facing Mayo now is what takes their attention. They can offer Parsons any amount of emotional support but ultimately they have to get on with what they’re doing.
I would presume that Stephen Rochford was already onto Parsons's replacement on Sunday night. Whoever that is – Jason Gibbons is the most obvious alternative – is probably at training this week. Next time there's an internal game, he'll be running for the B team and aiming at the As. Everybody moves up one and now there's a midfield jersey up for grabs.
Parsons is a loss to them, definitely. He always struck me as a player who was initially more appreciated on a national level than he was locally. It was really only in his late 20s that he became a fixture for Mayo and you’d often hear people from out west giving out about him. But over the past couple of seasons, I think he’s been huge for them.
Train keeps chugging
He isn’t the sort of midfielder who is going to float points from 40 metres on an angle. But he’s box-to-box, hardy as anything, good under kick-outs and takes the right option the vast majority of the time. Like a lot of the Mayo players, he’s been consistently improving year by year. When people talk about the lack of Mayo players coming through, I always think of the improvement in the likes of Parsons. You’d want to be some player to edge him out if you were just fresh onto the panel.
That doesn’t mean he’s indispensable. Nobody is. You can’t afford anyone to be. You would have said Diarmuid Connolly was indispensable to Dublin but that’s not how it has turned out. The train keeps chugging on regardless of who’s on it or who’s standing on the platform.
Mayo’s biggest strength over the past few years has been their resilience. They’re always there when the All-Ireland is being decided because they know what it takes to keep themselves in the mix. It doesn’t matter what disasters come their way, they keep plugging on. Think of all the games where they fought to the bitter end despite giving up early goals or stupid goals or own goals and all the rest of it. They’ll wish Tom Parsons the best and keep on trucking without him.
There’ll be none of this Win It For Tom carry-on. That sort of thing is just empty words, the sort of pointless blather that people say when they can come up with nothing better. It would be the worst thing you could say to him this week, that’s for sure. Win it for me? What the hell were ye doing it for before now?
I was very lucky with injuries throughout my playing career. I never had anything particularly long-term – never much that would keep me out of championship anyway. The only time it arose was when I got a broken foot in an All-Ireland semi-final against Derry in 2004. It’s very little compared with what has happened to Parsons – although I did miss out on a final because of it.
When you're injured, you can offer nothing. And it doesn't matter who you are or what you've done in the past, you're almost entirely useless to this thing now
I had four weeks between the semi-final and final and for the first couple of days, I held out a bit of hope of making it. I was doing aqua-jogging with Séamus Moynihan and Donal Daly inside in the pool and the only thing that would get you through the boredom of it was the small sliver of a chance you might get yourself right. That only lasted a few days and I accepted defeat quickly enough.
Entirely useless
Your circumstances change completely when you’re injured. Your standing within the group, the weight you carry when you say something, that’s all dictated to some extent by what you can offer. When you’re injured, you can offer nothing. And it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done in the past, you’re almost entirely useless to this thing now. With the best will in the world, everybody knows it and everybody acts accordingly.
Even those few days I was training away with Moynihan and Daly, the atmosphere was different than in the main group. We were doing our work away from everybody else. They were training for an All-Ireland final – and there’s no better time in your life. The late summer weather is good, everybody is playing well so the sessions are enjoyable, the opposition are in your sights. Even though it’s all serious stuff, everyone is in good humour and there’s plenty of craic in it. It’s everything you want from playing football.
You have the deadening feeling inside you that you're going to miss the biggest game of the year
Meanwhile, we were bursting our gut just to get to tog out for training. You’re pushing and pushing just to be able to stand in the circle and do the warm-up. In that scenario, there’s very little good humour. There’s very few jokes flying around. You’re knuckling down and being seen to knuckle down. You’re taking this thing seriously. And most of all, you have the deadening feeling inside you that you’re going to miss the biggest game of the year.
I had to give in to reality after a few days. I got a cast put on the foot and admitted defeat. And then I entered the next stage of recovery – complete irrelevance. I still went to training but somebody had to drive me. I still travelled with the team but somebody had to carry my bag. I was a passenger. A member of the public with dressing-room privileges.
Players are ruthless. They're your friends, fair enough. But they're here for one thing. And all of a sudden, you're no use to them for that one thing
In a very short space of time, I knew I just wanted to stay out of the way. What was I going to do? Stand at the side of the pitch and wave my crutches? Yeah, that’s very helpful to the cause alright.
You go to team meetings and all the jazz but again, what use are you really? Players are ruthless. They’re your friends, fair enough. But they’re here for one thing. And all of a sudden, you’re no use to them for that one thing. They don’t be long moving on without you.
Pontificate away on crutches
Lads would be telling you to speak up in team meetings and all that but I just wanted no part of it. They’d only be saying it to make me feel useful. If I ever did something like that, I know well they’d be sitting there watching me pontificate away on my crutches and thinking, “Yeah, Darragh, thanks for that but you’ll be sitting in the Hogan Stand when we’re getting our heads taken off us down on the pitch. A lot of good you’re going to be – we’ll see you at the banquet.”
Unless you can do something about the game on the pitch, your opinion is of no great value.
If you’re going to talk the talk, you need to be able to walk the walk. That’s the long and short of it. Players have a fairly limited amount of patience for all the touchy-feely do-it-for-the-lads stuff. Unless you can do something about the game on the pitch, your opinion is of no great value.
So I took myself out of the way of it all. Not just with the team and the group as a whole but in life in general. For those few weeks, I was very picky about where I went and when I went there. I would time my visits to anywhere I wanted to go. The most important thing in my mind was not to get caught by some ear-on-the-shoulder merchant crying for my loss and stopping me in the street to sympathise.
People are great. They mean you nothing but the best. But did I want to hear someone telling me that Kerry were going to get it very tight without me? Like a hole in the head I did. That’s as much use to me as me piping up in a team meeting. It has no relevance. There’s nothing tangible to it. You play the game to play the game and win the game. Fellas telling you you’re going to be a huge loss only puts you in bad form.
Drift away
The upshot of all that is that you drift away from the whole scene. You don’t go to every training session because you don’t feel like you have anything to contribute. You pick and choose when you go down the street or go for a pint because you have no interest in talking about it. You do your rehab but you resent that after a while too.
For Tom Parsons, that drift is going to be inevitable. He lives and works in Dublin so at least he won’t have people coming up to him to tell him what a loss he’ll be. The people he will be around day to day won’t give a rattling damn about poor Mayo and their midfield problems. At least he’ll be spared that side of it.
But the other side of that is that he’ll be even further on the outside of the Mayo panel than the usual injured player. He’s not going to be hauling himself up and down to Mayo to watch the rest of them training. He has a long road ahead of him to get himself back to where he can be an asset to them again.
And it doesn’t matter how tight they are as a group or how many people check in with him on a daily basis, that’s going to be a lonely road. He’s going to be doing his rehabilitation while the rest of them are in survival mode. They’re looking at seven games in nine weeks once the qualifiers start. They’ll have enough on their plate and so will he.
When you’re injured, that’s the reality. We can only wish Tom Parsons well in his recovery and applaud him when he makes it back.
