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The success, or not, of so many GAA players’ careers is contingent on the quality of the coaches that they come across at underage level.
In our club, those that received the tutelage of Roly O’Shea benefited from a deep understanding of Gaelic football as well as enjoying the entertainment of his regular malapropisms.
Roly – his mother was a huge fan of Errol Flynn – seemed ancient when I was playing on his teams in the late 1980s and 1990s, though he wasn’t much older than I am now. A builder by trade, he set up his own business in the 1970s, but was the kind of boss to muck in and do the basic tasks.
He never went to college, but he possessed a huge appetite for learning and his van always had a few disparate titles on the dashboard, ready to be thumbed if he found himself having to pass a few minutes waiting for someone or something.
Unfortunately for Roly, while the information went from the books to his brain without a problem, the road from there to his mouth was one with a few wrong turns and what came out rarely matched the original thought.
His creativity was such that he was always coming up with new ideas for products and would enthusiastically tell you about the latest “protocol” he had sent off to be patented; he would insist that buildings had to be buttressed with “rolled steel Joyces”, and when one client expressed the view that the plans of his house made it look crooked, Roly insisted that it was just “an obstacle illusion”.
To pass the time on the sites, he’d engage his co-workers in debates on various topics.
“Lads, is Monica O’Sullivan the toughest Irishwoman of them all?” he asked one day.
While fellas were trying to work out who he meant, he joined the dots for them. “Like, she was down and out after the Olympics in Atlantis but then she came back to win a silver.”
He would always allow for counter-arguments though and often he made them himself: “I suppose your one, the pirate queen Grace O’Mahony, was a hardy bit of stuff, too.”
While he hadn’t been the most talented footballer, he had seen at a young age the benefit of fitness and that ensured he was a valuable asset on the teams he played on. Unfortunately, the 1960s and 1970s were a barren time at adult level, which was part of the reason why he dedicated himself to ensuring that the next generation would receive the proper coaching.
He devoured any material he could, from a variety of sports, in the quest to give his teams the edge. Shuttle runs were one of his introductions, even if he called them “shuffle runs”. Having read about the importance of defending from the front in soccer, he tried to get us to do the same at U16 level. “If one of their backs is coming with the ball, you surround the hoor from one side!” he’d say.
The success followed, but it was probably down to his sporting ecumenism that some of the more traditional higher-up figures in the club decided not to give him a chance with the adult teams.
Nevertheless, we learned a lot about other pursuits from him, even if he was extolling “Maurice Becker” or “Stevie Ballesteros”. When we had minor training the night before Ireland played the Netherlands in the 1990 World Cup, he told us that “Bobby” Charlton’s side would get something from the game as he didn’t fancy the Dutch goalkeeper, “Hertz van Rental”. The custodian’s real name was Hans van Breukelen, but Roly was right – he was at fault for Niall Quinn’s equaliser.
That was the year we made it to the county final, against Ardacrow – or “Artichoke”, as Roly said – the opponents. Team talks just before a game were his forte. He’d start off calm and tell how the opposition were useless, then he’d build up and up and up to finish by reminding us why we were great.
On this particular day, he knew that it would be the last time he’d manage most of us and so added a little bit to the crescendo, finishing with the immortal line: “This is it lads, you only get an opportunity like this once in a blue movie!”
In his head, he had said it correctly but the rest of us just creased up laughing. We went out on to the pitch so relaxed that we put together the best performance of our careers up until then and Ardacrow couldn’t live with us.
“Like taking candles from a baby,” he said as he congratulated us afterwards.
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