Dublin stars need to learn that there is more to life than football

Eamonn Sweeney

Dublin players at secret training session

Dublin players at secret training session

April 04 2021 02:30 AM

Right now Dublin look like Davy Stockbrokers in shorts. High-rolling big shots whose motto is team first, me second, and everyone else a distant third.

Their illegal training session was stupid, selfish, dishonest and arrogant. The alacrity with which their county board suspended Dessie Farrell was an acknowledgement that there’s simply no defending this one.

That didn’t stop people from trying when the Irish Independent broke the story on Thursday. Some favoured the old ‘with all the bad stuff going on in the world, how is this a big deal?’ number.

This is essentially a version of the drink driving favourite, “Why aren’t you out catching all the murderers instead, guard?”

The claim that Dublin shouldn’t be punished because other counties are doing the same thing resembles another roadside classic, “There’s people driving drunk out this road every night of the week and you didn’t bag them.”

That’s a singularly unpersuasive argument because if lots of other counties are also training illegally that doesn’t mean Dublin should get off. It means those counties should be punished as well and that this month’s return to inter-county training should be postponed.

The implications of blathering about nationwide breaches didn’t seem to occur to those who used it to excuse their heroes. For one thing it makes the GAA’s warning about illegal training, issued a day before Dublin were caught, look a bit like a publican’s, “Lads, the cops are pulling out the road tonight. Hang on a bit and drive home the back way.”

If non-compliance really is such a widespread and widely known phenomenon that suggests the GAA’s negotiations with the Government about the return of inter-county action have been carried out in bad faith.

It would mean that training during lockdown is like paying managers, something the GAA knows is going on but is prepared to let go with a nod and a wink.

Only Croke Park knows whether this is true, though the lengthy bans imposed on the Cork and Down managers for previous infractions suggest it isn’t. But given the long-time tendency of some within the Association to treat rules as a set of vague aspirations rather than binding laws of conduct who can be sure?

This is not a uniquely GAA thing. Given the depth of its roots in our communities, few organisations mirror the Irish character to the same extent as the nation’s most popular sporting body. The present moment is no different.

In deciding they’re entitled to break the rules, the Dublin footballers are hardly outliers. Lots of people have made the same decision over the past year. There was plenty of it going on last week as the combination of good weather and the Easter holidays prompted many into deciding that ignoring lockdown regulations wouldn’t do any harm.

Hopefully the results won’t be the same as they were when so many decided that seeing friends and family over Christmas was worth ignoring public health advice for. But our general willingness to occasionally ignore the rules surely contributes to the rate of cases remaining higher than expected.

So I’m not inclined to mount a moral high horse and berate Dublin for slapping frontline workers in the face while failing in their sacred duty as role models to the nation’s children. It would be a peculiarly unobservant child who hadn’t noticed long before this that plenty of grown-ups only follow the Covid rules when it suits them.

And if Dublin’s antics are a slap in the face, then what’s gone on at the Coombe and the Beacon must count as a bullet in the head. Taking drugs home for personal use and vaccinating your children’s teachers ahead of cancer patients are much more serious offences than breaching a training ban. As is registering on the HSE online portal to secure a vaccine you’re not entitled to when people at risk still haven’t been looked after.

That’s why a Garda investigation into Dublin, or any other team for that matter, seems absurdly heavy-handed. I haven’t seen any mention of the Gardaí in connection with what went on at the Coombe and the Beacon. Those hospitals were allowed to carry out their own internal inquiries.

This doesn’t mean Dublin aren’t in the wrong. You would hope those involved in this session, and any others which have been taking place, would have the cop-on to feel ashamed. It appears that, as was the case in Cork and Down, the manager will carry the can and the players escape sanction.

Yet this hardly lets the players entirely off the hook. These are grown men. They didn’t have to do what the manager told them, especially because as GAA players their job wasn’t at stake. All of them were free to say that what was being proposed was wrong and to refuse to go along with it.

That many would say the players didn’t really have any choice shows the extent to which we infantilise sports stars. Ciarán Whelan’s contention that the session is the inevitable result of a culture within the game where securing an edge over the opposition is sacrosanct has the ring of truth.

But it also shows how little the values of top-level sport have to do with those of everyday life. Tunnel-visioned youngsters who inhabit a bubble where winning by any means necessary is everything have few useful lessons to impart to anyone.

It’s hardly surprising that a bunch of lads who’ve been told they’re heroes since they were 12 or 13 might think lockdown rules shouldn’t apply to them.

Players love to talk about learning from setbacks. There’s a lesson Brian Fenton, Brian Howard, Johnny Cooper et al can take from this and it’s not that they should feel sorry for themselves because the media caught them out.

Instead they should think about the sneakiness of training while the city slept. They should think about what it means to be someone who blindly follows orders.

They should imagine what their behaviour looks like to people who don’t think kicking a ball is the most important thing in the world.

And so should the players from other counties who’ve been training in secret.

It’s time to grow up. There’s more to life than football.