Ciarán Murphy: How New York’s history-makers came together is the real romance story

It would be easy to say that what we saw in Gaelic Park on Saturday night was 100 per cent pure romance.

And New York’s first win in the Connacht championship, secured on penalties over Leitrim in a welter of excitement in the Bronx, had all the ingredients – a never-ending run of losses for the home team, a seeming rag-tag bunch of players from a variety of backgrounds, even the very nature of the victory, with the winning spot-kick scored by a Gaelic footballer born and raised in New York.

Where the analogy falls down is in the losers’ dressingroom, as Leitrim are no one’s idea of a Goliath. And closer inspection of that New York playing group revealed a genuinely talented combination, full of players with a lot of experience of big games.

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Johnny Glynn, their totemic captain, had played in five All-Ireland hurling finals by the time he was 25, and his journeys back and forth from New York to play for Galway in 2017 and 2018 meant that many GAA people would have readily associated him with GAA in the city.

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But there were others playing for New York whose presence on this team before the ball was thrown in on Saturday night people may not have been familiar with, but who nonetheless offered real top-level experience, like Eoghan Kerin of Galway, who was an All-Star nominee in 2018.

There was also Bill Maher, who might have the most remarkably varied collection of GAA experiences I can think of. He won an All-Ireland minor football final with Tipperary in 2011, beating a Dublin team that had Jack McCaffrey, Paul Mannion, Cormac Costello and Ciarán Kilkenny in its ranks.

He then captained the Tipperary minor hurlers to an All-Ireland title, which is the most predictable medal in his locker, lost the controversial 2015 under-21 All-Ireland football final to Tyrone, before winning a Munster senior football title with Tipperary in 2020. Where in the midst of all that does last Saturday night rank?

Pretty highly, I suspect.

Because the real romance for me comes not so much from the group’s achievement, impressive as it was. It comes more from the individual decisions required to get those men on to that pitch in the first place.

I won’t speculate on each man’s personal circumstances, but it’s fair to say that all the Irish-born lads on this team walked away from GAA teams to move to New York.

I find it strangely refreshing to frame it like that. If Gavin O’Brien, who played such a prominent part of Kerry’s national football league campaign in 2019, decided that he wasn’t going to spend his life waiting for Jack O’Connor to pick up his phone, then that’s to his credit.

Emigrating is never an easy decision. It’s often made even more complicated by one’s relationship with the GAA. If you’re a footballer or hurler as good as many of the lads on this New York team are, it’s not just their family who might be bitterly disappointed by their decision to leave Ireland.

They will have fielded calls from club grandees to tell them the large hole in their parish team they’re leaving behind them. Vague suggestions from inter-county managers that maybe they might be in their thoughts if there are a few injuries don’t cost the manager anything, but might prompt another bout of soul-searching as a young man tries to decide once and for all if he’s going to leave the country.

The lads that wore that red, white and dark blue jersey on Saturday night listened to all that talk and went anyway. Too often in the GAA we fetishise the suffering, and don’t acknowledge the desire to strike out for pastures new, even if it means leaving parts of your GAA upbringing behind.

That’s not to say that the New York team didn’t make a ton of sacrifices to win that game on Saturday, or that they don’t love the GAA. They love the game – they just didn’t feel like they had to put their lives on hold for it. More power to them.

It reminded me of what the Sigerson Cup used to be about, 30 or 40 years ago. It was a group of disparate individuals in a situation together for one reason that wasn’t the GAA, but who were nevertheless able to find, through the GAA, a common place to come together.

I interviewed Johnny Glynn in New York for this paper in 2016, and it was published as that summer’s hurling championship was about to begin. As I said then, reading it from home it seemed perfectly natural for me to be pressing him about when he was going to end this dalliance with New York and come home to where he belonged – hurling with Galway.

Asking him that question as the sun set over the Manhattan skyline on Randall’s Island, as he was training the NY Sligo senior footballers and embarking on a remarkably fruitful and enriching time in his personal and professional life, the question seemed almost beside the point. His first and only responsibility was to himself. The GAA was a beautiful, powerful connection to home, but it wasn’t going to stop him doing what was right for him.

Glynn won his All-Ireland 17 months after that chat, and so maybe he had the best of both worlds. For everyone else, last Saturday night was an unexpected, hard-earned, beautiful bonus.