Once upon a time, team announcements in the GAA were trustworthy and newsworthy and exciting. After days of speculation they would be released in midweek, igniting the final phase of the build-up and launching a million conversations. The emergence of dummy teams added layers to the mystery, and simultaneously killed the wonder.
Team selections seep out late in the week now and everyone strains their sight, looking for the lies. A few minutes before throw-in a final approximation of the starting line-ups will be announced in the stadium and the graphic on your TV screen will be touched up for “late changes”.
But even then, how the matchups will pan out and how many players will have no fixed address will become apparent only when the ball is thrown-in. At that point you will need the vision of a scallop, a creature with more than 100 eyes.
Every so often, though, a big player is left out by a big team and there is no amount of three-card-trickery that can disguise the fact he has been dropped. In the GAA, typically, no explanation is ever offered, and maybe the question is left unasked.
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Gearoid Hegarty, for example, didn’t start for Limerick against Clare, and there was no formal indication why. Was he dropped because they were furious about his sending off against Waterford, or because his overall form in that match and in the League final had been so far below his usual levels that they needed to send him a firm message? One way or another, when a former Hurler of the Year and multiple All Star is left out the significance of the decision is not lost on anybody.
For reasons we don’t need to dwell on here, the GAA and the Premier League are different. In professional football the games come thick and fast, and there is so much rotation in team selection at the big clubs that it can be hard sometimes to distinguish between a player being rested and a player being dropped.
This season, though, in the case of Kevin De Bruyne, his manager had no desire to cast a veil over his selection decisions. The Manchester City captain, and by consensus the best midfielder in the League, was dropped by Pep Guardiola for a home game against Tottenham in January – having been publicly criticised by his manager before the World Cup – and was left out again in subsequent weeks.
They trailed 2-0 to Spurs in that match, and the TV pundits who had been perplexed by De Bruyne’s omission before the game assumed at half-time that Pep would admit his mistake and bring him on. In the event Man City won 4-2, the manager didn’t make a substitution until less than ten minutes to go, and his captain wasn’t one of the three players to leave the bench.
When they lost to Spurs 1-0, away, a few weeks later, De Bruyne was left out again and only came on for the last half an hour. All told, in a nine game run of Premier League matches, he was left out four times. He started against Newcastle but even then he was the only Man City player taken off, hauled ashore when the game was still in the melting pot. Another message.
For the first time in his Manchester City career he had lost the manager’s confidence which, in different ways, must have been jarring for both of them. Along the way Guardiola explained that De Bruyne needed to get back to doing the basics well: “easy principles” was the phrase he used.
Watching Guardiola wrestle with the form of one of his pivotal players has been a fascinating subplot to the Premier League season. It was clear, though, that Guardiola didn’t believe De Bruyne’s stubborn dip in form signified a decline. So he kept pushing and pulling until everything changed. In April, at last, De Bruyne’s form was sensational. This was the part of the season when they needed him most.
For every manager, in every sport, managing big players is one of the most exacting challenges. Do they deserve more forgiveness than less talented players? Is that indulgence counterproductive in the end? At what point do you draw the line?
In the GAA, these dynamics are at play too. One of the things that was consistently said of Brian Cody was that he had a sharp instinct for knowing when a player was over the top. The only one of his many great players to retire without an extended stint on the bench was JJ Delaney.
When it came to the biggest matches Cody wasn’t afraid of hard calls either. During their four-in-a-row 2008 was the only year when the starting 15 was unchanged between the All-Ireland semi-final and the final. Over the years Richie Power was dropped for the 2007 All-Ireland final, Martin Comerford for the 2009 final, TJ Reid two years later, Padraig Walsh for the 2014 final, Brian Hogan and Joey Holden for the replay that year. Cody was a master of calculated instability.
In Limerick, John Kiely and Paul Kinnerk have created a similar environment, without quite the same depth of resources. In the four All-Ireland finals that Limerick have won under their leadership only 18 different players have started; for Kilkenny’s four-in-a-row finals, 21 different starters were used.
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However it might have seemed during the League, Limerick’s panel tapers off after number 20. When they were chasing the game against Clare they still turned to Graeme Mulcahy in his 15th season rather than any of the emerging talent they auditioned during the spring.
All of a sudden Limerick find themselves fighting for form, with one of their most influential players desperately out of sorts. When Hegarty came against Clare early in the second half there was nothing in his performance to suggest that he had turned a corner yet.
“If you’re not going well, John [Kiely] will tell you straight out,” Hegarty said in a great interview with Larry Ryan in the Irish Examiner in January. “He doesn’t beat about the bush.”
We can assume they’ve had that conversation. Limerick need Hegarty to return to the form that made him Man of the Match in the All-Ireland final last July; he’s too important to be stuck in the doldrums. So many things over the years have tested Kiely’s management. He hasn’t failed yet. Watch.
