Connacht SFC Final The forwards may be getting faster and younger but as Keith Duggan learns, Galway full back Gary Fahey is still up to the challenge
Full backs: They have an architect's eye for fissures in the greater structure. Ask Gary Fahey to survey Galway and attendant hopes for 2003 and he identifies something that isn't necessarily troubling, but is often overlooked.
Galway are old. Not over the hill, but definitely a mature team by contemporary standards.
"Look at it. I'm a 31-year-old full back. Seán De Paor is 31. Kevin Walsh is a 34-year-old midfielder. Ja (Fallon) is over 30. Most of the other lads are 26 or 27 now,which is fine, but not that young. Not many teams carry guys over 30.
"Like, Down started with just one against Fermanagh. Paul McGrane is called the old guy of Armagh and he is 28. Kerry have Moynihan who is about 30. But show me any team with four guys over 30. There isn't one."
And it is true. Fatherhood is the bonding topic of interest among Galway's senior statesmen, moulded by traditional GAA voices whose mutual pleasure and madness it is to spend summer Sundays chasing energetic young flyers more moulded by the voice of 50 Cent.
Gary Fahey does not worry about the age gap, but he is not going to pretend it does not exist. "I'm not saying 30 should be regarded as the cut-off. I think it depends where you play. Look at Henri or van Nistelrooy - these guys hit their prime in their 20s.
"Maybe a midfielder has a longer life. But let me tell you, when you have to mark a 21- year-old speed merchant at 31, you know all about it. They say you have the experience, but sometimes I think I'd prefer the 21-year-old legs."
As he sips a mineral in a country bar that has become enmeshed in the neon sprawl of east Galway city, Wimbledon's new wave of total athletes are on television, muscle-bound adolescents with freakish maturity that can run from dawn to dusk.
The GAA is producing similar specimens now and their sheen and application is a source of marvel to Fahey. Young players, he believes, keep getting faster and better.
Like his second cousin Kevin Walsh, the full back is one of the unsung heroes of the O'Mahony administration. Four Connacht medals, two All-Ireland medals and the honour of the 2001 captaincy put his among the most glittering GAA careers in the country.
But he has slotted into the full-back position with such clinical smoothness his contribution is often taken for granted, like the oak cabinet whose presence at the rear of room cannot be realised until it is removed.
Since 1992, Galway teams have come and gone but there has never been a need to tamper with full back.
Over recent years, Galway's all-singing, all-dancing half-back line has had the fans all a-flutter and the copper-gold figure of Ciarán Fitzgerald has rightly been lauded as one of the best finds to come out of Galway in many seasons.
But Fahey the elder has been consistently unscrewing the bulbs from the game's best-lit names season in and season out. There is the sense from him of being utterly secure in his pedigree without ever taking it for granted. Yet he has always told himself he is never more than 70 minutes away from being dropped.
A mechanical engineer, he is endlessly fascinated by the general thought processes and cycles of the game he loves, and smiles when he ponders Mayo's view of him.
"Like, Maughan will have them fit and Mayo will be wired for this game. They have shrewd operators on the sideline. It can turn around for any county so quickly. And don't try telling me they can't make 15 good footballers in Mayo.
"They will be young and speedy. Like they will say, 'ah, Fahey's slow' and they might send young Mortimer in on me. They will. And it doesn't bother me, it happens all the time nowadays. The game has gone completely tactical."
Fahey smiles, as if to acknowledge that at times he sounds like he belongs to the great Galway team of the 1960s. Railing against the vagaries of modernity. But when he began, it was different.
In 1992, he was thrown in the latter stages of a Connacht final against Mayo with a brief to stop the elegant brand of misery Liam McHale was inflicting on Galway.Mayo won, but Fahey at least neutralised the Ballina man's influence and so a career was born.
For Jack and Marjorie Fahey, it was the culmination of many years of driving to and from remote pitches around Galway.
Killanin was, as Fahey testifies, "pure country - like there was no city", when the family grew up there in the 1970s and 80s. Gary was the first of eight. That is a lot of football boots.
"My folks used to get slagged by the neighbours that they only took an interest in football after we were old enough to play. But yeah, they were very involved and encouraged us all."
Now, his youngest sister, Niamh, is on the Galway under-16 team, Neil has played under-21, Jimmy and Paul play club, and Richie has been playing for Galway alongside Gary since the 2001 All-Ireland success.
His other sister, Avison, is, he says, sensible enough to do her own thing while Philip, the remaining Fahey brother, concentrated on karate.
In retrospect, Fahey's ascension to the Galway seniors seems almost predestined, with the rites of passage through minor and under-21 and a place on the UCG team that bridged a long Sigerson gap in 1992.
But it is often forgotten how chronically low the ambition and structure had sunken within the county back then. Fahey's first two years of championship began and ended with games against Leitrim.
In the early 1990s, Connacht was the sick man of Gaelic games and Galway were no exception. "Good players came and left without a Connacht medal. It's hard to analyse what happened, it was just a low. And then it suddenly turned around."
These evenings, Gary Fahey charges in the door from work, grabs a gear bag and shoots a guilty look in the direction of Áine, who is just a couple of months old.
Now, playing for the county is a burden on more than just his time. At work, his colleagues will make little fuss about his participation in tomorrow's match, one of the biggest sporting fixtures on the island. They have a world-class pool player, Stephen Horan, after all so full backs aren't all that coveted.
And he enjoys an environment that leaves him at a remove from the game and notes that most adults now spend their free time scooting to a gym or fitness clubs anyway.
His theory is if you can stay fit playing inter-county football, you may as well. His wife, Niamh, a soccer player, became accustomed to the craziness of his schedule from the day they first met. She knows that despite Fahey's longevity, Galway football will not be calling upon him forever.
In fact, just a summer ago, out on the field in Croke Park, Fahey cocked an ear, certain he could hear the bells toll. The All-Ireland champions were in the midst of a licking from Kerry. They were being booted out of the championship with such conviction that the lecture mattered much more than the result.
"The most disappointing aspect was that we just petered out. It was a non-contest for the last 20 minutes. And that was kind of embarrassing. We just weren't contesting the play. I remember thinking, 'we can forget this, we shouldn't even be here'. People put it down to the long lay-off after the Connacht final. That was overstated. We struggled all year. Winning blunts you. It is the same in any sport."
The current championship has already run through several acts of high drama with Galway waiting in the wings. An authoritative, if prosaic, victory over Roscommon has been our sole sighting of the maroon.
In fact, they have been exceptionally low-key since that quarter-final loss to Kerry. As it stands, Galway have been the most consistent team of modern times and with All-Irelands no longer a novelty, the motivation now is wrapped around the sense that another title would bookend a legacy that began in 1998.
Pat Comer's great film of that season, A Year Til Sunday, is something Fahey will cherish as much as the chunks of metal in the years to come. In a way, such anavant-garde venture was in conflict with the precision that John O'Mahony creates.
"It was a trust thing," responds Fahey. "John knew this was a serious undertaking and Pat was one of those who soldiered for many years when there were no medals. He had something like 80 hours of film to edit down. I think it is a work that will stand the test of time."
Already, it is considered a classic and is sacred among the paraphernalia that Fahey has accumulated. This week, he was to see about getting a tiny replica Galway number three jersey for Áine. A few years ago, he would have chided himself for entertaining such a distracting idea. But he has learned there has to be a balance - that life cannot be said to get in the way of football.
It leaves him feeling happier and more at ease with the slick landscape of virtual professionalism that has come to pass.
Burt Lancaster starred in a marvellous film of John Cheever's short story The Swimmer, where a man makes it home by stoically swimming across rows and rows of suburban back-garden pools. That is how it must be for players like Fahey, who submerge and rise again game after game. Every new whistle brings with it the fear that some forward just out of childhood will arrive and just not let you come up for air.
"They are so well coached now and when they are playing on good teams, they just slot into a system. And they keep getting faster."
Graham Geraghty is, he reckons, the most explosive and skill-laden attacker of all the storied names he has faced down over the Sundays. But any forward carries with him the threat of ruination and Fahey sees the way the bright young things regard him, as old country.
He neither minds nor blames them. Life around the square is fast and unmerciful, a place where reputations are built over years and incinerated on single afternoons. That Gary Fahey has made his home there for the last 11 seasons is about as high a tribute as you could pay him. But wait. Another Connacht final beckons, another deep breath to take.
