THE cover of the GAA’s fixtures diary has a funky design, with action shots bouncing across the bottom and last year’s All-Ireland winning captains dominating the centre of the page. Both of them are lifting the trophy above their heads and because of the wrinkles on their jerseys you can’t really make out the small number on the front: Lester Ryan from Kilkenny is wearing number 20, Kieran O’Leary from Kerry, number 23. Between them their All-Ireland final appearances lasted less than six minutes: O’Leary only in stoppage time, Ryan only in the hurling final replay.
Their omission from the All-Ireland final 15 wasn’t a surprise: Ryan hadn’t started a match since June and O’Leary’s only championship appearances had been off the bench. No remarks were passed. Their status as team captain wasn’t under review or threat. In that sense it rhymed with everything we hear these days about the primacy of the squad. Captains who are subs is a plausible by-product of that mentality.
It could happen again in the coming weeks: David Collins, the Galway hurling captain, hasn’t been able to reclaim his place so far after an injury early in the summer and Kieran Donaghy, the Kerry football captain, was replaced at half-time last Sunday having been left out for the previous round. His selection is not assured.
On a personal level not starting will matter deeply to both of them but does it matter to the captaincy? Does it inhibit their capacity to lead? In rugby or cricket, for example, this situation would be unconscionable: the captain must be in the thick of it, being seen to lead.
There was a time when captaincy in the GAA was a light confection of ceremonial duties but over the last 10 or 15 years that has changed. The role was given substance by managers who wanted players to have a greater stake in how teams were run and in most counties the gift of appointing the captain was taken away from the club champions, in step with its enhanced relevance.
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Kerry and Kilkenny, though, are two counties who refuse to budge from this tradition. The Spa club in Killarney brought a motion to Kerry convention 10 years ago proposing that the power to pick the captain be transferred to the team management and only about a tenth of delegates supported it. In Kilkenny it is not a live issue. So, in 2014 and in 2009 they arrived at the All-Ireland final with a non-playing captain.
Michael Fennelly hated the experience six years ago. Perhaps his expectations were different to Lester Ryan; it was Fennelly’s fourth year on the panel and he had been a starter earlier in the year. But he played no part in the Leinster final and was hustled onto the podium to receive the cup in his tracksuit pants, not looking like the captain and not feeling like it.
“It’s only when I was captain that I realised how hard it is,” said Fennelly years later. “If I was looking in from the outside I’d be like, ‘Ah, sure look, how hard is it to go up and lift the cup? You should be delighted that you’re captain. Just a privilege doing it.’ But for me, it was just playing, you have to be playing. Mentally it was horrible, it really was.”
Ryan had a different outlook. He embraced the honour and ran with it. “Anytime someone would introduce me as Kilkenny captain it would send a special feeling up through my body,” he said after last year’s championship. “The big thing was that the captaincy wasn’t going to be a negative for me. If the captaincy was a burden you’re in more bother than just not playing. . . I was never thinking, ‘I’m captain, I need to play.’ Of course I wanted to play. You have to have that ambition but it never affected my approach.”
Kilkenny have not suffered any diplomatic incidents over excluded captains in modern times; Tipperary haven’t been so lucky. In 1988 and 1989, just after Tipp came in from the wilderness, they faced this issue in successive years. Noel McGrath’s father Pat lost his place early enough in 1989 to suck the heat from the situation before Tipp hit Croke Park but in 1988, seven days before they contested their first All-Ireland final in 17 years, Pa O’Neill was dropped. Cue uproar.
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Nicky English was given the honour “two minutes” after the team was named and in his autobiography, Beyond the Tunnel, he described the outlandish fallout, from crank calls to abusive letters. “Looking back, the calls and letters had an awful effect on me,” wrote English. “I wasn’t ready for the kind of grief I was getting. I actually started willing the week to be over.”
Babs Keating, the Tipperary manager, received letters of rebuke from the parish priest and the local sergeant in Cappawhite, O’Neill’s home place, and he was summoned by the county board executive to explain his decision. The stink lingered for months.
Willie Ryan was Tipp’s last non-playing captain in 2009; the right of the county champions to pick the captain was removed at the 2008 annual convention but Toomevara had already won the county final and it was thought only fair to give them the honour for 2009.
There was a tremor early in the season when Ryan got injured and the county board decided to appoint Conor O’Mahony as the stand-in captain in his absence, as opposed to another Toomevara player. The club kicked up but the decision stood. Ryan made four substitute appearances during the summer, including in the All-Ireland final and the Munster final, but in the match programme O’Mahony was listed as captain and Ryan wore number 28.
It hasn’t always been smooth for Kerry either. Wheesie Fogarty, the Kerry broadcaster, tells an extraordinary story from 1953. Paudie Sheehy was the Kerry captain and their top scorer; his father, Johnjo, was a selector. At the selection meeting before the final he excused himself from the room when they reached his son’s position; by the time he returned his son had been dropped.
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Thirty years later James O’Donoghue’s father, Diarmuid, was nominated as Kerry captain for the 1984 season after a composite Killarney team had won the county final. But when he was dropped for the Munster final the decision of who should replace him as captain was referred back to a Killarney committee that included Fogarty.
In 1997 there was no need for any special referrals although it was a poignant situation. Mike Hassett was injured for the All-Ireland semi-final and couldn’t reclaim his place for the final, so the captaincy reverted to his 22-year-old brother Liam.
“I told him [Mike] I’d no interest in getting the cup,” Liam said years later. “After the final whistle Mike was the first one over, jumping on top of me and I said, ‘Listen, buddy, you’re taking it from here.’ I was trying to get Mike up alongside me [on the podium] but I was young and I didn’t have the character to force the issue. If I could turn back time that’s the only thing I’d change.”
Lester Ryan lifted the Liam MacCarthy Cup last September. He had prepared a speech entirely in Irish with the aid of a former teacher. In it was a seanfhocal which, translated, means: We live in each other’s shadow, we rely on each other. For non-playing captains everywhere, that is a sentiment to hold dear.