During those years when Dublin hurling wanted to be successful, but couldn’t figure out how, David ‘Dotsy’ O’Callaghan was the kind of source that Prime Time would have interviewed in silhouette using an actor’s voice. He was a gifted hurler in exile with the footballers, an honours graduate of Dublin hurling’s first development squad on whose talent the future was pegged. He should have been part of the solution but he was seen as part of the problem. Without him and his like, where were they going?
O’Callaghan wouldn’t have seen it like that. In his heart he was a hurler but what sense was there in being a romantic fool? He wanted the chance of success and the football panel offered that possibility. In terms of rhetoric the hurlers were shooting for the moon but their spacecraft borrowed something from Flash Gordon. Any suggestion of takeoff was a trick of the imagination.
“For a couple of years there I didn’t know what I was at really,” he says. “I was doing hurling and football and I ended up going with the footballers for a couple of years for the simple reason. . . like, in 2003, I played football and then 2004 was my first year playing senior hurling but you couldn’t compare it to the football. You couldn’t compare attitudes and players’ commitment levels. A chance to get back onto the football panel came along and I thought I may as well try this because I didn’t want to be fluting around either.”
During his first brief interlude with the hurlers he scored five points from play in a championship defeat to Offaly. It established O’Callaghan’s nascent class as an inter-county hurler but it also clarified Dublin’s status. Offaly were no more than a middle-ranking team but that day they had the capacity to beat Dublin by 15 points. O’Callaghan could have hung around and been a martyr but, in a sense, that would have been a pose. The hurling set-up wasn’t designed for winning and part of him just couldn’t accept that.
Seeking asylum on the football panel, though, didn’t work out in the long run. In the beginning, stuff happened; in the end, it wasn’t home. He had barely started with them in the winter of 2003 when he was injured on a skiing holiday. Leaving a nightclub he slipped on ice and the beer bottle he was carrying speared his hand. There was so much nerve and tendon damage that he couldn’t play anything until the summer.
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Not long after he got back he shattered his hamstring. For six or seven months he went from one specialist to the next, looking for a solution. He would try to jog and his leg would seize up. The year was a write-off. In 2005 he started again with the footballers but their early interest cooled and over time he became a back-number in the squad. After the 2007 League he quit.
“With the football, people will say that you left because you weren’t getting on [the team]. I didn’t really commit to the football the way I probably should have. At times, I probably couldn’t understand why I didn’t get more of a run and maybe I was a little bit justified in thinking like that.
“It was a huge relief for me [to walk away]. I was nearly in tears leaving the football squad. For any lad, I suppose it’s his dream to play inter-county. It was still tough to be walking away and it was a fairly brave decision but I knew it was the right thing to do.”
O’Callaghan spent the rest of 2007 travelling the world from the United States to New Zealand to Australia: painting and drinking, in no particular order. By the time he got to Sydney he took an office job to stay afloat, subsisting from week to week. “When I was away, that’s when I thought, ‘I want to go back hurling’.”
The hurling panel was better but still not as good as it needed to be; the support structures were improved but still inferior to the footballers’; public statements of ambition were still too easy to say but much harder to believe. A match against Cork in the qualifiers that summer comes to mind. Off the field, Cork’s turmoil was still private, on the field they were vulnerable. Even though the game was in Pairc Ui Chaoimh, Dublin had a winning chance but they didn’t travel with that thought and when it only occurs to you on the field it’s usually too late. Cork beat them with a late surge.
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“Certain lads had plans made for what they were doing that night, rather than thinking about going down and winning the game. I suppose there was still a bit of that there as well. Times have changed and the whole mentality of lads now would be a lot of different to what it was then.”
Three months ago they returned to Pairc Ui Chaoimh, needing a win to have any chance of reaching the League final: they expected to get it and they did. For Dublin hurling, that altered mindset was an evolutionary leap.
In the middle of last summer, though, believing in such a thing required a monumental act of faith. Kilkenny beat them by 22 points in the Leinster championship and Antrim blindsided them in the qualifiers. Transplanted into any Dublin summer over the last 50 years those results would have represented the worst of times. The imperative for Dublin was not to take them in isolation. They had to carefully process the setback and dispose of the toxic waste.
“You always have a belief that this is going to go somewhere with the work that’s gone in — even on the bad days you think, ‘Look, it’s going to go somewhere’. Then last year, the defeat to Kilkenny was a disaster and then the defeat to Antrim as well — you think is there any point in going on with this? Personally, you wonder why you put it all in if you’re not going to get anything out of it.
“I suppose you come into the dressing room after defeats like that and it’s hard to even look lads in the eye. As a group you just feel — you’re not looking for scapegoats but everyone felt they’d let the whole thing down as a collective. Last year we were just too up and down. That lack of consistency was absolutely killing us.”
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Over the winter, a lot changed. Dublin acquired a new physical trainer, Martin Kennedy, with experience in Australian Rules. He brought more of an edge to training without introducing any dread: his sessions were sharp, lively and varied.
The personal gym programmes of every player were more closely policed and whatever permission to coast had existed before was withdrawn, absolutely. For their minds they started to work with Declan Coyle, a sports psychologist and, as the League progressed, Dublin moved closer to a rounded whole.
On top of that, there was a reunion of old friends. O’Callaghan and Conal Keaney played together on a Dublin Colleges team that was mugged in an All-Ireland semi final 10 years ago. Like O’Callaghan, Keaney was seen as a hurler with a football habit and like O’Callaghan he followed a path that he thought could bring him to Croke Park in September. Within the football panel, though, Keaney’s status changed; within the Dublin hurling community it never did.
“Every year since I was back hurling you’d be wondering ‘Will Keaney ever come back’? I was in touch with him a bit for the first couple of years but I think I got cheesed off of asking him. Having him back is a huge boost. It’s a very imposing game he has.”
Unlike Keaney, O’Callaghan doesn’t come from a powerful club. St Mark’s in Tallaght have had some good days in O’Callaghan’s time but, right now, they’re struggling: their senior footballers are at the foot of Division Two in the Dublin Leagues, their senior hurlers are at the bottom of Division Three. In the battle for recruitment, soccer is a formidable rival and like every other club in the country they must deal with social issues too.
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A couple of weeks ago one incident came to a head in spectacular fashion. Some young lads were seen drinking cans and lighting small fires at one end of the GAA field. As they were hunted off the premises they made a sinister pledge to come back: “What the lads said was, ‘You'll see a fire later, don’t worry’. That night they rammed the gates of the club and then rammed the back gates as well. Went into the middle of the pitch and burned out the car.”
Moving clubs in Dublin is much easier than in most other counties but O’Callaghan has resisted the temptation. When O’Callaghan was a boy one of his neighbours was the inter-county hurler Conor McCann and it meant something to him to see a St Mark’s player in Dublin blue. For better or worse, O’Callaghan inherited that role and accepted the responsibility.
McCann played on a Dublin team in the 1990s that flickered for a couple of years on hurling’s radar and then disappeared. In every respect this team is different. The fear that Dublin’s season might have peaked in the League final at the beginning of May was never given a chance to bed down. Against Offaly and Galway they did enough without jeopardising the impression that there is better to come.
“We know all the pitfalls. If you rest on your laurels you’ll be found out pretty quickly. We got back down to training. I don’t think anybody’s ambition in the squad was fulfilled by just winning the League.
“A couple of years ago everyone said that Dublin hurling was going along nicely when we got to a Leinster final and an All-Ireland quarter final. That was seen as progress. Everyone saw what happened last year. We had to learn from that.
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“It’s still a new team. It’s still about getting over lines that we haven’t crossed before. Going down to Pairc Ui Chaoimh and getting a win, winning the League final, beating Galway [[in the Leinster semi-final]. Those are big steps that we haven’t taken before. Those wins wouldn’t have been achieved a couple of years ago.”
From where they stand on the climb, the summit is no longer hidden in the clouds, though the next part of the ascent is steep and treacherous; in [manager] Anthony Daly they have the perfect sherpa.
“He’d encourage you to get out there and express yourself. He definitely gets that across. I’m sure he can see from training how good lads are and he wants us to get out there and basically show it. Make sure to bring it on match day. Get out there and express yourself.”
On the Wednesday morning after the Galway game they trained at 6am, as they regularly did during the spring. There was no break in their stride. Eyes forward. Driving on.