Retracing old steps

Up until last year I used go home much more regularly. Each time I would return, I would still plan my time around being able to go up to the field to hurling or football training. Now though, I go home less and a lot of the lads I’d have been closer to have moved away. They've naturally been replaced by the next generation. I'd have trained a lot of them as U-16s but wouldn't have known them as friends.

That fact and also the feeling that you are just getting in the way meant that I didn’t go up training since Christmas 2009. I was home at the weekend and heard they had a session Sunday morning. Gearoid, who trains the team, was in Malaga but assured me it would be all ball. That appealed but I still needed a fair bit of convincing to go up. I started to realise how the likes of Emmett and Co felt here, after they had been out injured or on family duty for a prolonged period. The group in which you were once an insider, turns over, and suddenly you become the outsider.

You can't beat going back to your club though. You might have driven in the gates of the field a thousand times but it is a rarity nowadays and that makes you savour even just an hour training all the more. Familiar faces were scattered around the place; Seany and Brian Murphy Town talking tickets no doubt and selector Ollie floating around greeting fellas. The only blip was that Gearoid O'Leary and Ger Callaghan were sitting in my corner of the dressing room. I quickly separated them.

It was a cracking day; sun beating down on top of a nice grassy pitch (a novelty compared to Parc50). Tony Griffin was laying out cones, none of which looked close enough to involve the ball. I began to regret the decision and quickly surveyed the group to see how badly my fitness would be exposed!

I'd have huge respect for Tony. He only joined us in his mid-thirties after a very successful career with Nemo but I'd have learned a load off him when playing alongside him in the full back line. He had unreal composure and distribution. He could talk you through a game too and any time he talked to the group in general, he was very precise in his instruction. One thing that has always stuck in my head was when he was talking to the backs down by the bottom goal one night. His comment was so simply obvious; 'race your man to the ball'. Why wouldn't you get to the ball first was the jist of it. It sounds obvious but for a back, that should be your frame of mind all the time. Don’t play your man from behind.

Anyway, it seems ridiculous that his presence alone would provide me such motivation to burst my balls at the session. Other lads didn't appear equally motivated though. Maybe that just reflects the fact that the generation gap is too great and Tony is just another retired footballer in their eyes. The young fellas were surprisingly sluggish in the early runs. There is no way that the likes of myself and Regan are fitter than them but that appeared the case. It's not fair to judge on one poorly enough attended session but you would hope the obsessive drive required for them to be successful is not far from the surface.

When you move away from home there are things you badly miss at first; your gaa club, your friends/girlfriends, family etc. In the case of some of those things, you can learn to live without them and when you are away, you stop missing them. However, when you return home and are around them again, you start to realise how much you do actually miss them. Kinsale G.A.A. would be like that for me. In one sense I've moved on and when I am here I don't feel like I'm missing out. But when I get back out on the field amongst the lads, I wouldn’t wish for anything more than to be part of it all again, whatever the frustrations that would accompany it.