“I’ve heard people like Brian Cody say that it’s a privilege to be involved. It’s really no sacrifice at all.”
Brian Darby isn’t burdened by the GAA.
Offaly head for Croke Park next week and the Rhode man has an opportunity to clinch just his second piece of silverware in his eight-year county career. He’s fighting for a second Division Four title – the material total of his efforts so far.
But his head doesn’t bow. Darby doesn’t throw his hands up in despair and, even when the rest of the world are telling him that it’s pointless, that it’s thankless, that it isn’t possible, he ploughs on. Because this is the life he has chosen. This is the life he loves.
“You really have to just stand back and look back in to get a dose of reality and realise that it doesn’t go on forever,” the Offaly player spoke with SportsJOE ahead of the league decider with Longford. “It’s so competitive now but there can be an awful public perception that you have to give up your life. You don’t. You want to get the best out of yourself. You want to train your best. You want to look after your diet as best you can.
“I’ve heard a few codes of conduct and things like that that can go over the top, no doubt about it, but you’re there to enjoy it and it’s not going to last forever.
“I’m enjoying it. When you look back and your career is over, you can hopefully appreciate what you did and the contribution that you made and you can hopefully look back with enjoyment as well.”
The primary school teacher has been penning a brilliant blog which takes readers behind-the-scenes of what elite sportsmen put themselves through and he provided a fascinating insight into both the diet and a typical training week of a GAA player and compared it with that of AFL professional Sean Hurley. The discipline and application by even an amateur sportsman looks like a frightening task but it’s something Darby wouldn’t change.
“I just always took it seriously and once you’re in the habit of it you just don’t stray from it. If you go and do a good, hard weights session, it would turn your stomach to think of going and drinking or eating things that you shouldn’t be.
“When you train as hard, you want to try and balance it off and maximise what you can with food, in your diet and hydration and things like that.”
And even with all that work and commitment, the lack of success in championship hasn’t altered the defender’s mind set. Yes, it’s tough when you’re not winning, when you’re not progressing, when you’re taking peltings even, but you’re training to be the best and a sub division of that won’t satisfy Darby’s appetite.
“I always liked the traditional aspect of the provinces,” he wasn’t having any intermediate championship talk. “It always gave a lot of teams in Leinster a fighting chance of making progress up until a few years ago when Dublin really took over. But there were times when you had Meath and Louth in finals, Meath overturning Dublin, Kildare getting to finals.
“And, from the outset before Leinster started, we would’ve thought that we had a good fighting chance. One year, you looked at it and we had Westmeath in the first round. If you got over them, I think we had Louth after that – you know, just games that you thought on the day that, if you got the best out of yourself and you got a bit of momentum, you could end up in maybe a Leinster final. At that stage you were always hopeful.
“As much as you could, I’d like to stay away from things like a junior All-Ireland championship. No disrespect to any other counties and, speaking as an Offaly man, counties that have tradition and they might not be at the same level they were at a few years ago, but you’d like to think that you can still progress and move up the ranks and still make an impact on the big day.
“A junior championship or an intermediate championship would take away from that, I’d say.
“There’s a flipside to it, if you come up against the like of Dublin or Cork or one of the big teams in the country and you really get your arse handed to you. But you’re training as hard as everyone else, you have realistic goals and you like to put yourself out against the best teams and give yourself that challenge.
“I’ve often found down through the years that we might’ve played the likes of Donegal, teams like Derry in challenges and we’ve performed very well, we’ve been pretty competitive. If you take that away, you don’t really have a comeback.”
In an era of uber competitiveness, demands placed on players have never been higher. The bar has been raised, expectations through the roof and rules and guidelines are a hell of a lot stricter. The high profile fallout in the Clare hurling camp mustered a lot of scrutiny with some pundits criticising the GPA for not stepping in and helping out the like of Davy O’Halloran when he was parted from the squad.
“I heard Joe Brolly and Colm Parkinson come out about the Clare hurling debacle and they were very scathing on the GPA’s behalf in a lot of ways which I thought was unfair,” Darby said. “I think it was Colm Parkinson who said one evening that they should offer to sit down together, I just thought at that stage it had gone too far. The player had made his decision and it’s not like it’s his career where he had to stay. The player has to have a say as well.
“I just didn’t see what the GPA could really have done. I understand that they are a players’ union and they are there to engage with players but I just thought that the benefits of what they’re giving goes unseen in a lot of cases. They’re not a union that are there to act on behalf of players and fall out with managers, I think a lot of that needs to stay within the squad. I’m sure they would’ve offered to help in whatever way they could but I don’t see how they could’ve jumped in and how coming out and issuing statements would’ve helped the player or the set-up in Clare.
“It’s not like a professional thing where a lad needs to find a new club and move on. The GPA aren’t acting as a player’s agent and, in my own opinion, they can’t. Those kind of things go on all the time I’m sure in a lot of squads so I think a lot of the slating of the GPA was kind of unfair.”
It’s not his concern next weekend though. Offaly lost a Division Four final just a couple of years ago and, since Darby arrived on the squad, they have been up and down from the league’s basement. It’s time to start progressing and he can feel the fever rising.
“You’re a couple of weeks out from the championship at this stage and (a league final) is kind of what you want. Players know from a week out that it’s a big one and they’re doing everything that they can for it. We’ll relish it.
“We had a do or die game where we needed to get the best out of ourselves. Now we’re in a league final, we have another good, competitive game against a team we’re going to be playing again in the first round. In an ideal world, you’d get out of the division, you’d win the division and then you’d feel you have an upper hand on whoever you play in the first round.”
That’s a man with a vision. He isn’t a man making excuses. And he’s certainly not one who wants the authorities to intervene and help them out.
Anything can happen on a big day. Anything can happen on any given day.
Players don’t want that big day taken away from them. They don’t want that dream taken from them.
You can read more from Brian Darby over on his website about every aspect of the game from motivational speaking, to media, to diet, to conditioning.
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