Paul Flanagan remembers a league match against Kilkenny in the spring of 2015, when he was still on the outside and every game he played felt like a trial. His opponent Mark Kelly wasn’t one of Kilkenny’s stars, but he had a day when he stepped out from the chorus line, and in those situations the spotlight always falls on two people.
What Flanagan remembers most is the “fear” he felt, and how invasive it was. After a while he started looking to the sideline, waiting for his number to appear on the fourth official’s board. Fifteen minutes from the end, his self-fulfilling prophecy came true.
“I was probably in a little bit of a rut of being very harsh on myself,” he says now. “Maybe thinking the worst before [it happened]. That was a wheel that I went through for that time. We played Tipp in Cusack Park in another game [in that league] and John McGrath took me for five points. When you’re at that age [23], and that stage of your career, that’s enough to probably end your year, you know. That’s the harshness of it.”
That wasn’t the beginning or the end of it. For years, Flanagan grappled with his need to be there, to be part of it, accepting a cramped space in a corner of their thoughts. There were no questions about his entry-level credentials, or his aptitude for the lifestyle of an intercounty player, or his infectious personality, all of that was established.
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When Clare won the Under-21 All-Ireland in 2013, with a gallery of future All-Stars, from Tony Kelly to David McInerney to Shane O’Donnell to Peter Duggan to Colm Galvin, the player chosen to captain the team was Flanagan; three years earlier, when they lost an All-Ireland final as minors, Flanagan performed the same role.
But that only took him so far. When Clare won the senior All-Ireland in 2013 Flanagan was number 26, the last name on the panel. It was too soon to know then, but that would become his principal address, along the terrace of subs.
“I remember coming home after the All-Ireland semi-final [against Limerick] and the tale of a player is that, the 15 who started are going to be delighted, and then the lads on the outside – you’re so far on the outside, it’s not even funny. Everyone is buzzing around the county and I rocked in home, disappointed. I’m just thinking, ‘You want to be playing. You’re a player – you want to play.’
“Davy [McInerney] landed out to the house in his silver Citreon and he said, ‘Come on, come on, we’ll go into town.’ He just sensed it, I’d say, that I was down.”
For a long time he was stuck. In 2014, he made two substitute appearances off the bench in the championship; the following summer he made one. For the 2016 league he was given a run in the team, but he collided with Walter Walsh’s elbow in the league semi-final and suffered a concussion that grounded him for a couple of weeks. The perils of concussion weren’t as well aired then as they are now, and Flanagan struggled to take the setback at face value.
“I remember we went down to Garryvoe [in Cork] for a training camp [before the league final] and we played Cork in a challenge match. I couldn’t play, the doc had ruled me out, and I probably thought at the time, ‘That’s an easy excuse.’ That was my own take. There was a bit of me pushing back, saying, [in my own mind] ‘I should be playing. I should be playing.’”
As his frustration grew, he didn’t feel empowered to challenge anybody. In his mind, every search for reasons was circular, and ended with him.
“Obviously, you were dealing with a manager [Davy Fitzgerald] who was, I suppose, one of your heroes growing up really and you don’t want to push it and say, ‘Why aren’t I playing?’ Look, there’s no hiding it, it was a tough environment too. Davy definitely pushed us. It was all-encompassing. You were 100 per cent in, and it was very hard to escape that.
“He tried to push buttons to get a reaction and I don’t know if that was the best for my development, long-term. You’d probably get a quick reaction, but overall, I probably didn’t get the best out of myself at that time. I struggled to understand myself in terms of how I was going to integrate as well as I could. I wasn’t playing well enough to be in the shake-up.”
Things didn’t get better: he failed to make a championship appearance in 2016, or in 2017, and the following year was written off to a knee injury. It was an obvious opportunity to leave and call it quits; he couldn’t.
“I’d say loads of people on the outside probably said, ‘Jesus, what’s he thinking? He’s coming back year after year after year.’ But, I suppose, I was so immersed in it. That was still the dream.”
By the end of 2019, though, Flanagan accepted that he needed a break. Along with his girlfriend Sarah they went travelling around Asia and Australia for four months, just before the pandemic struck. “I definitely needed to step back from the intercounty scene. The Ballyea lads would tell you that I was probably too driven, or too caught up in it, and just needed to see different things. I needed a breather.”
It wasn’t a complete break. Before he went he approached Adrian O’Brien, a strength and conditioning coach he knew from school teams in Ard Scoil Rís, where Flanagan teaches. O’Brien designed gym programmes that Flanagan could access on an app called Train Heroic, and at every stop on his journey he found a place to train. Shortly after he came home, in early 2020, the GAA season was halted by Covid, but the injuries and niggles that had stalked Flanagan for years, had been ironed out. He felt refreshed.
That year he moved back home to corner from Limerick and enrolled in UL for a master’s degree in Mental Health, Mental Skills and Performance Psychology. His ultimate plan was to work with other athletes, but first he applied what he had learned to himself: meditation and visualisation became part of his routine.
In search of small advantages he cast his net wide. He read somewhere that the Dublin footballer Paul Mannion had become a vegan, and even though Flanagan had never met him, he flashed him a message on Instagram, wondering how he maintained his protein intake on that kind of diet; Mannion replied in detail. The supplement he suggested is still part of Flanagan’s diet.
And he went in search of speed, consciously, methodically. For a corner back, in the modern game, speed doubles as a shield and a sword. “It’s a strange one to say, but I’m faster now than what I was in my early 20s. You might have thought you were quick, but you didn’t know what that looked like.
“With the data now, you nearly know how quick you are in every session. I kept after it, and after Covid, I kind of got a bit more traction on it. I noticed it in the training with Tony [Kelly] and Jack [Browne during the lockdowns]. I said, ‘Jesus, there’s something coming here all right.’”
Ballyea were beaten in the semi-final of the 2020 county championship, and he didn’t know where he stood with Clare. On his way to Miltown Malbay for a recovery swim he got a phone call from Brian Lohan, the Clare manager. “You were probably coming from a different angle this time. I think it gave me a fresh bite for it.”
Two months later, nearly eight years after he joined the panel, Flanagan started his first senior championship match for Clare, a November qualifier against Laois, in the eerie emptiness of the Covid All-Ireland. A year later, he was an ever-present on the team. This year, he was sensational. In September, a week shy of his 30th birthday, Flanagan was nominated for an All Star. Whatever happens at the selection meeting next week, his nomination is a towering monument to perseverance.
It’s funny thinking back now, he says, because at the start he wondered how much time he would have. He remembers going to the 2012 All-Ireland final replay between Kilkenny and Galway, and checking the match programme for Paul Murphy’s age. Around then, Murphy was the pre-eminent corner back in the game, and even though he was only three years older, Flanagan took comfort in that.
“The thought crossed my head, ‘I still have time.’ When I look back on it now I think, ‘That was a strange thought to have.’”
Murphy retired at 31. Flanagan has just reached his glorious peak.
Clare SHC Final: cornerdddd v Éire Óg, Sunday, Cusack Park, 3pm.
