INTERVIEW/JOHN GALVIN:IT IS not the most glamorous of comebacks but for John Galvin it is perfect. Today, he will put on a Limerick jersey for the first time since last May and he will sit in the dug-out to watch his team-mates against the Kilkenny footballers, the team who are fast becoming the Sorrowful Mystery of the GAA.
The tall man from Croom is the latest Gaelic football player to endure the lonely process of recovering from a cruciate ligament injury and even though he is excited at the prospect of being declared healthy again, he admits “the knee” has become a preoccupation for him.
“I do see it as a second chance but I have a lot of personal worries that I may not be the same player as I was,” he said this week after a long day working the farm he owns in Croom.
“I felt I was going fairly well in 2009 and 2010 and I would never want to be one of those players of whom it is said, ‘he should have finished up after that injury’. I had a lot of niggly things – groin strains and that – so I hope my body has recovered and I should be able to take more than I ever did.
“But I do worry that I am older and won’t reach the level I was at before. But the only way I can build up my own mind and get into it is to play and see how I am going. Confidence was never really an issue for me but this thing is in my head at the minute so I need those few games to get my head focused and to realise that I can still do it. I am focused on nothing but my knee at the minute.”
He has the consolation at least of knowing his injury was caused by a definite incident and not because of an inherent weakness. In the build up to last summer’s championship, Galvin sat comfortably among the handful of elite midfielders in the country. His form over 2009 and 2010 was often spectacular and he was very unfortunate not to have been selected from the All-Star nominations after a summer during which he single-handedly hauled Limerick back from the brink against Kerry in the Munster championship.
But Galvin was primed for another big championship last year when he jumped for a ball against Down on a pitch in Dublin in a challenge game. He is not certain which Down player he was competing against us. “The ball kind of got away from both of us and when I came down, I went to give chase and he fell. My leg was planted in the ground and he hit against it. It was just a freak accident.”
The following minutes turned into weeks and the initial diagnosis was correct: the dull pain was a cruciate and he would be playing no sport for the remainder of the year and into 2012. It is, he concedes, “a horrible injury”. It is not so much the discomfort as the sheer hold it takes on your life and the patience it exacts from you as you try to build up the muscle just to have the operation and then, afterwards, start a new rehabilitative process.
For months it seemed like knee repetitions and not the demands of running a beef and tillage farm set the routine. It was solitary and slow. “I think it was around Christmas that I was allowed to go out for a light jog for 15 minutes and I remember being so excited by the thought of this.”
By then, the football world had been restored to the old order: a Kerry-Dublin All-Ireland final. Limerick, however, had put in arguably the most under-appreciated performance of the summer, making it to the last eight. Under normal circumstances, a Division Four team lasting until the last eight of the All-Ireland would have been sensational.
But nobody really saw Limerick as a fourth-tier county and their jousts with Cork and Kerry over the previous few summers made their potential clear. If they could be categorised as anything, it was as the unluckiest team in football. Limerick football people could be forgiven for thinking that Cork and Kerry have a vendetta against them.
One or the other does them down and the Rebels chose a heartbreaking method in 2009, pilfering the Munster final with two late goals. Galvin cut an inconsolable figure in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and sounded broken as he reflected on Limerick’s long wait. “To tell you the truth 113 years doesn’t bother me,” he said. “All I know is that I’m playing 11 years and haven’t won one,” he said.
But a year later, he bagged two goals against Kerry only to be hauled back. Last summer, Limerick’s reward of a Croke Park appearance came with a caveat: the lottery of the draw cast them against Kerry. It was something of a black joke. For Galvin, that was the most excruciating of days. Ever the team man, he acted as water boy and was delighted for all of Limerick to see the football make a debut championship appearance in the great stadium after 125 years. But it felt physically painful not to be out there. After a decade playing for Limerick, he felt he deserved it.
The result was predictable. If Croke Park was breathtakingly new for Limerick, it was a summer retreat for their neighbours. Kerry looked at home and were razor sharp. It went down as another defeat. Galvin’s father is a Finuge man so he is well-placed to judge the relationship between the counties.
“It is disappointing to be beaten by Kerry so often but they are a fantastic team. They show up in a semi-final or final every year so you have to acknowledge that. They do see us a weaker team. That is fact. And we are a little below them. But I would say if we went and beat Kerry in a championship game, they wouldn’t begrudge us a Munster title because they have seen how close we have gotten . . . it might be a different story if we knocked them out.”
Galvin admits he took little personal satisfaction from his performance against Kerry in the 2010 Munster final. “When you are wrapped up in a team, you are still going into a losing dressingroom afterwards and everything else is forgotten about and I suppose the same as the three times we lost the Munster final, we have got so close and there were opportunities we could have taken and just missed out.”
A Munster medal remains a big ambition but the task never gets any easier – beating Cork and Kerry just to win a provincial championship is arguably the toughest task in football. But for now, his ambitions are more prosaic and immediate. Galvin just wants to become confident in his fitness again. He spent 10 years combining his football career with winters playing basketball at Superleague and first division level. His height and versatility made him a natural for the game but he credits the persistence of his schools coach Tommy Hehir with his development. Liam Kearns, the former Limerick manager, suggested Galvin had one of the quickest football minds he had come across and believed basketball had benefited his approach to football. Galvin says basketball transformed him from “a gangly 14-year-old who could hardly make the club team to getting on county teams in a few years.”
He also lined out for the Croom hurlers for years and given his height and athleticism, it is a wonder he passed under the radar of the Munster rugby teams. Of all the sports in Limerick, Munster is the team he pays the most attention to. He spoke to a rugby player who had gone through the cruciate ligament doubts when he was due to come back.
“I was never a windy player or one of those fellas who half went into things. But it is in your head and the only way to do it is to go out and play. A rugby player was telling me when he came back he was right nervous of it. And he caught a ball and went to kick a Garryowen and he was cleaned out and landed on the knee that was operated on. And the minute he was hit he thought, ‘I’m f**ked’. But he was fine and it was the best thing that could have happened to him. I think that’s the attitude.”
Unless Limerick fall victim to one of the greatest shock results in GAA history, this afternoon’s game will be a formality. From Limerick’s perspective, it is a hard game to approach. No team enjoys hammering another but the 46-points Fermanagh piled upon Kilkenny distorts the scoring average on the table. “It throws the whole league out of whack. What if other teams take it easy in the game and promotion comes down to scoring average? That will be on everyone’s mind.”
If John Galvin appears for a few minutes in the second half he will be happy. With a decade of Limerick service under his belt and plenty of days of extreme emotion in between, nothing could be better than a sleepy Division Four game in March. The very thought of it gets him animated in a way he wouldn’t have believed possible a year ago. It puts a 15-minute run in the ha’penny place.
“When people ask me how long I will play for . . . look, if I feel 100 per cent, I can’t see myself walking away from it . . . until I’m thrown out.”
