GAELIC GAMES:Seen as the supporting act in a cast of stellar forwards, Patrick Maher is more than a power runner, writes MALACHY CLERKIN
HE’S NOT the man you think he is. Or at least he’s not the man you think you’re calling him. He’s not Patrick ‘Bonnar’ Maher at all. He’s Patrick ‘Bonner’ Maher. The spelling difference might seem like teeniest nit to pick but it’s crucial here. A game-changer, not unlike the man himself.
To explain. Ask anybody where his nickname comes from and they’ll shrug and give you a look that says, “Well, d’uh.” A thump and thunder Tipp forward? Happiest with the shoulders low and filching ball he has no right to? With a name like that? Sure it can only be Cormac Bonnar.
Not so. Turns out that when the young Patrick Maher first dived about on the lawn at the family home in Lorrha, the 1994 World Cup was on the TV. That tournament didn’t end with what you’d call Packie Bonner’s finest hour (his shoulders must still sag at the very mention of the name Wim Jonk) but to the five-year-old Patrick Maher there was no such thing as a clanger. When you’re a five-year-old who likes to do goals, the Ireland goalkeeper is a hero no matter what happens. So they called him Bonner.
You can see how folk would assume otherwise, of course. When Cormac Bonnar won his two All-Irelands with Tipp in 1989 and 1991, he was the heavy lifter at full-forward for the men around him. A hewer of wood and a drawer of water. In a Christmas tree with decorations like Michael Cleary, John Leahy, Pat Fox and Nicky English hanging from it, he and Declan Ryan formed the trunk. He won All Stars both years he won All-Irelands – it was no accident that on both occasions one of his corner-forwards was the hurler of the year.
Times change, formations change but roles tend to stay the same. Eoin Kellys and Lar Corbetts still need Bonner Mahers. Always will. Very few leading men look as good without a best supporting actor nearby. In terms of skill, there’s more hurling in him than there was in Cormac Bonnar. In terms of influence, the similarities are uncanny.
“He’s the heartbeat of that Tipperary team for me anyway,” says Michael Ryan, selector during the Liam Sheedy era. “He’s brought a huge energy and a huge honesty to his play and I think it has had an effect on the rest of the forward line since he’s broken though.
“That’s what the man does. He doesn’t do non-work days – if he has a bad day, it won’t be because he wasn’t trying. The minimum you’ll get from Bonner any day is 100 per cent effort. He’s a very difficult player to beat over an hour. You might beat him for a few minutes here and there in a match but you won’t see him off.”
Ryan was impressed with him from the start. Maher is from Lorrha, about as far north as you can go while still being in Tipperary. Birr is a few miles to the east and Portumna an even fewer miles to the west. Ryan reckons nobody has further to travel to training in Thurles, a 90-odd mile round trip. “It’s a dog of a drive but he never missed a minute in my time. He’s hugely committed and just lives for hurling.”
In Lorrha, they knew what they had from early on. As soon as he passed 16, he was fast-tracked into the senior team, then playing in the intermediate championship. In 2007, with him fresh off an All-Ireland minor win playing at full-forward for Tipp, Lorrha were a point down with a minute to go in the North Tipperary Intermediate final against Ballina. While older heads wondered what to do, Maher sprinted out to collect a ball on the 40, turned for goal, got to the 21 and, well, they wouldn’t still be telling the story if he didn’t find the bottom corner. He was a fortnight short of his 18th birthday.
Still, they worried for him at times. He was fit and strong and fast and loved to run with the sliotar. Maybe loved it a little too much. Putting the head down and barrelling on was fine at club level but do it too often once you make the leap and intercounty defenders will turn highways into cul-de-sacs quick enough. It wasn’t that he was greedy, more that his peripheral vision had never properly been worked on.
Maybe the soundest lesson he got came in his championship debut last summer. Drafted in after the timbering down in Cork, Maher started the qualifier against Wexford. Late on, with the game nestling neatly in the bag, he burst between two Wexford defenders and drew a third just as he crossed the 21.
Maybe he saw the headlines or maybe he just saw nothing only the goal. One way or the other, what he didn’t see were the two All Stars screaming for the ball inside. He took a pot that was saved by Noel Carton. Cue a pincer movement from Kelly and Corbett, the pair of them fit to be tied.
“It was my first game,” he said at the end of the year. “Larry and Eoin weren’t too happy with me because I went for my own goal and I missed. The goalie pulled off a good save in fairness. Larry and Eoin came over to me after it, very cross. I learned so much on my first day.”
Three games later against Galway in the quarter-final, he pounced on Donal Barry’s attempt to tap a high ball down to himself and straight away looked up as he broke free. A swift handpass to Kelly alakhazamed Tipp’s first goal of the afternoon out of thin air. Immediately the flag was raised, Kelly came running out to grab Maher and shouted, “Your goal, your goal!” into his face.
“That’s been a huge part of Bonner’s development,” says Ryan. “The guys really bought into what it is he does and they’ve encouraged him. One of the biggest reasons he has developed is that the best players we have in Tipp, the biggest players like Eoin and Lar, they’ve put their arms around him and said, ‘Look Bonner, if you keep doing what you’re doing, it’ll help us do what we need to do.’
“There’s a danger that you tend to stereotype a guy like Bonner and it becomes gospel that you’re going to get one product out of him and that’s endeavour. But he’s a really fine hurler too. Okay, he might not necessarily be the lad you’d most like to see take the last puck if you needed a point but he’s definitely the fella you’d like to see chasing it down. That’s not to degrade the fella or underestimate him. But his absolute strength is his bravery and his hard work.”
That’s broad-stroke stuff, the kind of thing any half-interested observer can pick out. For Ryan, though, players like Maher are changing the way hurling is played. Set free to roam by Eamon O’Shea initially and still given licence by the current management, he’s at the vanguard of their perpetual-motion game, one that calls for fairly refined tactical nous on top of everything else.
“All good teams expect the early part of a game to be frantic,” says Ryan. “But they also expect that it will settle down after a while and they’ll be able to play their own game. But there’s a new breed of hurler around now and Patrick is at the forefront of them, lads who will not let you settle into a game. He’s constantly moving, constantly switching position, picking up possession out in midfield, in the centre, wherever he wants to go.
“And defenders hate that. It takes them out of their comfort zone. More than that, it takes a defence as a whole out of its comfort zone. If Bonner is drifting across to pick up a ball, the wing-back doesn’t want to follow him.
“But if he does it a few times and eventually his man goes with him, then you all of a sudden have a corner back getting very edgy. There’s a big gap in front of him now that he doesn’t like. That’s what Bonner does. He makes teams unsettled and worried.”
They say that in Napoleon’s army, even the lowliest private carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. You get the feeling Bonner Maher would have fared well in that kind of set-up.
