You've probably been to a night club or pub and witnessed a past or present GAA star doing his thing and trading on his celebrity and thought, 'Hey that's probably not such a bad life'. So to say I found Dessie Farrell's portrait of the modern intercounty player jaw-dropping would be an understatement. In his conversation with Vincent Hogan in today's Indo, he puts it in no uncertain terms that to play intercounty today is to live a pretty meaningless life where the black dog is never too far from the front gate.
"We're finding that a lot of players are just on this merry-go-round, just ghosting through their lives. They mightn't necessarily be the extreme cases where there is depression or alcohol abuse, but a lot of them are on this carousel and don't know what it is they want to do or where they want to go. There's this chaos in their heads and it's camouflaged by this inter-county career."
I don't have any empirical info on this trend so can't say one way or another if Farrell is right. I would have thought that playing sport at a near-professional level might have provided something akin to a spiritual experience, but according Farrell, sport is just a veil that keeps a player's focus away from the abject depression of modern Ireland.
So I guess we're all in the same boat after all.
