Waterford GAA Thread - Mod note post #1
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Sunday Times
There is a 21-second sequence early in last Sunday’s game where Austin Gleeson is reduced to a double espresso with a Red Bull chaser. Conor Lehane is about to shoot at the Waterford goal, 25 metres out, when Gleeson arrives from his blind side and makes a clean block; the ball breaks to Seamus Harnedy, ten yards away, and Gleeson keeps going, flattening the Cork player with a shoulder, then crouching over him while Harnedy lies prone on the grass, trying to get rid of the unpinned grenade.
The ball ping-pongs for a few seconds in a force field of bodies, before Cork recover it and Niall O’Leary, Gleeson’s chaperone for the afternoon, shapes for a shot at goal. Gleeson charges at the Cork defender, executes another perfectly timed block with his hurley, and makes a body-hit on O’Leary in the same movement. When the ball goes dead Brendan Cummins in the RTE commentary is in raptures.
“The difference between winning and losing in the modern game is what Austin Gleeson did there for his team,” Cummins said. “He’s playing at centre forward but he’s back in his own full back line. He turned a Cork lad upside down to get a block in, and got another block in to get the ball up the pitch. That is the level of work rate that every manager is looking for. Austin Gleeson provided huge leadership there for his team.”
About 50 minutes later, in the same neighbourhood of Walsh Park, Gleeson was sent off on a second yellow card after rolling around in a loveless embrace with Robert Downey. Repeated viewings of the replay from the high camera behind the goal seem to show that Gleeson initiated the clench. There was no violence involved, but it was impetuous and foolish — the referee no choice.
“It was always going to be dangerous when Austin got that first yellow card,” Cummins said in commentary. Everybody who has paid attention to Gleeson’s career would have grasped that sense of jeopardy. According to a local media tally it was the tenth time that Gleeson had been sent off in his adult career in competitive matches: six times for his club Mount Sion, three times for Waterford, and once for Waterford IT in the Fitzgibbon Cup. For such an outrageously talented and flamboyant player, it is a startling disciplinary profile.
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Throughout Gleeson’s career there has been tension between the angels and the devil in his game. Acknowledging that conflict was the starting point. One of the selectors on the Waterford minor team that won the 2013 All-Ireland remembers ringing Gleeson’s dad after the first round against Tipperary, when Gleeson had become entangled with a Tipp player; nothing terrible happened, but the interaction had been needless.
“If things went against him he could lose his mind a little bit,” the selector says. “He used to get embroiled in situations, and when he got distracted, his hurling suffered.”
For all of Gleeson’s coaches the challenge was to harness that spikiness and convert it into renewable energy. After Gleeson gave a mesmerising performance in the 2016 Munster semi-final — his Hurler of the Year season — the Waterford manager, Derek McGrath, said: “He’s at his best when he’s angry and bitter.”
In an interview a couple of weeks later, Gleeson elaborated on that. “It’s weird,” he said, “if I’m angry I always seem to play well and I don’t feel as tired. I’m trying to get myself angry for every day now, but I don’t want to go over the line of being angry and do something stupid. I need to keep it calm. Then raise it a bit.”
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Nobody wanted to purge the devil from his make-up for fear of what might be lost. It brings to mind something Aidan O’Brien once said about Kieren Fallon, when he was the stable jockey at Ballydoyle. “Part of what makes him so brilliant,” O’Brien said, “is that little bit of madness.” But what it meant, sometimes, was that Gleeson was walking a tightrope.
“He needs to be careful,” the former Clare captain Anthony Daly wrote in 2016. “Gleeson does live on the edge.” Four years later the former Kilkenny corner back Jackie Tyrell addressed the same theme: “His work rate looks to have gone up and he is bringing an edge to his tackling. He needs to control that side of things.” Daly and Tyrell both played for teams that traded in edginess; there was a skill in that too.
Gleeson has been lucky once in a while. He should have been sent off in the 2015 All-Ireland quarter final on a second yellow, and he should have sent off in the 2017 All-Ireland semi-final on a straight red, for yanking Luke Meade’s helmet clean off his head.
Two Waterford players had already been suspended for helmet or faceguard interference that year. And yet, in the heat of battle, he couldn’t stop himself. Having dodged that bullet, Gleeson scored one of the greatest goals ever seen in Croke Park. That afternoon was a perfect distillation of the wonder in him, and the weakness.
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Some of his dismissals have come in clusters. In 2020 he was sent off in a club championship match just a couple of minutes after the throw-in; Mount Sion over-turned the red card on appeal, but having been reprieved Gleeson was sent off again a week later, this time on a double yellow.
Had he not learned? The same thought must have been coursing through Liam Cahill’s mind last Sunday. After Gleeson was sent off in the League semi-final for a mindless, feathery jab of the hurley, Waterford decided not to appeal; striking with minimal force is an incredibly hard offence to over-turn, and the video evidence was conclusive.
Gleeson was outstanding in that match, just has he was last Sunday. When Cahill was asked to reflect on his latest sending off, he reached for diplomatic language first, and then he was blunt: “If it was warranted [the second yellow] it’s bitterly, bitterly disappointing. We’ll do our best to address it and try to fix it again, but it seems to be falling on deaf ears at this stage.”
Do other teams target the fault line in Gleeson’s temperament? It would be naive to assume otherwise. “Niall O’Leary and Austin Gleeson are having a running battle off the ball,” Cummins said in commentary, very early in the game last Sunday. “Austin is getting good treatment from Niall O’Leary – something he would have expected.” As it happened, three Cork players were booked for incidents involving Gleeson, though not O’Leary.
None of that stuff would be a surprise to Gleeson. For the guts of a decade he has been Waterford’s most talented player: mercurial, explosive, dazzling, vulnerable. Last Sunday, Cork couldn’t sto
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