'I would do it all again' - Dunne reflects on Offaly career

Dunne admits low points took a personal toll

By Kevin Egan

If you spent your life watching Offaly football but you never met Nigel Dunne, you probably still felt that you knew him, at least a little bit.

To play intercounty football or hurling is to give your time, your energy, your body and your focus to the cause. Anyone failing to push those chips into the middle of the table will soon find that they’re playing the wrong game and that they will soon have to fold and walk away.

But then there are those scenes in movies where someone doesn’t just push in all their chips, they empty their wallet and throw their car keys on top of the pile, just for good measure.

That was how Nigel played football. Shamrocks and Offaly didn’t just get his time, his talent and his commitment, they got his heart and his soul, not to mention every emotion that he had in his being.

Frustration, ownership, angst, passion, they all went into the gear bag with his boots, towel and gum shield and then came out onto the grass with him. He played 91 times for the Offaly senior footballers in league and championship, more often than not at the top end of the pitch in the full-forward line, and yet even as things were happening 100 yards away at the other end, he had that air of a man who was feeling every kick of the ball and taking it personally.

None of this was misleading, or giving a false impression of who he was as an individual. The personality he put on display was exactly who he was, except that what we saw only scratched the surface. Some athletes talk of the separation of the person and the player, even if they do so solely as a self-preservation exercise.

Not here. Nigel the player and Nigel the person were one and the same, to the point that the player was the one steering the ship, the person was just along for the ride. He just hasn’t figured out yet if that’s a good thing or not.

“Looking back on my Offaly career now, I’d say it was frustrating,” he admits. “It feels like a very unsuccessful period in Offaly history, real dark, bad times”.

The player may have been steering the ship, but for the duration of his long career, Offaly football was a sea of choppy waters.

“I would have always envisaged myself winning All-Ireland medals, not playing in Division Three and Division Four. So you’d feel maybe unfulfilled, like you haven’t maxed out on your career. So let’s say frustrating for the vast majority of it, sprinkled with really enjoyable times,” he says.

Yet within that, there is no small amount of appreciation for having achieved what was in his case, the one and only thing that motivated and inspired him from a young age.

“I would do it all again in the morning. If someone came up and said you’d have to start from scratch and you’d get exactly the same outcome, I’d do it all over again because all I ever wanted to do was to play football for Offaly.

“Of course, there are regrets. If I had even got to one Leinster final with Offaly, even to play in one, I would have taken that over winning four All-Stars and four All-Irelands with Dublin. Year after year we were unsuccessful, but then every winter you’d have hope. When Amhrán na bhFiann is playing in Tullamore and you have an Offaly jersey on, there might be 4,000 people there or 200 but that doesn’t matter, it’s still a very emotional experience.

“I still treasure it, I couldn’t imagine any other feeling like it. This is where I’m from, my hobby is Offaly football, my work is Offaly football, if I'm talking to someone over a pint, I want to be talking about Offaly football. Is it a healthy thing? Probably not. Do I enjoy it? Yeah.”

As the conversation develops, unseen sides of playing intercounty football and living out your passion in front of the people of your home county start to emerge. Supporters might have seen Nigel Dunne on the pitch, but they didn’t see what came with the territory after the final whistle and the drive home. That said, for most of his career, his nearest and dearest didn’t see the full extent of it either.

“Even your biggest support network, my wife, my parents, my family, nobody understands the mental anguish, the mood swings. Being on a downer for three or four days after you lost, or you played poorly, or God forbid, both. Then you can’t concentrate in work, you’re at a loss trying to communicate with people. I don’t like using the word depressed, but you’re genuinely down.

“Then you play well and you win, and you’re on such a high. It’s unhealthy for the highs to be so high and for the lows to be so low.”

Suddenly, we’re in a different realm. It’s not that Nigel wished on a monkey’s paw to be a talented player capable of playing for his county and that he was granted his career at the cost of his sanity, but it’s painfully clear that each of those chips he splashed into the pot had to be paid for, and unlike some other players, he didn’t get any of them at a discount.

The usual currency is physical effort, and that toll was paid eventually. Over the course of the conversation Nigel reveals that as a young footballer he didn’t really understand what was needed, due to having as he puts it, “the body type and the genetics where you'd have to be constantly minding yourself”.

He credits Tom Cribbin for some outstanding man management and guidance in putting him on the right path, even if he says that he strayed from that path for a few seasons after the Clane man stepped away. Then when it came to making his comeback in 2023 after missing three full seasons, he describes the training that he put himself through in order to come back as “barbaric”.

However, while that physical commitment is a universal currency in the world of the athlete, there are those for whom self-doubt and introspection are not part of their mental makeup. Most older players will remember someone on their team or around the locality whose thought process didn’t extend beyond “get ball, see posts, kick between posts”, then rinse and repeat.

That type of player may have died out, but Nigel was the other extreme. For him, the ball might have been thrown in on a Sunday but he was playing the mental side of the game all week long.

“The week leading up to a big game, you’re so absent from real life. People have no idea how much time you spend alone with your own thoughts when you play intercounty football” he says.

“I’d often sit in a room and pull down the blinds, then it’s just you and every thought possible about the match and how it might go. I imagine it’s so counterproductive, as a coach I’m so different to that. I’m sure psychiatrists and psychologists would say that you’re feeding a huge amount of anxiety by isolating yourself to that degree.

“You’d run through every good and bad scenario in your head. People say to you to visualise and I often wonder is it that important, because I think it just burns up so much energy. Everyone tells me it’s good, but I don’t know. Maybe you have to be better at it than I was!”

“When you add different layers onto it, like being a free-taker and a score getter, there’s even more to it. You’re going out on that pitch in front of family and friends, and you feel like who you are as a person and as a man is about to be measured according to whether you can get the better of the man marking you. If a player got the better of me on the field, I was mortified.”

Measuring his career by the numbers, that should have left him in a good place. Out of the last 50 games where he started for Offaly, stretching all the way back to April of 2015, he got on the scoresheet in 48 of them. And now that he prepares to deepen his involvement in the world of management and coaching, he cites the value of the relationship between the player and the manager as absolutely crucial.

“I loved when I had the pressure to deliver and a manager backed you. When I was in my prime, I always felt that I will contribute, even if I’m not playing well. If I was poor for 40 or 45 minutes, I genuinely felt that this will come good for me. A huge part of that was knowing that someone you respected, someone whose opinion you valued, trusted in you to come good.

“I know there were people that would have said I was hard to manage, but certain managers definitely handled it. It was obvious that I was massively invested in football, I loved it probably more than anything else in my life. How could a manager not harness that type of energy? That'd be my thinking. And anyone that really did and backed me probably got rewards.

“Of course there’s a challenge. Anyone could manage a team of Ciarán McManuses who are genetic freaks and who do everything perfectly. But working with different people is what managing and coaching really is all about. If you want everyone the same, then you don't need a manager or a coach because that's easy.”

So does that mean he’s cracked the code? Or is it no different to the young Nigel Dunne that started out on his Offaly career as a minor in 2006, expecting that Sam Maguire would cross his path at some time in the future?

“I’ve no idea, but I will say this. I do believe that Nigel Dunne the coach and manager will be more successful than Nigel Dunne the player. Maybe I’m deluded and that’ll sound foolish in a few years, but I appreciate my time as a player and I’m ready to move on now, and I’m excited by it.”

Whether he will be a success or not remains to be seen. What we can say with confidence is that he will be all in, mind and body, because that’s the only way he’s ever known.