Two greats bowing out with very different tales to tell

Carlow’s Darragh Foley and James McCarthy of Dublin announced their respective inter county retirements on the same day a few weeks back. One of the national papers carried a piece in the days which followed lamenting how – understandably but nevertheless unfortunately – for one individual, media outlets were festooned with pages of coverage while the other – no less noble or admirable a servant – did well to command a few paragraphs. Now read on…

Two other decorated stars of their respective sporting arenas brought the curtain down on stellar careers. A pair of trojans who did everything it was possible to do in their chosen sport, yet the mechanics of how they went about asserting their individual greatness could scarcely have been more polarised.

On one hand, you had Brian Fenton who, from the time his Dublin career began was cast in a veneer of stardom. Hercules of the Hill. Darling of the Dubs.

I cannot be sure how many championship matches he played in before tasting defeat, but it was definitely a multiple of 10. And as for the losses, I’d venture they may not have even constituted a handful.

Now, I was only fortunate enough to see Brian Mullins play once in the flesh – what happened to be the last time  the great man togged out – but, between being raised on songs and stories and perusing the Decade Of The Dubs video, to this outside observer, the similarities between the two Brians were striking.

But then, there’s always another angle to a story. In this case, the Raheny club’s alacrity at producing Dublin midfielders/half forwards. From Ciaran Whelan to Brian Howard to Fenton. Yet the greatest feeling, as a lover of good football regardless of by whom it is played is a mixture of shock and sadness that the life of Dublin’s latest beatified Brian has – in a sporting sense at least – come to a close when gut feeling is he still had so much more to give. Moreover, with McCarthy having already taken his leave of the big stage, it is not unreasonable to ponder a dearth of leadership figureheads in the camp of two shades of blue.

However, from another angle, you can but admire (a) the truly remarkable haul of accolades the 31-year-old bows as the holder of and (b) that he managed to navigate his way through such a brilliant career without encountering any injuries of note.

With that in mind, and knowing how consistently Raheny have knocked on the door in the Dublin SFC, with their totem now available fulltime, their chances of picking said lock are surely only coming to their most fervent.

So to Part II of the latest retirement double whammy. A completely different sport. A part of the world hundreds of thousands of sr away. Yet in terms of personal and influence on their own code and indeed the wider sporting world, thsuccesse stories of Fenton and Spanish tennis star Rafa Nadal are more commensurate than may be at all obvious.

Like Fenton, the Spaniard had won every major honour in his sport multiple times over. Likewise, where Fenton was confronted by, among others, David Moran and Aidan O’Shea and Conor Glass and Conn Kilpatrick and Paul Conroy, Nadal would torment and be tormented by Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Andy Murray.

If Croke Park was Fenton’s fortified fiefdom, his tennis counterpart resembled a caged lion if there was a perceived challenge to his clay court control.

Fenton’s closing balance read – 7 All Ireland SFC, 10 Leinster SFC, 5 NFL, while the southpaw Spaniard ended up with the following title haul:

22 Grand Slams, 14 of which were garnered on the combatant’s beloved clay courts of Rolland Garos in Paris which of course were the manifestation of Rafa’s utter domination of the French Open over the years.

However, where there stories take drastically different routes is that – whereas I can hardly recall Fenton having (m)any serious injuries throughout his glory-laden career, but in contrast what Nadal achieved in a glittering career is all the more staggering when you consider how much thereof was ravaged by a succession of injuries.

While there’s no problem accepting that it is indeed folly to muse that we might never see their likes again, methinks it would be equally fairly universally recognised that there are now four extremely large sporting shoes to be filled. The pleasure has been all ours.