Diarmuid Connolly saw this coming.
He saw it coming from miles away.
Diarmuid Connolly has had a lot of teammates in his time as a Dublin player. He’s played alongside the country’s finest footballers for years and he’s trained alongside them too.
He shared a dressing room with experienced leaders like Alan Brogan and Rory O’Carroll down through the years, he sat beside prodigiously talented youngsters like Con O’Callaghan and Paul Mannion in team meetings more recently.
2017 was Connolly’s tenth season as a Dublin senior footballer and by that stage he’d seen enough and he knew enough to be able recognise the lads who had the stuff required to make it and indeed, the lads who didn’t.
Brian Howard had the stuff.
It’s May 2017 and the Dublin seniors are just after getting a kick up the arse by losing the League final to Kerry. The first round of the Leinster championship is only a month away and now Jim Gavin has the motivation of that League final loss to use against them.
It’s another training session sometime in the month of May. Training is always tough at this time of the year. The sun is beating down, it’s that really sweaty kind of weather where your mouth is dry at all times and your jersey is dripping.
Dublin had just won the under-21 All-Ireland and Jim Gavin brought a couple of these lads straight in. Probably to keep things fresh and to let the senior lads know they had enthusiastic youngsters snapping at their heels.
Some of them had been in here before. Like Con O’Callaghan who’d featured briefly in the 2016 championship but for the rest of them, this is a whole new ball-game and you couldn’t really blame them for being starstruck putting their socks and togs on in the dressing room beside men like Diarmuid Connolly.
They can’t let this distract them though, they’re here to make an impression in the highest standard gaelic football training sessions in the country.
Brian Howard made that impression.
Diarmuid Connolly told the story well when he was interviewed on the Hill 16 Army podcast last year.
“Keep your eye out for one guy, he is a lad from Raheny, Brian Howard,” Connolly said eight months ago now.
This was before many of us had even heard the Raheny man’s name.
He’d played for the Dublin minors and under-21s up to then but he was still only 21, he was still only a small fish in this big pond. Yet Connolly was able to speak about him in effusive, definite terms. This lad was coming and he was coming like a train on tracks.
He’d caught Connolly’s eye in those early training sessions. He’d been doing what he’d done for the minors and the 21s, he’d been going about his business quietly, effectively.
“Even in training, he is a leader,” went the St Vincent’s man.
“He isn’t a loud guy in your face or anything like that but he is a leader with the way he goes about his work.”
And Connolly knew that this man was on the cusp of it.
“He came in last year, he was on the U21 team. He is going to come on next year. In the next six or eight months, Brian Howard is going to put his hand up for a jersey,” he said.
“He came on this year in the championship and didn’t put a foot wrong. I was actually surprised he didn’t play a little bit more to be honest.”
Seven months ago, this man passed up on the team holiday so he could prove himself in the O’Byrne Cup.
They scoffed at him six months ago when he wouldn’t play with DIT in a Sigerson Quarter final so he’d be able to play for Dublin in the League that weekend.
Some wondered why he’d miss out on the craic on the buses, the post-match parties, all that Sigerson stuff when the likes of that man Connolly were going to come in and take his place when it really mattered in the championship.
That wasn’t a deluded decision. It was a determined one.
And now Brian Howard is getting just reward for following his convictions.
Eight months have passed and now Brian Howard is only one more big performance away from a Footballer of the Year award.
Best of luck Tyrone with trying to stop him.
