22-years of age. 1-9 to your name. Captaining your club to their first ever county senior title…
It really doesn’t get any better than that and on a wet, windy Sunday in Salthill, Moycullen’s Dessie Conneely lived the dream.
“It’s the greatest day of my life,” he said triumphantly afterwards, as the people of Moycullen found true joy in the October elements.
But this Sunday from heaven was far from a bolt out of the blue, Moycullen had been building and Dessie Conneely had been inspiring.
Prior to the decider, he’d been one of the top scorers in the Galway senior football championship with a hatful of goals and points scored. A couple of years back, he was chosen to captain the Galway minor football team while in college, he led Marino to an All-Ireland title, scoring 4-2, yes 4-2 in the Corn na Mac Léinn Cup final.
22 is young for a club captain but Conneely quite clearly revels in the responsibility and on Monday’s GAA Hour, Colm Parkinson, Conan Doherty and Conor Heneghan discussed the leadership shown by this young man and the value of trusting a capable youngster to lead the team.
22-years of age
Club captain
Scores 1-9 out of 2-12 to inspire Moycullen to their first ever Galway senior title
Dessie Conneely shouldn't have to buy a pint for years 👑 pic.twitter.com/SBOHpuy8HH
— GAA JOE (@GAA__JOE) October 4, 2020
“The great advantage of having a young fella like Dessie as your captain is that generally your captain is an old fella and the young lads look at him going ‘aw this lad onto us again,’ whereas if it’s a young fella, he can get around the younger fellas, even the lads with attitudes, he can get them on board,” said Wooly.
“Generally the older fellas will have a good attitude too, and then you can have your whole team and squad rowing in the one direction, rather than your 31-year-old shouting at the 19-year-olds going ‘lads will ye ever cop on?”
“You’re obviously going to have to have leadership qualities, you’re not going to just ask some young headbanger to become captain.”
In Moycullen, they were all pushing for the same goal.
“Exactly,” says Conan Doherty, “and that kind of situation is rife in clubs that don’t succeed, where that disconnect grows and people start to blame each other. If it’s not forwards blaming backs, it’s old people blaming young people.
“On top of that, Dessie Conneely leads from the front too. He was man of the match, he scored 1-9. It’s his team now for the next ten years and all the boys his age group are going to follow him up…”
Meanwhile, Conor Heneghan feels the captain should reflect the age profile of the team and agrees that Don Connellan’s choice to name Conneely, who was added to Páiric Joyce’s Galway senior panel at the start of the year, was an inspired one.
“The captain I feel, should be representative of the age profile of the team, so if there’s a lot of lads in their early 20s on the team, there should be a fella like that leading them as captain. The last thing you want is a generational gap growing with a 30-year-old falling into ‘aw we did this in our day, why aren’t ye like this?’. Especially too, if you’ve someone as inspirational as Dessie Conneely on the field in his performance, and just seeing his speech afterwards too, he seems like a fella the whole team could easily get behind…”
Showing faith in the youth certainly worked out well for the men of Moycullen.
You can listen to Monday’s GAA Hour Show here.
