On the line looking in was how it ended, Derek Savage hadn’t envisaged it any other way.
At the beginning of the year you see, the idea was not to play but to manage. By the end, he was a county championship winning player manager. A threatening half forward on the Cortoon Shamrocks team, scoring points and kicking passes by day, thinking tactics and dreaming team-talks by night.
You’d have to go a long way to find another one of those, but Savo has always been one of a kind.
During the lock-down, he was inspired and in the Galway intermediate championship, he double-jobbed his way to glory.
“I kind of got an appetite for playing at the time of the lock down. I was in good shape and I said I’d train with the lads and see if I was good enough to make it,” he says now, two days after winning his third Galway intermediate championship medal – the first of those came last century – in 1999.
“I suppose I would be (a fitness fanatic.) I do a lot of running anyway, the kind of long distance, endurance stuff, 5ks and 10ks – I do a lot of those anyway whether I was playing football or not. Being that bit smaller as well, the joints are under less pressure, and while I’ve had hamstring and muscle injuries, there was nothing too severe such as hips and knees. I’ve been lucky that way.
“The other side of it is that football is such a power game now, starting and stopping, acceleration – that’s when the body really feels it when you’re up against someone like Shane Walsh and he puts the burners on, every sinew in the body was straining then…”
42 years of age, won an All-Ireland in '98…Derek Savage is still going strong for @CortoonShamrock as player manager ✊
And the burst of pace hasn't gone anywhere yet ⚡️https://t.co/DRhxVVCJMY
— GAA JOE (@GAA__JOE) September 29, 2020
But Savage, as he has so often done over the course of a career that stretches back to Galway’s memorable 1998 All-Ireland triumph, managed just fine.
“I won’t say it’s easy. I had a very good backroom team who covered most of the stuff that needed to be done. But especially when you’re pushing on, it takes longer to recover from knocks and so on and when you’re combining that with tactics and getting the team right… it’s all-consuming.”
“The water breaks did help this year, so if there were big decisions to be made, we made them at the water break or at half-time. Apart from that, we had a runner and with good lads on the line too, they made decisions as they saw it. When you’re playing yourself you just can’t see what’s going on…trying to analyse is impossible to be honest. For the first couple of games, I wasn’t really getting involved in the game at all. I was struggling but the guys on the management team said to me just focus on your own game, that’s the best thing you can do for the team now. That really helped me and in the later stages, I was able to focus a bit more…”
In 1998, Derek Savage won an All-Ireland with Galway 🇶🇦
In 2020, he inspired @CortoonShamrock to Galway intermediate glory as player manager, scoring freely throughout the championship from wing forward.
— GAA JOE (@GAA__JOE) October 5, 2020
A scoring return of 1-7 (1-3 from play) in the championship tells its own story, Savage still has the burst and the brain to unlock a defence.
“I absolutely love the club championships. Lads put so much into it all around the country. The Covid thing nearly added to it too, with county players with their clubs all year.
“I’d say it will take me the winter to recover…I’m not sure I’d recommend it but it’s been a rollercoaster, a brilliant experience. Obviously when you win, it papers over everything but it’s been so enjoyable.”
For the Cortoon Shamrocks, they’re back at the top table of Galway club football once more and in a place where football is a religion, that means everything.
“It’s a half-parish, Cortoon, it’s on the outskirts of Tuam. There would be very few town guys, it’s a very rural club and all we have really is the pub, the church and the pitch. It’s a very small community and football is the only sport we play, but it’s been fighting above its weight for years and it’s great to be back there now with those senior clubs. Realistically, are we going to be winning a senior championship, highly unlikely, but it’s great for our younger lads to be playing at the top level in Galway, measuring ourselves against the best players, whether it’s making a quarter or a semi-final or whatever we can do!”
As for Savage, he’ll see how the body heels over the winter before making a call on next year but on Sunday, the view from the sideline was just fine.
“What was really lovely about Sunday was there was a guy there who started all year but didn’t start in the final. He came on for me in the last 15 minutes and kicked one of the key scores, so it was really good from that perspective that the team won on the field, and I was on the sideline at the end, I just felt it was a fitting end to it all…”
