The Dublin midfielder says his club’s run to only their third ever semi-final has taken him by surprise
was on stage at a fundraising lunch for his club Raheny. Dave McIntyre was the MC and had already induced a sharp intake of breath around the room when he asked Mayo goalie – and now Raheny clubman – Robbie Hennelly if his intercounty career was over. Straight out. Just like that. “I was laughing,” Fenton says now. “I was like, ‘Jesus Dave, no mercy there…’”
“Now, that was after we lost a group game to Thomas Davis and now we’re about a month down the road and we’re in a semi-final so maybe I was being a bit pessimistic. But at the same time, if you go around telling everyone that you’re going to win a senior championship, then you can create the perception that we’re doing everything right and that we have everything sorted here. But we don’t.
“When you have three intercounty players, we should on paper be competing,” he says. “But there’s so much more behind the scenes that you need. Coaching, standards, fundraising, facilities – that’s all stuff that we’re behind in and that we’ve always needed to get better at. “We’ve never had a big scalp. We’ve always been third in the group. We’ve had a nice draw this year – it was a tough enough group and we had some great wins. But it’s great. If I ever look back I’ll say, ‘Look we got to a semi-final’. And look, I hate mediocrity, obviously I want to win as much as I can. But at the same time you have to be realistic and point out where our club is, compared to the big guns.
GAA All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final, Croke Park, Dublin 30/7/2023 Dublin vs Kerry Dublin’s Brian Fenton celebrates with the Sam Maguire Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/James Crombie “To some extent, maybe,” he says. “I think for the players who had been there through 2021 and 2022 – myself, Ciarán , John Small, James McCarthy – the hurt that we had built up meant that even if no one had come back, I think we would have had a bounce this year. Just internally we were like, ‘You know what? F**k this.’ I was like, ‘Fenton, you’re gone a bit shit now. What’s the story with you? you’re only 29.
Would it have been enough without all those All-Ireland winners coming back into the dressingroom? Maybe. Maybe not. What he does know is that everyone had to sew their own corner of the quilt and every stitch counted in the end. “He’s just a shark around the place. And Pat Gilroy is a bit like that too. Jack, less so – he’s just that bit more social. And Mannion the same. Whereas Clucko is straight in there. Literally that night, we were having a meeting afterwards, just a generic meeting, maybe a review or something. And there he was talking straight away! Part of me was even going, ‘Bit soon there Clucko.’
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