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Parnell Park on a Monday afternoon and Mick Fitzsimons sits at the centre of a media huddle, discussing a rare county final for the Cuala footballers.
It’s an otherwise empty room but the recording devices are still working hard to pick him up and you have to remind yourself that no one else, not a single player in the history of Gaelic football, has won more All-Ireland medals than the softly spoken medical doctor.
His mother, he says, has all nine of those senior medals from a brilliant Dublin career stored away at home somewhere. Maybe he’ll make it 10 in 2025 – he’s undecided at the moment about whether to continue for another season in blue – but it’s principally about the club right now and the pursuit of an elusive county title.
Truth be told, the queries about his future plans are already starting to get a little old. And it’s only October.
“It’s just an easy thing for people to ask I suppose, if you run out of questions, you can just ask,” shrugged the 35-year-old. “I’m just living day to day. You just have to shrug your shoulders. People think you’re being coy but you’re actually not.”
If you had to lay down a long-term wager over the years, you’d probably have predicted that Fitzsimons would finish up his playing days without a county SFC medal with Cuala.
Rewind back to 2017 and when the decision was taken to restructure the county SFC for 2018, the Dalkey outfit, flying high on the hurling scene at the time, were effectively relegated to the lower tier SFC 2 despite making the overall quarter-finals in 2017.
Results from previous seasons were factored in too and down they went. Thomas Davis suffered the same fate and fought, in vain, all the way to the Disputes Resolution Authority.
In Cuala’s case, they resolved to earn promotion back to the top flight by winning SFC 2 and duly did so in 2020. But given the pandemic, promotion was parked that year. It felt like the Gods conspiring.
Cuala eventually won the SFC 2 in 2021 and, after putting former Mayo forward Austin O’Malley in as manager ahead of 2022, have made steady progress in each of the last three seasons, reaching two SFC 1 quarter-finals and now reaching this weekend’s final.
Kilmacud Crokes will provide stiff opposition and Cuala will be considerable underdogs, but this could well be Fitzsimons’ one and only chance to tick this box.
“When we were in the intermediate championships, this was always the goal,” said Fitzsimons. “I remember having a meeting and we were saying our goal should be to win a senior championship at some stage and people were like, ‘Does Jim Gavin not always say to stick to the process?!’ I was just like, ‘I think you’re taking that out of context’. Everyone who played with Dublin understood what their goal was. You have to mention it at some stage. Then you can start sticking to the process!
“We’re a long time on the road, a lot of us in Cuala. We planted that idea early on, that if we could get our act together, we could do it. It’s probably taken longer than we would have liked to get our chance.”
By Sunday, we’ll have spent most of the weekend poring over the attractive new trial rules for football which will be used in the four interprovincial games at Croke Park. All of those games will be televised. Then it will be back to the regular rules on Sunday. Even with all the talent on show – Kilmacud Crokes will have Shane Walsh, Paddy O’Connor and Paul Mannion in attack, three of the very best in the game – it could feel like a balloon being popped returning to what will probably be a cautious Dublin SFC final.
Fitzsimons hasn’t got any hard and fast opinions about what should, or shouldn’t, be changed about the game rules-wise.
“I’d trust Jim and Eamonn Fitzmaurice and their group that they’ve looked into it in great detail,” said Fitzsimons of the FRC’s proposed ‘rules enhancements’ for the game.
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