Castle man
April 30, 2011The lot of the substitute can be a strange one. You are at once part of the collective but outside the team. You receive the awards when the medals are distributed, but the prestige can pass you by. For Russell Casey, a fine footballer for Castledaly for the better part of two decades, that was his experience of 2004.
In the history of Westmeath football, that summer stands out like a beacon. Like a Halloween firework, Westmeath sparked and sizzled but all too quickly were plunged into darkness again. Casey was part of the panel for seven years and experienced the lows as well as the highs. He would like to have played a bigger role, but still insists that he holds something he never thought possible when he first graduated to the Lake County senior panel in the 1990s.
"Of course, you'd like to have been on the team but it didn't go for me that year," he tells Maroon & White. "I remember I injured my shoulder in maybe the first game of the year, a challenge match, and I was out for about two months. I got back fit and played in a couple of challenges and Paidi seemed to be fairly impressed with how I was playing, so when we went up to Omagh to play Tyrone(the all-Ireland champions at the time) in a league game I was selected at centre back. I was marking Brian McGuigan that day. It was a gale force wind and we played against it in the first half and I don't think we scored. We were seven or eight points down but we still thought we'd give them a good rattle in the second half with the wind behind us. But they absolutely annihilated us. We couldn't live with their short hand-passing game. I didn't really get much of a look-in after that to be honest even though I had a good year with the club.
"But still, to win a Leinster with Westmeath, we'd never have thought it was possible when we started our careers. It was a huge achievement. We had a great team around then and we definitely deserved to get something out of it, but it's probably a pity that we didn't win another one or two. I think we had the team to do it. We could have even made a run for the All-Ireland in 2004 but after we won the Leinster we went out against Derry in the quarter-finals and we had probably had our day in the sun. We had put everything into winning the Leinster, and we didn't do ourselves justice against Derry."
Paidi O Sé is a man and manager who falls in the category of either messiah or villain, and seldom in between. What are Casey's memories of the iconic Kerryman? "We had a good panel at the time and it had been a good panel for two or three years before that, but there's no doubt Paidi was a big influence in getting us over the line," he says. "He wasn't every player's type of manager but get him into a dressing room before a game and there's nothing like him. He's very inspirational - any lad who's any way motivated at all, he'd have them going out through a wall, so himself and Tomas O Flatharta, who was doing all the physical training then and got us very fit, both of them had a big bearing on the success we had."
At club level, Russell almost missed out on the biggest day in Castledaly's history. A Senior electrical engineer with Mercury Engineering, he was dispatched to Qatar in 2005 to work on a number of projects and spent three years in Qatar, only returning in the late spring of 2008.
"We had got to the final [in 2006] the year after I went over to the Middle East, and I was home that summer for a while and played a couple of games. The team were going well at that stage and had a great chance of beating Tyrrellspass in the championship final, but they probably threw it away the first day. Unfortunately I wasn't around for it. I came back in May 2008, got married that summer and won the championship a month later, so it was an unbelievable time really. I had been playing a bit of football out in Qatar, and a bit of soccer as well, so I was in decent enough shape and managed to get back into it when I came up."
Garrycastle, who were going for a fourth senior title in the space of five years, provided the opposition, with Casey coming on as a half-time replacement to help Castledaly come out on top by just two points (0-10 to 0-8) at the end of a tense tussle. "Garrycastle have always been the team we've strived to match over the last ten or 12 years," says Russell. "To us they're the team to beat every year when we go out in the championship and to win it that year against them made it even more special. They had disappointed us a lot of times so it was finally good to get one over them."
Alongside him on the winning side that year was his brother John Paul, who for several years was regarded by many as one of the best forwards in the county. Now just 31, JP's career is already at an end, the result of a long-standing hip problem. Another notable of the club, Derek Heavin, who was also a member of that 2004 Leinster-winning side, is also crocked after a shocking injury sustained in the 2010 Leinster championship against Louth. Losing players of that calibre was always going to affect a rural club such as Castledaly, as Russell Casey attests.
"The problem we have is that a lot of the team are starting to get old together. A lot of the lads won U12, U14, U16 together so they'd be a tight enough group, they came through used to winning. I'd be a couple of years older than them but they came through and knew what it took to win. We've had a few retirements now and a lot of injuries. My own brother John Paul was a big force for us every game - we could be guaranteed a hatful of scores from him in every game. He's had severe problems with his hip, something similar that forced Colly Moran from Dublin to retire as well. The chances are that he'll need a hip replacement in the future, so he had no choice to pack it in. He's only around 31 now so he had three or four good years to give at club level, but he's gone nearly two years as it is. I think we're going to lose Derek Heavin now too, he's more or less finished now because of his injury and is a big loss to the club and county. James Galvin has retired too. It's hard to replace people like that, especially in a small community like Castledaly. We're not blessed with large numbers.
"We still have a good enough team, we're up for the challenge every year and I'm sure it'll be no different this time but with the way the economy is it's hard. There's not a lot to keep them around. Lads all over the country are heading to Australia or Canada and I'm sure we'll be no different as a club. Years ago when you were in college you'd have no problem getting summer work but there's nothing for lads now, so it's going to be hard for clubs everywhere."
As for his own position, Russell insists that he will give it one more year. "I'm still chipping away at it but it's not getting any easier. I went back at the start of January last year and it was probably too early for me. It's a long year, I'm working in Enniskillen at the moment and it's a lot of driving, which is nearly harder on you than the training. I appreciate the rest nowadays, I nearly try not to train the week before a match so that I'll be fresh for it.
"I'll give it one more year. I have to take every game as it comes. My wife and I have a small boy now as well, Oscar, who's nearly 18 months, and between him and work, it's not easy to put the bag in the car and head off to training. You lose the hunger at certain times of the year, but when the long evenings come in it gets a lot easier, so you just have to keep trying hard."
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Russell Casey is lead electrical engineer with Mercury Engineering. Based at Sandyford Industrial Estate in Dublin, Mercury Engineering employ approximately 1000 people and have offices in Glasgow, London, Paris, Moscow, Qatar and Bahrain. Tweet
