Making the cut with Canning

AT THIS time of year, American football teams are tasting the white heat of intense pre-season training. Gridiron giants take part in a violent annual ballet as a hulking, heaving mass of athletic hardware crashes into each other in a frantic bid to forge a team ready for the NFL season.

Amongst this chaotic scene however, one, particular, man is an island. While the team of coaches on the sideline watch these full-blooded practice sessions unfold on days when the season’s playbook is inked, there, invariably, wearing a brightly coloured cap, is the author of so much of it: the quarter back.

This orange hat, which crowns the QB, offers his enthusiastic and often much bigger team mates a very clear message: “Take it easy on this guy; he’s the franchise”. Neither Galway, nor county champions Portumna, make Joe Canning wear a luminous cap – but everyone knows this guy is worth a few Superbowl rings to the Tribesmen.

It’s fair to say, the 21-year-old is the key to at last unlocking All-Ireland success. But not his year. The westerners, as we know, were dumped out of the championship, after an encouraging run, which began in the Leinster SHC, by Waterford who picked the victory from Canning and co’s pocket in an All-Ireland quarter-final in Semple Stadium. Another year wasted.

But, despite his box-office name and his face now plastered on Dublin buses, the Portumna man is not one to swaddle himself in a burgeoning reputation it seems. As he beats a familiar path – from his club’s dressing room to the centre of the well-worn pitch – he is half feeling his left shoulder while he inspects the balding surface underfoot.

The day before Canning is to teach me some broad-brush strokes in the art of the sideline cut – an art in which he is a master – his club side take on Tipperary ahead of Sunday’s All-Ireland decider with Kilkenny.

Essentially, it’s a chance for both sides (Portumna are at the business end of the county championship) to click through the gears in preparation for the real battles ahead. Not so for the LIT student who roars full throttle into a shoulder challenge with Premier county man-mountain Michael Webster. “I saw him coming and I thought ‘hang on now’. He’s a great player obviously. And a really big guy.” Canning comes off the worse in the crisp exchange. But he’s ready for a few sideline cuts nonetheless.

“I don’t practice that much realty – maybe 20 minutes once a week you’d fire a few over. But you’d say you practice them all the time, you know,” he says as he leans over the sliotar which he places very deliberately (it’s the same position for every attempt, you might notice).

“I read a lot of books from sports people – Ronan O’Gara’s one was very good I thought, Roy Keane’s and Jonny Wilkinson’s. The routine I go through is a bit like Wilkinson’s. And I do try to take what I can from other sports and apply that to my own game.”

We’re in the south-east of the county of Galway, the only bodies on a deserted pitch, but he could be under a full stand at Twickenham, trying to angle a conversion between the posts, such is the marked similarity of the routine.

Two steps back from the ball. Two deep breaths. A quick glance at the posts – and a visualisation of the sliotar sailing over. He then kneels into his target, reaching low and flinging the hurley face – at a 45-degree angle, a fraction beneath the ball. He winces as his shoulder aches but the contact is painless and it floats gracefully towards the goals he’s played into as long as he’s played the game. “Now your turn,” he states.

The sideline cut is the game’s alchemy – Canning and few others on the intercounty scene can create gold from scraps. Teaching that magic, is a tougher science. Canning runs me through the routine slowly like someone who’s sitting next to a nervous flier on a trans-Atlantic take-off. “That’s just the wheels coming up, that sound is engines whirring, this tablet will make you sleepy.” But though I understand each component part, thanks to his tutelage, doesn’t mean I can fly.

After my first attempt skims along the grass towards the town, the Galway man asks casually, “You’re a soccer player, are you?” A dirty stroke. A few attempts and I can see a slight improvement, while Canning steps in again to show me, like a club pro, how my swing is letting me down.

When I ask why he isn’t laughing at my clumsy attempts, he insists no sideline cut expert scoffs at any effort; it could happen to anyone.

What’s the first sign of madness? Talking to yourself? Suggs and his bandmates walking up your driveway? Try, offering to stand in goal for a Joe Canning penalty. The anaemic grass in the goalmouth area of both goals in Portumna’s pitch has been replaced with coarse astro-turf. The club elders sought a solution many in clubs throughout the country will be familiar with.

“The grass never got a chance to come through at all really; especially in this goal. Below in the far end it’s just the square is replaced. Here it goes all the way out to the 20 because young fellas were coming in and playing in the near goals. Was I one those lads? I suppose I was for a long time.”

This local boy has fired a million arrows from a quiver he developed in this couple of acres of rural real estate, in the shadow almost of the town’s picturesque castle and its abbey. Never before has a journalist agreed to stand in his crosshairs.

Respecting his new opponent so much, he adopts a clever rope-a-dope tactic and takes it handy enough for the first few. I save at least three I think and I tell him one particular stretched save, which the photographer captures will be on Facebook within the hour. The next shot whizzes by my head like a deadline. And the next. I get to the last but it’s so powerful it knocks me over the line anyway. That one won’t be going up online.

Afterwards as thoughts turn to the All-Ireland final this Sunday, a date circled in red on the calendar all year, though Galway and their young star will not fill the role they had hoped, Canning admits he’ll be in the stands anyway. As Michael Webster and his Tipperary team mates run out onto the Croke Park pitch on Sunday, he’ll be in his civvies, with friends.

“The Galway lads decided we’d go up as a group and support the minors. We can chill out a bit and relax together after a long year. It should be an excellent game anyway. Will I have a pint? No, we have a big championship game coming up with the club and there’ll be none of that.”

Galway supporters will hope he looks after himself between the sidelines in the meantime and returns to Jones’s Rd next year for a champagne moment in September. This guy is certainly the franchise.

Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in today’s Irish Examiner.