Malachy Clerkin: Brian Fenton, the best midfielder of his era and one of the greatest ever

Brian Fenton has always had his head up, scanning the horizon. When he finished college in UCD, he took his physio degree with him to work in Beaumont Hospital. It was 2015 and he had just been brought into the Dublin panel. For someone who had been overlooked as a minor, he’d have been forgiven for seeing it as a destination. Instead, Fenton used it as a launch pad, both on and off the pitch.
“I was hearing all of this sports psych language,” he told The Irish Times last year. “The Gary Keegan stuff – break through the ceiling, constant improvement, constant gains and all that. And I was applying this to my life and I was thinking, ‘I just don’t see this in physio. Am I going to be a 40-year-old physio?’
“I did 19 months of mobility work, which is very important. But I was going, ‘This isn’t for me.’ I want variety. I want to be chasing stuff. A lot of the lads were in sales and chasing targets and that kind of thing. I wanted to be more accountable.”
[ Brian Fenton: ‘For sure I’ll be back next year. I’d love to do 10 seasons for Dublin’Opens in new window ]
He ended up in the medical devices world, finding himself selling high-end microscopes to hospitals and clinics at half a million a pop. A few times a week, he gets into his scrubs so he can be on-hand in the operating theatre in case a surgeon removing a tumour needs guidance with the kit. No shortage of variety or accountability there.
“Obviously, being a football player gets you in a few doors, there’s no denying that,” he said. “But if you’re bringing a surgeon a product for trial and it starts faffing about and failing, there’s no turning around and going, ‘Eh, do you want to talk about the Dubs maybe?’ They don’t give a rat’s, like. You’re talking matters of life and death and I can’t be going, ‘Ah well, I have my medals in the car if you want to have a look at them…’”
Fenton’s retirement from intercounty football is widely presumed to be due, at least in part, to his plans to go off travelling. He has never hidden the fact that he fully intends to do a year or two on the road in his camper van along with his girlfriend. On top of which, in that Irish Times interview last year, he pinpointed his 10th season as a Dub as being particularly significant.
“I’ve always had it in my head that I’d love to do 10 seasons as a Dublin footballer,” he said. “Now, whether I do 11 or 12, I don’t know. But I definitely want to do 10. I’d love to look back and go, ‘I gave a decade of seasons to Dublin.’ That’s a very insignificant personal thing, obviously. But it’s something I’ve always had in my head.”
So although the news comes as a surprise, it’s maybe not that much of a shock. It is in his nature to look forward, to keep moving, to find something more in life. Unusually for a modern GAA star, there’s nothing remotely paranoid or guarded about Brian Fenton. He has always been able to rise above the grind and sacrifice of the intercounty game and treat it as something he is lucky to do for his enjoyment.
He has lived through a gilded age, of course. His great forefather and clubmate Ciarán Whelan played for 14 Sam Maguire-less seasons in Dublin’s midfield, arriving the year after they won the 1995 All-Ireland and leaving two years before the 2011 one. Fenton played for 10 seasons and finished all but three of them on the steps of the Hogan Stand. His timing was always spectacular.
He arrived fully-formed – and not a minute too soon. Jim Gavin brought him in for the 2015 season, precisely when Dublin were going through a retread after the shock of the previous year’s ambush by Donegal. Denis Bastick was coming towards the end, Shane Carthy was struggling, Cian O’Sullivan was a defender press-ganged into playing midfield. Dublin needed a foil for Michael Darragh Macauley and it turned out Fenton was hiding in plain sight.
Soon enough, the only question when it came to the Dublin midfield was who was going to be Fenton’s partner. They had to mix and match over the years – it was Macauley for a while, then it was James McCarthy on the biggest days. At various stages Peadar Ó Cofaigh Byrne and Tom Lahiff have done shifts in there. Nobody has been able to match Fenton’s combination of smooth running, high fielding, accurate kicking and general game sense.
And so this one is going to hurt. Throughout their years of empire, Dublin have never been immune to suddenly finding that one of their headline names has wandered off on them. Rory O’Carroll did it, Paul Mannion did it, Jack McCaffrey did it twice. Stephen Cluxton did it once already and might well, for all anyone knows, be in the middle of doing it again.
For the most part, various iterations of the Dubs found a way to take the hit and keep rolling. With the obvious exception of Cluxton, they always had a well-stocked larder to make up for any and all losses. But now, out of nowhere, they don’t have Brian Fenton and they don’t have James McCarthy. For the first time since 2010, they don’t have an All Star midfielder in their panel. Boo-hoo, says the rest of the game, obviously.
We can all mourn the loss of Brian Fenton from the sport though. He was a real one. The best midfielder of his era, one of the greatest to ever do it. More luck to him, wherever life’s winds blow him.