HE KICKED points by the hundreds, but was not as unstoppable as Peter Canavan. Space did not appear around him like it does with the Gooch.
He could put a football where he wanted it to go, but he did not have the vision of Kieran McDonald. He kicked frees well, but he was not as consistent as Oisin McConville.
He was not as fast as Michael Donnellan. He was not as imposing as Kieran McGeeney. He never decided a final like Padraig Joyce did. He was tireless, all right, but so were Brian Dooher and Paul Galvin. He carried his team in the lean times with scoring tallies that often reached double figures, but so did Mattie Forde and Dessie Dolan.
Medals? Unless you count the O’Byrne Cup or division two, he retired yesterday with one of note, the same as the number of All Stars he won. Many of his peers won more in one season at inter-county level than he managed in 15.
John Doyle was not the best footballer of his generation. We are often guilty of bandying around the word “great” or “legend” every time a player of note retires. But as John Giles put it, if everyone is great, then no one is.
What is it, exactly, that qualifies the Kildare man for the volume of high and heartfelt praise that has been lavished on him since he announced his retirement on Sunday? If you were to pick your best 15 from 2000 to 2014, would he be on it? Really? Ahead of Galvin, Dooher, McDonald, Trevor Giles, Joyce, Cooper, Canavan, Maurice Fitzgerald?
Well, rewind a bit. John Doyle had a battle to get on more humble teams than the hypothetical best 15 of this young century. He did not make it with Kildare at minor level. He was a bit-part player at U21. Both those teams sank sans trace.
I first saw him play in a club league final. He was the most enthusiastic player on the pitch, but not the most accurate. He kicked a clutch of well-taken points, and about the same number of uninspired shots that dropped wide or into the keeper’s hands. He was game, he would run all day, and he was unconvincing.
When Mick O’Dwyer selected him to start against Louth in the 2000 Leinster championship, it was a shock. Only the sharpest regulars at Kildare training had begun to notice some potential, an understated but steely self-belief, an indefinable quality about the kid from Allenwood who swam in his jersey like an underfed jockey.
Still, scores of such players appear on team sheets every summer. One of the first things we wonder about a surprise inclusion is whether they will do enough to start the next day.
Doyle started the next 66 days. He immediately grew rather than shrank in the jersey, and he did not truly relinquish it until Sunday.
To say he was immediately a star would be wrong, even though he played well as Kildare won the Leinster championship that summer.
But throughout the 2000s, as Kildare’s fortunes plummeted, Doyle just got better and better. To try to measure his career through medals or aesthetics is to miss the point. That he didn’t kick 10 points in an All-Ireland final or win a string of All Stars is not a stick to beat him with; indeed, it is part of the reason why he is held in such high esteem.
Whether Kildare were 10 points up or 10 points down, whether they were All-Ireland semi-finalists or first-round Leinster fodder, his effort was the same. The same desperation to chase and harry and tackle, the same determination to accept responsibility, the same honesty and humility and quiet heroism.
Kick points like the Gooch, in a winning team, with all the timing and skill in the world, and you earn great admiration; kick them like Doyle, for a struggling side, at the end of another lung-bursting run, your face contorted and half of the opposition back-line hanging off you, and you earn a different type of respect. Maybe even a deeper type.
For all the scores he kicked, two images epitomise Doyle. When Kildare were two points down in injury time against Down in the All-Ireland semi-final of 2010, a cluster of up to a dozen bodies jostled for the final kick-out. Somehow, impossibly, Doyle emerged from the bedlam to pluck the ball and kick-start an attack that would end with Kildare hitting the crossbar. There should be no way to catch such a ball; too many arms, too little room, too many men possessed. It remains perhaps the only catch I have seen taken through force of will alone.
The second was even more poignant; two years later, the brief window through which Kildare could just about glimpse Sam Maguire was ruthlessly shut by a Cork team that massacred them in Croke Park. Thoroughly beaten, with Cork sprinting through without mercy and the contest long over, Doyle could be seen leading every hopeless chase, the patron saint of the lost cause.
He was an excellent practitioner of the skills. But it was the intangible qualities that made him great, that make the platitudes well deserved, for it is these qualities that somehow carry more weight than all others combined. This is the type of player that is loved most fiercely by supporters, the one who plays the way those on the terraces feel it. It is the type of player most valued by team mates.
He was brave to the point of recklessness. He was the toughest thing to spring from the plains this side of Ruby Walsh. He was relentless. He was capable of missing a straightforward free, incapable of chickening out of taking the next one. He blamed no one but himself. He played every minute of every game, regardless of the score or the glamour of the occasion, as if it were the last 60 seconds on earth. He could not have done any more.
What a player.
