Persistence pays off as Jake moves up the ladder

Cavanman's Diary

A sage piece of advice I received when I started working in journalism was that it’s always better to have too much copy to squeeze into too-few pages than the opposite.

Pagination in the sports section of a newspaper depends on many factors, usually to do with advertising and supplements elsewhere in the paper. The classifieds and motoring sections and so on are positioned right by the sports pages and tend to be a moveable feast in terms of how busy they are, which impacts things further back in “the book”, as the old school pressmen call it.

Often, space will be tight; stories or reports need to be dropped or trimmed back. Worse, though, is when there is not much happening, you’re staring at a blank plan and wondering how you are going to fill the pages.

That was the case during the recent lockdown, even though pagination was limited. There was so little sport happening, particularly at local level, that each week seemed like a “loaves and fishes” sort of set-up. The Reading of the 5,000, you could call it, if you wanted to butcher the biblical theme altogether (although thankfully, despite reports of the demise of print, we are still read by substantially more than that).

At one stage, there were only a few Cavan people taking part in any kind of sporting activity. Leona Maguire was one; Jake Doyle-Hayes was another.

So, I found myself following both closely. I am not the most au fait with Scottish football but so keen was I to keep tabs on Doyle-Hayes’s progress – and fill pages – that I found myself watching St Mirren matches and following them closely in the news. The Daily Record became my go-to website of choice.

It’s not just that we were stuck for content that I was doing so, you understand. To have a professional footballer in the UK from Cavan is a real novelty – Cillian Sheridan and Leanne Kiernan are the only others I know of in the last couple of decades who have spent a prolonged period playing first-team football across the water – and it would be impossible not to find yourself rooting for the Ballyjamesduff man.

It’s easy to forget just how difficult it is to break through to professional soccer. I always smile when fans slate a player for being “useless”; the reality is that anyone who manages to carve out a pro career is in the top tiny fraction of one per cent of all of those who ever kick a ball in earnest. You could liken it to winning the lottery – although there’s a lot more than just blind luck involved.

To put it in perspective, when Doyle-Hayes played for the Aston Villa youth team, there were six nationalities in the squad. And that was the youth team, and Villa are just one of 92 professional clubs in England, each of which have youth teams. The odds of making it as a full-time pro are astronomical.

A couple of years back, I interviewed him on a Friday evening. Two days before, he had played a starring role for Aston Villa in their win on penalties over Blackburn Rovers at Ewood Park in the FA Youth Cup. That morning, he had trained with Villa’s first team, a reward for his performances and also, he was humble enough to admit, a by-product of the flagship side being down a few bodies.

At the time, Jake lived in digs with one other English player. He said he didn’t mind it; the thing was to keep busy but not too busy so as to be tired for training – a difficult balance for teenagers in a new city, living away from home for the first time.

“It’s alright,” he said, “as long as I’m doing stuff, getting out and about. If you’re just sitting round doing nothing and you’ve too much time to think, then you’re thinking about home and thinking about what your friends are doing and stuff like that but, once you’re out doing stuff, you’re grand.

“The first time I came over, I was a bit homesick but since the start of this season I’m fine, I’m grand – I’m keeping myself busy.”

At that point, his star was very much in the ascendancy. Having represented the Republic of Ireland at all underage grades, starting with an U15 call-up for a tour to Qatar when he was still just 13, he was by then captaining the Villa U18s.

On the day he turned 16, having been courted by several top English clubs, he signed for the Birmingham club.

Around the time he was first capped, a coach told me, deadly serious, that he had “never said this before” but this boy will definitely make it as a professional. Another told me later that Tim Sherwood, the former Villa first team manager, was overheard saying Jake was the best player in Villa’s academy.

In the end, he played a handful of first-team games with Villa. He ended up going on loan to Cheltenham Town, where he was an immediate hit with the supporters, who dubbed him “the Irish Xavi”. He was hopeful of getting a new contract with his home club and seemed like he may have done enough in his loan spell to secure one but Villa thought otherwise and released him.

But that wasn’t the end of the line. Around this time, he was in Limbo, with a number of clubs chasing his signature. On a few occasions, I drove up the N3 and saw him running the roads, keeping in shape. It’s hard not to like that sort of effort.

Soon, St Mirren came in and he immediately nailed down a starting place, lining out over 30 times last season as the Paisley club enjoyed their best finish since the 1980s.

Over the last few months, my new favourite paper, the Daily Record, had weekly updates on his contract status. The Saints were keen for him to stay but others were sniffing around. Last week, it was announced he had signed for Hibernian, one of the biggest clubs in Scotland.

Theirs is the fifth largest budget in the SPL and, in normal times, they play to 20,000 crowds every week. The disappointing end to his time at Villa Park is now long forgotten about; the Ballyjamesduff man has worked his way back towards the top and, at just 22, he’s right on track. If he can make a splash at Easter Road, anything is possible.

It looks like that coach I spoke to was right. Sales of Hibs jerseys will be expected to multiply around this county next year and pressure on column inches in the Celt will be increased too now that a Cavanman is plying his trade with such a famed club, one of whose greatest ever players was Lawrie Reilly, grandson of a Cavanman. What a welcome problem to have.