WHEN Oliver Burkeman calculated how many weeks the average human being will live, he did what anyone would do when they have their own unique bit of trivia: he pestered people.
Like a child who knows something you don’t, Burkeman would ask his friends, one-by-one, to guess how many weeks they might get to be alive for.
Answers varied but were rarely close.
One person gave him a six-figure answer.
“As I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks – 310,000 – is the approximate duration of all human civilisation since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia,” he wrote in his best-selling book.
The name of the book was the answer to the question.
Four Thousand Weeks.
That’s the average human’s lifespan.
It doesn’t seem like a lot, does it?
If you’re feeling guilty about what you’ve done, or not done, with your weeks then probably best to avoid delving too much into the story of Slaughtneil.
I’m not sure if Oliver Burkeman would have considered sitting down for two hours on a Saturday evening to watch hurling on RTÉ2 a good use of some of his precious time.
But he would have appreciated some of the layers beneath the Derry club’s win over Cushendall in an inspirational game.
Sometimes you have to step back from the trophy haul of the last decade to appreciate what the Emmet’s have achieved.
The Cushendall and Portaferry teams they will face in Ulster spend their year exclusively hurling.
Slaughtneil’s dominance of Derry football has ended yet they remain one of the best football teams in Ulster.
Since 2014, they’ve won five football championships in Derry and on four other occasions, been beaten by the team that won it.
The average GAA player lives four thousand weeks and if they’re really lucky, they’ll spend five or six hundred of them playing at adult level.
What Slaughtneil found was that their weeks were taking a toll.
In a revealing two-and-a-half hour sofa chat with Sure What Do We Know Podcast back in September, Brendan Rogers touched on how they had completely revamped their approach to training.
It was a strange sight to see Chrissy McKaigue layered up with a microphone in his hand as Slaughtneil went through their pre-match warm-up behind him on Saturday evening.
The weeks have stacked up on him as they do to everyone eventually. He decided to leave the hurl down altogether this year, give it whatever he had left in football.
Yet as the club’s full-time Games Promotion Officer, he has had a central hand in their adaptation of the Loughmore-Castleiney model.
For years, Slaughtneil’s dual players trained football one night, hurling the next.
Now they train both on the same night, splitting their sessions up.
All but one of their starting team from Saturday night, goalkeeper Oisin O’Doherty, was involved in the senior football panel this year.
McKaigue, who confirmed his retirement from inter-county football on Monday afternoon, first brought the idea to fruition during the Covid season.
Their senior teams returned to the old model when things went back to normal but all the club’s underage have continued to run joint sessions since.
McKaigue went and sought out Donegal man Aaron Kyles to take over their conditioning work before the 2023 season began and between the pair of them they’ve driven the reimplementation of the split sessions this year.
For most of 2024, they were on the pitch for training Tuesday and Friday, with games and gym work around it.
Whichever game was at the weekend got the bigger wedge of time.
Sessions were generally capped at around 90 minutes all in.
Conditioning work would often happen in that crossover period between the two, so that dual players aren’t having to do it twice.
Underage teams all do the same.
And what they find is that it makes young players more likely to be dual because A) they’re already there with their friends and B) they don’t have to come back another night.
It comes right out of the playbook Loughmore-Castleiney have been using for years.
They, exactly like Slaughtneil, have won five Tipperary SFC titles since 2013.
Just recently they claimed a third senior hurling crown in that time out of an incredibly competitive patch.
They’ve long used the side-by-side approach to training.
Michael Dempsey manages their senior footballers.
The former Laois footballer and ex-Kilkenny hurling selector chaired the GAA’s Talent Academy and Player Development Review Committee.
In a recent interview with the Irish Independent, he posed a few pertinent questions of his own.
“It’s interesting and makes me question some of the intensity. When you’re dealing with one team, you have more time to work on plays, like kick-outs or puck-outs. But then you may ask yourself, is all this time necessary? You have to keep training going, so the likes of Loughmore are switching from one to the other and you don’t have as much time. I think it asks a bigger question: how much time do you actually need to put in to reach the optimal level? Maybe we’re a slave to received ideas about what is necessary to get results. It poses an interesting question but I don’t have a definitive answer.”
Demands on players have grown exponentially since the turn of the century.
Because of it, the dual player has been pushed into a corner.
By many football people, hurling is viewed as this weird, threatening, far-out relation. Grand to be ignored from a distance, just best not to acknowledge its existence at all.
The two games have been pushed into a conflict
Slaughtneil have a serious challenge to come from Portaferry.
They will come armed with an ambush fuelled on a whole year’s hurt and a whole year’s hurling.
But regardless of the silverware, Saturday evening’s epic encounter with Cushendall was proof that the less-is-more approach is working.
After all the battles they’ve had with Cushendall, Dunloy and Loughgiel, last year’s Ulster final said that perhaps Slaughtneil were just beginning to run out of road.
When they lost to Cushendall in extra-time in 2015, Slaughtneil hit 20 scores (3-17).
In beating Loughgiel the following year, their tally was 2-14.
Last year, they scored just 2-10 in defeat.
On Saturday night, they scored 1-36.
The proof of the pudding is always in the eating.
When coaches look for answers, the first place they’re inclined to look is more.
Slaughtneil looked to Tipperary.
What they saw wasn’t less.
It was simply smarter.
A better use of time.
When you maybe only have 500 weeks at this, you have to use them wisely.
