Diarmuid Lyng’s journey from the back-end of Kerry to hurling’s heart and soul

Diarmuid Lyng looks at his watch. Show-time.

It wasn’t that long ago when, as a man who gave up his job as a sideline reporter and a studio pundit for Off The Ball, he left this life behind him.

That was a time when he’d had enough of Dublin’s busy ways but here he is, sitting in front of me, a bunch of stats on the table and the weekend’s team-sheets in his hand. Limerick have some strength in depth he says. Clare could have a say in things yet.

He’s back in the city he once longed to leave and, as the new host of the GAA Hour Hurling Show, he’s back in the game he’s always loved.

He says no job is worth getting out of bed before 6.00 for so it’s not the early starts that have pulled him back in. And as he steps onto the 9.00 train in Tralee, looking around the carriage for the seat he’ll spend the next four hours in, it’s surely dawned on him by then that this is a fair old ordeal just to say a few words on a podcast.

But Colm Parkinson had free rein when he was in the hot-seat and, as sure as the Wexford accent never leaves you, Lyng has the same thing now. He’ll talk about the red cards, the throw-balls and the harsh frees but alongside all of those aspects, it’s the heart and the soul of the the thing that’s bringing him back.

“Hurling is a game that came out of here. It’s our game. That’s not a diss on football because it’s just a fact. Hurling comes from here.”

“And there are some great moments in hurling. I’m talking about the moments of play when the whole game has come alive and the crowd knows it, and the players know it, and for a short time, you just feel a gratitude to be a part of it all.

“As part of the hurling community, I appreciate all of those moments and all the way through them, I’m interested in how players and managers hold themselves, the values that Brian Cody always talked about. That John Kiely is talking about now.”

Lyng hosts retreats for a living and, on the weekend before his first show, he was out in the Burren along with fifteen others basically, learning how to live in the wild. He talks about skinning, tanning deer and some of it, I have to say, went over my head. But he also brings teams on camps and day-trips and it was on a recent one, with an inter-county hurling team, when he was left to ponder his place in the game.

So he had them building camps. They were cooking food over fires. They were leading, they were learning about each other, they were singing and drinking and, by the end of it, Lyng was told by the team’s manager that it was one of the most enjoyable experiences they’ve ever had.

But it was something that manager said to him, in the late hours of the night, that has been running through his mind ever since.

“He thanked me for the experience and he told me, he said ‘this was unbelievable, because before I came out here, lads were rolling their eyes when I said I was going to work with you…But I’ve never seen the lads enjoying themselves so much.”

The eye-rollers may have been past players or sport psychologists or tacticians or dieticians or whoever else but Lyng wonders, every now and again, whether it’s him that’s the weirdo.

“The essence of the experience is to create three things. Connection to self, connection to team-mates and connection to their place. They’re learning how to lead, how to be led, how to trust each other and how to trust themselves. All things that are necessary to be an inter-county hurler.”

It would be very easy, living as he does in the back-end of west Kerry, to become something of a hurling outcast but Lyng was born into the game and he can’t ever see himself growing out of it.

That’s one of the reasons why, having got the urge to give his neighbours a shot, beach hurling is now all the rage in the area. They didn’t even know what a hurl was before he came along but now half of Ventry has hurls in their hands.

He started by asking Philip Doyle, a hurley-maker in county Wexford, for 50 of them and it won’t be long before he’s back asking for 50 more.

“I was thinking ‘look, we’ll play a game a month or something like that. But after the first day, they were asking to do it every week. Sure I mightn’t be around some weekends now but they’ll still go out and hurl.

“We have Dorian, a 10-year-old who comes every Sunday with his father. We have women playing and a 72-year-old who broke two of his ribs one day with a shoulder.

“Now listen sometimes I’d be pulling my hair out. Someone’s trying to pick the ball up and they can’t hit it for the third time and I’d be like is this what I’m supposed to be doing with my time – should I be in coaching a club team or a county team or something like – but it’s great when they finally do learn then, and hit it on the sweet spot – and I enjoy it anyway because I’m content with the fact that this is where my life has taken me now.”

He still has a good relationship with his club St Martin’s and great connections in the game. TG4 came down to film the beach hurling one day and with Jack O’Connor, George O’Connor, Declan Ruth, Barry O’Connor, Katie O’Connor, his brothers Ciaran and Micheál all showing up, Lyng will never forget the energy in the place that day.

“I’ll never forget it. The producer of the show who, I’m sure won’t mind me saying, had never played the game before and just couldn’t hurl – he ended up winning the game.

“Anyway, the filming was done and he was like ‘I want to join in,’ but he was struggling. I was nearly running to him handing him the ball and he was still dropping it.

“But the last ball of the game, the very last ball – Micheál my brother – lobbed it over the top and the producer – the worst of them all by a mile – I could see him running, he just dropped the hurl, jumped and caught the ball for the winning score and it was just magic.”

He has close friends in the game such as Kilkenny’s James Ryall – a man who’s opinion he values hugely. Such as Rory McCarthy and Damien Fitzhenry – players he felt that, on the field, he had an intuitive understanding with. Then there’s Derek Hardiman, Eddie Brennan, Eoin Quigley and a whole load of others who, some Monday in Dublin, he’ll shoot the breeze with for one good and wholesome hour.

And I, for one, am looking forward to listening.

Published on SportsJoe by Niall McIntyre on 27th April, 2022