Of the 19 Limerick players that featured in July’s All-Ireland final win over Kilkenny, Nickie Quaid was one of just two aged over 30.
The other was Graeme Mulcahy, who came into the panel a couple of years before him. Quaid’s first season was 2010 with Limerick hurling at absolute rock bottom as they fielded a shadow team after then manager Justin McCarthy axed a host of players, resulting in a dozen others defecting in solidarity.
They lost each of their nine League and Championship games, most of them heavily. Quaid was a wing-forward back then. Now he’s a four-time All-Ireland winning goalkeeper who has just picked up his second All Star in between the posts.
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He’ll turn 34 during next year’s Championship and though his long-time understudy Barry Hennessy recently retired, there’s no suggestion of Quaid stepping back any time soon while he and the team are still performing to such a high standard.
“I am still really enjoying it,” he says. “I enjoy meeting with the lads, that’s probably the biggest thing. The craic that you would have with the lads in the group, it is great.
“To be involved in a high performance group like that, it is something you do really enjoy and look forward to getting stuck back into again. The enjoyment definitely isn’t going for me anyway.”
When Quaid was shifted into goal in 2011, the position was already evolving significantly with a higher premium being placed on retaining possession from puckouts. But it has accelerated significantly in the interim and Quaid has been at the heart of it, to such an extent that he is now widely recognised as the finest exponent of the restart.
However, he deflects praise for Limerick’s retention rate to his colleagues out the field.
“The game has gone possession-based. But that is not down to the goalkeeper, the goalkeeper probably has a very minute part to play in that.
“It is more so the movement and positioning of the forwards. Things like that have a bigger bearing on the puckout because it is great saying the goalie can put it into space here and space there, but if lads aren’t creating the space or making the runs, there is very little the goalie can do really.
“It is more the outfield players than anything. But yeah, that is the biggest change, there is more of an emphasis put on possession and keeping the ball than just getting the ball as far away from your own goal as possible and taking your chances from there.”
Quaid insists he doesn’t find the burden of responsibility that comes with the quarterback-type responsibility that comes with the goalkeeping position now as a heavy one to carry.
“I don’t see it as a pressure. Internally, maybe, because it is something you maybe work on more than you did before.
“And when you put the work into it then on the training field and it is not happening on game day, that’s probably the most disappointing part of it. But when you do put the work in and it does work out on game day, that is probably the most satisfying part of it for me.
“The saves and things, they are great when they come, but it is something you can’t control whereas you know you are going to get a set number of puckouts in games.”
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