In the six months or so after Dublin’s All-Ireland semi-final loss to Kerry, Jonny Cooper went searching for that little extra.
As an exercise, it wasn’t particularly different to what he had undertaken in all the previous close seasons over the years, when he was always able to find an extra edge from somewhere to further his development as a footballer.
“It’s not solely the Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday tradition of going to the gym, pitch, analysis - all that kind of stuff is standard,” he explains.
“Can you kick on? Evolve in lots of ways personally? What extra from a psychology point of view? What bit of magic, bit of value are you going to find?
“So it’s all them things more so than the standard catching and kicking and running faster.”
Except this time, as the winter drew in, Cooper couldn’t find “that 15% more”. And so, on New Year’s Eve, he announced his retirement from inter-county football, going against the prevailing feeling that, with Paul Mannion and Jack McCaffrey’s return and Pat Gilroy’s acquisition, Dublin were throwing absolutely everything at reclaiming the Sam Maguire Cup in 2023.
“A few weeks up and down. Spoke to Dessie [Farrell] and a couple of other people along the way, just trying to square it all off.
“And I guess that was the right decision for me because personally I couldn’t reach that (target) and stand over maybe a bit of a diluted value, which would have been, for me, what 2023 would look like at that elite level.
“Especially the level the guys are at now, they’re kind of only getting higher and higher.
“For me it was purely can I get to not only the level I expected in 2022 but kick on that 10 or 15%. So it was a very clearcut decision for me that I couldn’t get to that level.
“Look, I’m busy enough with one or two other things, work included, but at the same time I don’t have kids or anything like that, it wasn’t a deciding factor.
“It was more that clinical way of looking at it – could I get to that 15% more, physically, mentally, leadership, role-modelling, behaviours, all the extra-curricular, analysis, all that sort of stuff? When you put it all into the pot, can you get there? And the answer was no for me.”
The cutthroat nature of the corner-back position was something of a factor too, though not a predominant one. Cooper got out before some tearaway forward 10 years his junior gave him the runaround on a big day in Croke Park.
“Certainly you are going to leave yourself exposed I think, and you'd be silly not to at least listen.
“I certainly had conversations with Dessie that we were brutally honest, we know each other for donkey’s years now so there were some really genuine and open conversations there about the realities of where I stood in general.
“But, again, it certainly wasn’t in the top number of things that had been a tipping or a deciding factor in it personally for me.”
It’s not that he didn’t have some difficult afternoons, however, and getting sent off in the 2019 All-Ireland final after struggling with Kerry’s David Clifford almost had disastrous consequences for him and Dublin. In the end, the team scrambled for a draw without him before winning the replay and a historic five-in-a-row with Cooper back in tow.
Had they fallen short, he would have been an obvious scapegoat. But he places the episode in perspective when referencing a brutal attack during which he was repeatedly stabbed in 2014, with the assailant later receiving a seven-year sentence.
“My training and preparation would have been slightly off on reflection [ahead of the 2019 final], but probably more so the learning for me is you probably get what you deserve in lots of ways.
“Obviously marking quality players, you are always going to have it toing and froing a little bit, but I’ve had personal millimetre near-misses with… not to be too crude about my own life and a few other things.
“So in context it’s something that we all deeply care about and rightly so, it would have been the crosshairs on my head.
“It’s in context as a sport, one we all thoroughly enjoy - but at the same time there’s a lot of personal things there that would have maybe built up a bit more resilience in me, I'd like to think anyway, to maybe deal with such a situation and put it into perspective.”
Still, Cooper’s emotions were noticeably raw in the immediate aftermath of that 2019 replay win over Kerry, which he says was the highlight of his career.
“It just happened to be very vivid, I don’t remember too much about scorelines of games and how you played, you just kind of moved on to the next.
“But 2019, because myself and Cian O’Sullivan were at a very close proximity and we both would have gone through months of an injury challenge that year, so that one in particular.
“Obviously there was the drawn game and so on, which comes into account but more so the journey that you get to share that 99.9% of people in the audience don’t get a true insight towards.
“So that moment with Cian, the three or four seconds was something that definitely resonates and is a great memory to have.”
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