THERE are certain sporting experiences that television does no justice to.
Anyone lucky enough to have seen Lionel Messi in the flesh will know why.
If you study him, you can see him absorbing the game around him, playing chess on a chequers board.
His feet carried out the instructions but it was the mind that delivered them.
In a different way but in very much the same vein, that was how I felt about watching James McCarthy.
There were days you might have watched him on TV and wondered quite what he’d done in the game.
And then you’d open social media and people that had been at the game raving about him.
‘What did I miss?’ I’d often think
But when you were there in a packed Croke Park, you knew.
It’s stuff that’s almost unquantifiable.
A bit like Roy Keane, in that the untrained eye might look at it think what’s so great about that tackle or that pass out wide to Giggs or Beckham, but it was the control he had of things, including (most of the time) his own aggression.
McCarthy was the same.
It might just be a turnover or a tackle or breaking the ball away when he was asked to stand in as a makeshift full-back.
The actions themselves, individually, didn’t always stand out at the time.
But when you gather them up into a collection, you’d find that he’d be at the very heart of so many key moments in a game and a season.
James McCarthy’s career is a lesson in why you shouldn’t always necessarily place your trust in statisticians.
He seldom scored. It was a rare afternoon he would have had the most possessions.
His brilliance was sometimes inexplicable.
What was it he did that was so great?
He just brought such energy and aggression to Dublin’s play that it set the tone.
On a team for which Stephen Cluxton set the rhythm, McCarthy was the drummer who found it and showed the others how to play it.
In a dressing room of talkers, he rarely bothered.
Whatever was asked of him, he just did.
He might have played wing-back one day, midfield the next, sometimes a spoiling role, sometimes at full-back, sometimes with licence to get up and puncture holes the way he did right from the throw-in during the Covid All-Ireland final, creating the first-minute goal for Dean Rock.
A physical freak of nature, Niall Moyna once said that he would have been an Olympic-standard 800m runner if he’d put his mind to that discipline. You can say it was in him or it was genetic but it’s so easy to lose.
At the height of their success, half-a-dozen of that Dublin team would go out to the parish centre in Palmerstown and do a bit of early morning boxing training with Bernard Dunne.
His ferocity in those sessions led Bernard Brogan to write in his book that ‘Macker’, who inherited a nickname and much else from his father John, was their “great big silverback gorilla of ours that rarely says a word, stomping around, grinning, gritting his teeth: ‘f***in love it!’”
For all that they won, including the five-in-a-row, Dublin’s last All-Ireland in 2023 might come in time to be regarded as their greatest.
Nobody’s part in it summed the whole thing up better than McCarthy’s.
When they’d lost to Mayo in 2021, he looked gone. Angry and indisciplined and gone. He could have been sent off several times before he finally was.
The year after they ran Kerry to the wire. McCarthy went away in the winter and got married, mulled over one more year.
It was his decision to stay on that eventually prompted the returns of Jack McCaffrey and Paul Mannion for that summer.
They knew what McCarthy had contributed to their successes but the idea of him getting the opportunity to go up the steps as captain was such a drive for the entire squad.
There was a moment in the All-Ireland quarter-final win over Mayo that year when you knew he, and they, were at it.
Croke Park was in one of its blue groundswells, the noise coming up through the grass, bouncing the game to a different pace, a different level.
McCarthy opens up his legs and strides right down the middle of the Mayo defence, bodies falling off him. The right kind of aggression, the kind he brought almost all the time.
Cluxton, Michael Fitzsimons and James McCarthy are the holders of nine All-Ireland medals.
The Kerry eights looked as though they would never be beaten until they were.
It is extremely unlikely that any of us will live long enough to see that record taken off McCarthy, who started all nine finals.
Greatness is difficult to wear.
We talk about it on the outside as though we’re the givers of it but we’re not.
Real greatness is known on the inside.
That Dublin changing room decides for itself who earns the tag and who doesn’t.
It’s not all medals.
If James McCarthy had won two or three or five All-Irelands, he would still have been a great Dublin footballer.
But nine?
Cluxton was maybe the most influential footballer of that brilliant generation, simply for the way that he tactically transformed football with a left foot, a kicking tee and a footballing brain the size of a small island.
But James McCarthy was the greatest player on the greatest team of all time.
Why?
You just had to be there and see him.