Numbers game has many meanings: How important is the jersey you wear to a GAA player

Daniel James started two games for Manchester United at the beginning of the 2021-22 season.

The Wales international played on the right flank in a 5-1 home win over Leeds United and a 1-0 victory away to Wolverhampton Wanderers. Then, two days after the latter match, he was sold to Leeds.

One of the reasons for his sale was the return of Cristiano Ronaldo – not because the Portuguese was taking James’s position but because he wanted to reclaim his old number 7 shirt. In order to do that, the holder of 7, Edinson Cavani, had to be shifted to a vacant number and so James’s 21 had to be freed up.

While numbers are essentially symbols on players’ backs to aid identification, they come to mean more. Former Millstreet and Cork footballer John Coleman remembers how his former team-mate Connie Hartnett, who usually played at left half-back, had an attachment similar to Ronaldo’s.

“Din Connors from the town had been left half-back on the Cork team to win the All-Ireland, in 1945, and he was a relation of Connie’s,” he said.

“All the time I was playing with Connie, there was only one jersey he would ever wear and that was 7. If the number 7 jersey was missing, he’d wear a blank. Talk about superstition!”

While soccer has embraced squad numbers in a big way over the last three decades – for instance, Declan Rice wears 41 for Arsenal, having been given it as a young player at West Ham United – GAA, like rugby, has, by and large, maintained the 1-15 system.

DEMOCRATIC

However, with no limits on the number of switches that can be made within the published panel, it’s possible to employ a quasi-squad numbers system. Waterford adopted such a policy during Derek McGrath’s time in charge, with Kevin Moran wearing 10 in the half-back line or midfield, Austin Gleeson wearing 6 as a centre-forward and Maurice Shanahan almost always starting despite having 21 on his back.

For their opening Munster SHC game against Clare, Tipperary numbered their squad alphabetically, partly as a protest against the new rule that meant panels were to made known on a Thursday.

Attacker Jason Forde wore 7, captain Noel McGrath 18 and midfielder Alan Tynan 26. Only goalkeeper Barry Hogan and his deputy Rhys Shelly were exempt from the alphabetical system, wearing 1 and 16 respectively (meaning that McGrath’s brothers Brian and John were 15 and 17), though right corner-back Cathal Barrett did end up with the number 2 jersey.

To Tipp’s credit, they did tweet the starting 15 after training on the Friday night before the game and then reverted to a more conventional approach for the remainder of the campaign.

As much as we consider ourselves inured to the ‘dummy team’, Limerick still managed some sleight of hand for the All-Ireland semi-final against Galway. With captain Declan Hannon ruled out, Kyle Hayes was named at centre-back with Gearóid Hegarty listed as number 7.

After a few days of chat about how the powerful attacker would fare, the beginning of the game saw Hegarty line out in his usual right half-forward spot with Hayes at left half-back while number 11 Kyle Hayes partnered Darragh O’Donovan at midfield and William O’Donoghue dropped to centre-back, without the burden of public speculation regarding the same.

With tactics so fluid now, especially in attack, the numbers mean less. 

While Patrick Horgan wore 14 in each of Cork’s four Munster hurling championship games, Luke Meade had 9 (twice), 12 and 13 on his back while Séamus Harnedy alternated between 10, 11 and 15 while Darragh Fitzgibbon wore each of 9 and 11 twice and Declan Dalton flitted between 10 and 12.

On the football side, Ian Maguire was Cork’s number 9 in each match, as befitting a midfielder, but it was a small change from had been the norm.

“With St Finbarr’s, I had always worn the number 8 jersey and it was the same for Cork under Ronan [McCarthy],” he said.

“I came back at the start of 2023 after a disappointing county final loss with the Barrs and feeling that I had a point to prove. Colm [O’Callaghan] was flying in midfield and I almost took it that he was the number-one midfielder and I was chasing him, even though we were playing together.

“I was given the 9 jersey early on in the year and I was using it as subtle motivation, purely created in my own head.”