NOT too long after last year’s Championship was over, Brian Howard rolled the dice.
He’d been playing for Dublin teams at various grades since he was a young teenager and decided it was time to gamble.
It wasn’t that he was putting his inter-county career on the line.
But by informing Dessie Farrell and the Dublin management that he was bowing to his wanderlust and taking a five-month travel break, he accepted there would be a toll to pay.
But the fun part first. Howard and his partner initially took 10 weeks out and travelled around south east Asia at the tailend of 2022, eventually coming home for Christmas before pulling out their passports again and leaving for another two months or so.
The versatile half-back speaks about ‘the sunshine of the Bali beaches’ and eye-opening experiences in Indonesia, a far cry from Blessington in Wicklow where Dublin opened their O’Byrne Cup campaign on a God awful wet evening in early January.
Howard only returned to inter-county training in late February and didn’t actually start a competitive game for Dublin until the Leinster final, their 13th game of the year.
Since then, he has been an ever-present, starting six Championship games in a row and it would be a major surprise if he is left out for Sunday’s All-Ireland final against Kerry.
But was it a risk, leaving the jersey empty for so long as he did?
“Big time, and I was under no illusion that it was going to be tough to get back in,” said the 2018 and 2019 Allstar.
“But I got an opportunity to go away and I thought it was the right time. Huge risk to take, yeah, but I enjoyed it. The hunger never left but I would say I’m hungrier now more than ever. But it was a risk and management said, ‘Look, be under no illusion, when you come back in you are not going to be handed anything just off reputation’.”
Howard is one of 56 different players that Farrell has handed game-time to this year, in all competitions, so it’s not as if there weren’t other options.
But when fully tuned in and fit, he is also a special talent who can perform a wide range of functions for the team, anywhere from half-back to half-forward.
He could have simply taken a year out, or longer, a la Jack McCaffrey, Paul Mannion and Stephen Cluxton. But that was never an option in Howard’s mind.
“No, and I had that conversation too, I said, ‘I’d never take a year out, I love what I do, I love representing Dublin and representing the county’,” he revealed.
“This is something I see myself doing for the next couple of years, until I’m not able to any longer basically.
“So I had that conversation and said that if there was a risk of not being able to get back into the squad, then I wouldn’t have went, I would have sacrificed travelling.”
A few years back, when Howard and Raheny club-mate Brian Fenton won midfield Allstars together, they looked set to form a thrilling partnership there for many years to come.
Fenton remained in his spot but Howard’s positioning has been more fluid, popping up wherever the need has been greatest between the two 45-metre lines.
The other big change since then has been to Dublin’s status. They are no longer the hunted.
An All-Ireland U21 winner in 2017, Howard started or came on in each of the 2018, 2019 and 2020 final wins but 2021 and 2022 ended in relative disappointment and semi-final defeats.
“To say it wasn’t easy is an understatement,” said Howard of missing the finals in those years.
“They were actually tough to watch, because I know how precious and privileged they are.”
Stephen Cluxton presumably felt the same because he plucked himself from retirement midway through this season and, like Howard, has been an ever-present for the majority of the Championship.
“I remember his first evening back, I was sitting in a room in Parnell Park and he just casually walks in the door,” said Howard.
“I was looking to see what people were thinking but he just walked in and sat down and started talking away.”
Business as usual. That’s what Howard is all about too. Even if it’s rarely straight-forward navigating the Kerry challenge at Croke Park.
“They’ve got top-class forwards,” said Howard, who singled out David Clifford.
“He’s just amazing. You sort of just have to admire him but we don’t have too bad forwards either.”
