The West Bromwich Albion striker has hurling in his blood and the decision to switch allegiance to football was considered a risk, but he is now a key part of the Republic side
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West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa share a spicy rivalry and when the teams met last October, it was an Irishman who took the worst of the blows. Shane Long, a record £5m signing for Albion in August, raced for a ball with Villa's Alan Hutton and was unceremoniously clattered, flipping through the air after a brutal tackle that kept easy company among the most notorious challenges of the season. Long's reaction was significant: there was no melodrama or writhing around the field. Instead, Long hobbled off, casting a baleful look at Hutton as he departed. That low-key response may have an inheritance from his former sporting life.
When he was a teenager, it seemed as if Long was destined to play the Gaelic sport of hurling with Tipperary, his native county in Ireland. Often referred to as "the ancient game" and "the fastest field game in the world" in Ireland, hurling is sometimes compared to hockey and lacrosse but is like absolutely nothing else on earth: it is 70 minutes of relentless speed and skill and toughness. The summer championship attracts crowds of up to 80,000. And even though the game, like all Gaelic sports, remains strictly amateur, to play hurling for Tipperary would have been the natural aspiration for Long. As recently as 2004, he was doing just that, playing for the Tipperary Minor [U-18] side in an All-Ireland semi-final at Croke Park for the second summer in a row.
You have to visit Thurles on summer afternoons when Tipperary are playing at home and 50,000 people cross the narrow stone bridge on the way to Semple Stadium, where the pubs are filled with mementos and photographs of hurling men who graced the county jersey for the previous 125 years, to fully understand how strong the romantic pull of the game can be on young men who grow up there. As Long has said: "When you are from Tipperary, hurling is in your blood." So his abrupt decision to switch his allegiance to football – soccer! – by taking up an offer of a scholarship with Cork City in 2004 was regarded with mystification in his home village of Gortnahoe. It was a period of great turmoil in his life: his father Eamonn had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 47, when Long was just 16, and he was conscious of his father's advice to try all sports in making his decision.
"Only my family were behind me: everyone else seemed to think I was mad," Long was able to reflect last year. "Up to that point, all I dreamt about was hurling for the senior team and I was so close to doing that. At the same time I was looking at the Premiership every week and soccer was big in my life at that stage as well. It was a tough decision but I just thought I'd go for it, give it a year or two and if it didn't work out I could always go back to the hurling."
But it is not as if Long should have realistically hoped to catch the eye of Premier League scouts at that time. Many promising Irish youngsters have crossed the Irish Sea with aspirations of making it big in England only to find themselves lost in the mechanics of the apprenticeship system and the loneliness of trying to succeed.
Long wasn't even on the radar in England. As it was, he almost blew his chance of going to Cork, getting his times wrong for a match in Tipperary in which a Cork scout had arranged to watch him play. Long showed up an hour late and rescued the situation by scoring a hat-trick in the second half. But Long had only played a handful of games with Cork City in the League of Ireland when Reading's chief scout, Brian McDermott, came to look at Kevin Doyle and ended up signing Long as well. In the years since, Long has taken his chance and his haul of 25 goals for Reading in the 2009-2010 season prompted Roy Hodgson to bring him to West Bromwich last summer.
By then, his hurling ambitions belonged to another life. But there can be little doubt that the experience he gained during those brief years of playing his native sport, when he learned to cope with the pressure of expectation in front of big summer crowds, helped him to adjust to the demands of English football. Temperament and athleticism have always been key to Long's game, as Giovanni Trapattoni outlined when commenting on Long's move to Albion and the Premier League.
"I said to him that he can learn more from playing against stronger opponents," the Ireland manager said. "The job of a striker is very different in the Championship; there is a lot of waiting for the ball to be played to you but in the Premier League there is more of an opportunity to play football. He has proven that he has good qualities but of course he can improve. He is fast. He jumps very well and he is fearless and he attacks the ball. But he needs to learn when to bring in the others and when to go alone."
It was inevitable that Long's full-hearted approach would catch the eye of the Italian coach and his appearance in Croke Park for Ireland against Slovakia in 2007 represented a remarkable milestone. Most Irish sportsmen are fortunate to play in Croke Park even once. Within three years, Long had managed to do so in two separate sports, hurling and football, a distinction that is his alone. The honour was not lost on him. Croke Park is a cultural as well as sporting institution in Ireland.
The 1920 Bloody Sunday atrocity, when British troops opened fire in the crowd and killed 14 people attending a Gaelic football match between Tipperary and Dublin during one of the worst days of violence in the Irish War of Independence, remains one of the most significant events in the history of Irish sport. The day was recalled when Croke Park was finally – and temporarily – 'opened' to host football and rugby internationals in 2007 when the Lansdowne Road stadium was being rebuilt. Long's journey, from promising young Tipperary hurler to Republic of Ireland striker, would have been regarded as scandalous in earlier decades. Now, it is a source of pride.
Long was just one year old when Ireland played in its very first European Championship finals in Germany in 1988. Many English-born players who qualified under the 'grandmother' rule lined out for Ireland during that summer and in the years afterwards. Long's journey has been the direct opposite. Raised on fables about 'Hell's Kitchen', the feared Tipperary full-back line of the 1960's, Long instead finds himself playing in front of a crowd for whom Jeff Astle, their bustling centre-forward, and Bryan Robson, in the first flush of youth during his Albion days, were the only gods that mattered. He made an immediate impression, scoring on his debut against Manchester United and stinging Chelsea the following weekend. And when that ferocious tackle by Hutton interrupted his season, sidelining him for six weeks, he abided by one of the first lessons he would have learned as a hurler: take the blows and get on with it.
Now he is in the Ireland squad for Euro 2012, having scored the only goal in the friendly against Bosnia last weekend. The days when Tipperary people thought of Long as mad for walking away from hurling have long passed. There are more West Bromwich Albion shirts in the Munster county than ever before and if and when he lines out for Ireland in the European finals, more than one hurler will sigh and remember when they were on the same field together. And look at Shane Long now, they will say.
Keith Duggan is the sports feature writer at the Irish Times
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