Now in his mid-30s, with nine All-Ireland senior medals and good enough to be tasked with man-marking David Clifford when the stakes were highest and Dublin last lifted the Sam Maguire Cup, it’s fair to say that Michael Fitzsimons is living his best football life.
And yet if there’s a cameo which captures his character and the single-minded determination that has underpinned his career as a defender, it’s a moment down the other end of the field.
That afternoon in Croke Park in May 2023 when Roscommon silenced the home crowd by playing keep-ball for nearly six minutes at the end of the first half to take the sting out of Dublin’s challenge in a humdrum All-Ireland series group game.
After picking up a black card earlier in the same game, Fitzsimons wasn’t in the mood to let more of the afternoon pass him by.
And so viewers were treated to a passage of play that would arguably help change the face of Gaelic football, foreshadowing the radical rule changes ushered through by the Football Review Committee, including a moment when Dublin’s decorated defender decided to try and beat the press almost on his own.
As if to say, enough is enough, he drifted far enough upfield to put a chase-down on Roscommon goalkeeper Conor Carroll and put a tackle in as his team’s furthest player forward.
Even if it was ultimately in vain, it shows how he was still stretching the limits of his own game, still prepared to take a gamble.
Cuala face Sligo and Connacht champions Coolera-Strandhill in tomorrow’s AIB All-Ireland club football semi-final at Breffni Park. In this year’s Dublin county final against three-in-arow champions Kilmacud, Fitzsimons was at it again, popping up at the other end of the field when least expected. In a game of fine margins, his two points from play were only part of the reason he lifted the Man of the Match award.
That’s double the amount he’d scored in 15 seasons as a county player. Talk about timing.
This winter, Dublin have already lost another nine-time All-Ireland winner in James McCarthy. The plans of the only other player apart from Fitzsimons to have such a medal haul – goalkeeper Stephen Cluxton – have yet to become clear.
At a time when 30-year-old Brian Fenton shocked the football world by announcing his retirement and with Dublin clearly in a state of flux, the Cuala defender has refused to be drawn on his own plans while the club campaign is still in progress. A club All-Ireland would represent an unexpected bonus given that Cuala weren’t on the original bookies’ shortlist for this year’s Dublin championship and were actually struggling to get up from Senior 2 level in the recent past.
Fitzsimons is part of a core group who actually won an intermediate title together back in 2012.
In the meantime, the football side of the Cuala house has had to watch on as the senior hurlers broke the mould by winning back-to-back club All-Irelands. And yet, on the eve of this year’s county final, Fitzsimons admitted the dream never died.
‘We were probably thinking we’d like to get somewhere like this back when we were in the intermediate championship. That was always the goal. We were always stating it.
‘I remember we did a meeting where we were saying our goal should be to win a senior championship and people were like, “Does Jim Gavin not say ‘stick to the process’?”
‘I was just like, “I think you’re taking that out of context.” Everyone who played with Dublin understood what their goal was. You have to mention it at some stage and then you can start sticking to the process.’
‘But we’re a long time on the road – a lot of the team.
We wanted to plant that idea early that if we got our act together it’s probably taken longer than we would have liked.
‘We’ve had ups and downs – being in Senior B, the championship format changing, the Covid year as well. Then we lost to Round Towers, Lusk in a tough game after extra-time.
‘So yeah, we’ve improved little by little.’
And so here they are, this time the favourites to find a way past their Sligo opposition after a convincing Leinster final victory over St Mary’s Ardee at the end of November.
Back in June, Fitzsimons was part of the Dublin team that cruised past Cavan at the same venue. If that one went to script, this one looks a much trickier assignment.
Even for a player of his experience, this represents a step into the unknown.
