‘It is a romantic notion’: Jack McCaffrey aiming for fairytale finish with Clontarf

Jack McCaffrey was sitting on a plane taxiing to the runway at Liverpool John Lennon Airport when Mayo finally won their All-Ireland. About to fly home after a stag party weekend, squeezed in among some of his old Dublin contemporaries and hoping not to be in the clouds and in the dark as the last seconds played out, he got to watch Mayo’s great wait end on his phone. “There were people on the plane just hugging each other at the final whistle, complete strangers, it was class,” he says with a smile.He was in Castlebar for work last week and found it hard to spot a telegraph pole or shopfront not still festooned in green and red or at the very least carrying some frayed evidence of Mayo allegiance. READ MORE“There’s no danger those flags will be coming down anytime soon,” adds McCaffrey.He’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel some satisfaction for Mayo. For most of his Dublin career, they were a constant pebble in Dublin’s shoe. But everything moves on. County. Club. Next game.Just two weeks after Mayo’s landmark victory, McCaffrey helped his club Clontarf plant a flag in the capital with a statement victory over Kilmacud Crokes in the first round of the PTSB Dublin Senior Football Championship.On Saturday, they will face reigning champions Ballyboden St Enda’s in a quarter-final at Parnell Park. Throw-in is at 5.30pm.Clontarf last contested a semi-final in 2015. They have only once progressed to the county final. They have yet to win one. Despite all he has achieved, there are still several hills left for McCaffrey to try conquer.In their only final appearance, Clontarf lost to Ballymun Kickhams in 1985. That decider was played at Croke Park and one of Clontarf’s key players was Noel McCaffrey, Jack’s dad. But it was Dean Rock’s dad, Barney, who caused more damage as Ballymun ran out five-point victors.It might seem trite to suggest it would be a storybook final chapter to McCaffrey’s career if he was to help take his club back there – but in a sporting context, that is what drives him now.“Absolutely. And you can romanticise it, because it is a romantic notion,” he says. “I think Clontarf is a much stronger force in Dublin than it was when I started playing. We have a really phenomenal group of young players who are really talented.“And as I do kind of shuffle my way towards the end of my playing days, it would just be really something I’d be incredibly proud of if I could say that we pushed on to that next level and left these lads in a position where they were kind of challenging for county championships.”Jack McCaffrey's Clontarf come up against Ballyboden St Enda's in the quarter-final of the PTSB Dublin Senior Football Championship at Parnell Park on Saturday at 5.30pm. Photograph: Dan Sheridan McCaffrey is 32 now. He’ll be 33 next month.“But my hamstrings are about 50,” he adds with a smile that quickly becomes an ironic grimace.During Dublin’s all-conquering era, McCaffrey was universally admired for the electric fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants nature in which he played the game. A torpedo burning holes in defences – a killer with blistering pace and a smile on his face. It earned him hero status on the Hill and the matchless endorsement of endless schoolyard copycats. But along the way there were injury setbacks. And at home these days, most conversations he has with his dad about football tend to veer towards how he might stay injury-free.He suffered a hamstring pull in that opening round win over Crokes and didn’t play in the round-two fixture against Ballinteer. But defeat to Ballinteer whipped the safety net out from under Clontarf. The Whitehall match in round three then became a highwire act. So, McCaffrey hopped up on the tightrope.“If we lost the Whitehall game, we were into a relegation playoff,” he says. “But we also had every chance of making it to the quarter-finals, so while the hamstring probably wasn’t 100 per cent right for that either, you kind of had to play because it was do-or-die stuff.”Clontarf won by 25 points.When he was 21 years of age and had the footballing world at his jet-powered feet, McCaffrey was part of a Clontarf team that contested a Dublin SFC semi-final. They lost that 2015 game to Ballyboden by just two points. Ballyboden went on to be crowned All-Ireland club champions and Clontarf went away full sure this was how life was going to be for them now, mixing with the big boys at the business end of the championship. But they haven’t even been back to a semi-final since. They drifted for a few years. In 2022, having survived previous trapdoor falls, Clontarf were relegated from the Senior 1 championship. They came back up the following season though and there’s a sense of a rising tide coming now out on Dublin Bay’s north shore. And it’s no harm having a son of the parish back around the place. McCaffrey had been living in Ranelagh until recently when he bought a house in Clontarf with his partner Ellie. He’s found himself at that stage of life now where various kitchen designs must be considered. To wallpaper or not? Bone white or cloud white paint? It’s all good stuff. Because he’s home. This is where he grew up. He’s cycled through all the shortcuts, knows all the shimmies. Sitting in a coffee shop just off the seafront, he looks out to the promenade across the way. These days if he’s ever stopped for a chat while out for a stroll there, the questions are about how Clontarf are going, not the Dubs. “You’re bumping into people from the club the whole time and they are chatting to you about your team or one of the other teams in the club. It’s nice.”On Wednesday night he was in St Anne’s Park to watch the Clontarf senior women’s team beat O’Dwyer’s. With Olympian Mick Clohisey helping the team’s athletic development, Clontarf have gone through the group stages unbeaten and are now preparing for a semi-final against St Sylvester’s.McCaffrey’s sister, Sarah – a multiple All-Ireland winner with Dublin – is a key player for Clontarf and it’s fair to say the integration debate last week didn’t go unnoticed in the McCaffrey household.Sarah McCaffrey in action for Dublin during their victorious 2020 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship final against Cork at Croke Park. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho “Clontarf are very much running a one-club model, and the club has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years,” adds Jack.“I think across the club, I would hope anyway, that people would see it as a very equal club. I think everyone agrees that it intuitively just makes sense for everything to be in one organisation, and it’s a bit archaic to have a different model for the three.“I’m not over the practicalities, but it’s something that certainly got a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks and hopefully that will translate into a bit of momentum. I suppose it’s easy for me to say just get it done.”Getting it done is the challenge for Clontarf on Saturday. Ballyboden will travel across from the southside expecting to progress to the last four. But Clontarf will hope the short hop for them from Seafield Road up Collins Avenue to Parnell Park ends up becoming a day the club takes a giant stride forward.“Ballyboden are probably favourites to win the whole thing so we know we’re up against it,” says McCaffrey. “But if you want to do anything, you have to beat these teams at some point.”As for the Dubs, well McCaffrey had toyed with the idea late last year of committing but the demands of life outside of football brought an end to those thoughts. So he took on the role of supporter instead.“I was looking around [during the championship] and I couldn’t understand the negativity that was there about Dublin. They were desperately unlucky against Kerry, probably just marginally second best that day but they deserved to beat Galway and Donegal. “There’s a serious connection between that Dublin team and the fans now. They really admire a lot of the characters who stood up and performed in those games. “And I don’t think the Dublin lads will lack any motivation next year given some of the conversations that went on about them during the year.”But all that can wait. For Jack McCaffrey, this weekend is only about trying to steer Clontarf into the last four of the Dublin SFC – a conversation that hasn’t included them for over a decade. * Jack McCaffrey is an ambassador for the PTSB Dublin Club Leagues and Championships, with PTSB sponsoring the competitions of all four codes across Dublin GAA, Dublin LGFA and Dublin Camogie from minor upwards.