So it is finally over. Ger Brennan’s confirmation that Stephen Cluxton is, at last, an ex-intercounty footballer brings to an end a career whose longevity was matched only by its successes. Nine All-Ireland medals, 18 Leinster titles, seven All Stars, one Footballer of the Year. Numbers that are unique in the broad sweep of GAA history and likely to remain so for decades. Galactic in scope and breadth.
He started against Longford in May 2001, in a Leinster quarter-final that would otherwise have been lost to the dusty leaves of history. By pure happenstance, Cluxton’s first game for the Dubs and turned out to be Jim Gavin’s last. It was a nothing game, a routine nine-point win, significant to pretty much nobody other than the two most important drivers of Dublin’s greatest ever team.
[ Stephen Cluxton will not be part of Dublin panel for 2026Opens in new window ]
Cluxton played championship before he played league, a battlefield promotion from the Dublin under-21s when regular goalie Davy Byrne got injured. He lost his place when Byrne came back later in that championship but regained it in 2002 and apart from a two-year hiatus just after Covid, kept it for the thick end of a quarter-century. His last game was against Tyrone in June 2025 – 24 years, one month and one day after his debut.
It is a staggering length of time to do anything, much less tog out for your county. Cluxton has played for Dublin since the days when we still paid for things in punts, since before 9/11, since before Saipan. He played in the same teams as players born in 1969 and players born in 2003. His team-mates have included players who made their Dublin debuts as far apart as 1988 and 2025.
RM Block
But if hanging around for a long time was all he did, he wouldn’t have got to hang around. Cluxton is revered in Dublin – and, not insignificantly, is now a member of Brennan’s backroom team – because he didn’t just change their fortunes, he changed the actual sport. Maybe Gaelic football would have changed anyway over time, as analysis invaded every area of it. But nobody dismisses Cluxton’s role in how the game has developed during his time.
The possession-based game he helped to birth, from kick-outs in particular, wasn’t such a feature of his first decade in a Dublin shirt. In the 2006 All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo, Cluxton only retained 10 out of 21 kick-outs across the whole afternoon and yet nobody made a big deal of it or thought it as unusual. Dublin were beaten that day but Cluxton was still the All Star goalkeeper when the awards were announced a couple of months later.
It was only when Pat Gilroy came in as Dublin manager that they changed the role of kick-outs in the game. They expunged the idea that a kick-out needs to be a lottery. In Cluxton, they had a seriously capable soccer player with a pinpoint left boot – why not use it?
“It came down to percentages,” a former team-mate of Cluxton’s explained one time. “There are 50-something kick-outs in a game. If we secure 95 per cent of ours and 15 per cent of theirs, we control the game. Once we have possession, it’s a matter of moving the ball around and waiting for a one-on-one to happen. But it all starts with him.”
It was far from the only thing Dublin became masters of but it was the element of their play that facilitated everything else. And because they kept winning with it, the rest of the sport fell in line behind. This wasn’t always a good thing – once you added 95 per cent retention of kick-outs to massed defences dropping off and sitting in, the sport became unwatchable. It was no surprise that one of the FRC’s headline moves was to bring back a level of unpredictability around the kick-out.
But Cluxton was more than that too. It wasn’t just that he lasted a long time and that his kick-outs were revolutionary. Everyone you talk to who was ever in a Dublin set-up along with him says the same thing. He was the setter of standards, the conscience of the dressingroom. “The shark in the tank,” one of them told me back in 2020. “Players, coaches, everyone in the group is kept on their toes by him.”
Brian Fenton tells a good story about the night Cluxton landed back into the Dublin panel in 2023, with none of the players having had a clue ahead of time. After the first training session back, there was a meeting upstairs in the clubhouse in Parnell Park. Midway through it Cluxton started picking up on something and laying down the law on it.
“And there he was talking straight away!” laughs Fenton. “Part of me was even going, ‘Bit soon there Clucko.’ Because the reality was, when he was away, none of us were all that sure why he wasn’t with us. It was up to him, obviously. But even though we’d be close, there was still a bit of me that was going, ‘You left us high and dry,’ kind of thing. But straight away, that first night, you were like, ‘He’s the GOAT, he’s back, this is great.’”
He’s finished now and Brennan’s era can start in earnest. Brennan will be the first Dublin manager not to have Cluxton between the sticks since Mickey Whelan. Calling him into the backroom team means his influence will still be felt, all the same.
The shark isn’t leaving the tank anytime soon.
