SHAUN Patton’s transfer papers are in.
Not to leave St Eunan’s for the handy life in Navan where he’s been living and working for almost three years, rather the other way around.
The St Eunan’s and Donegal goalkeeper has ended up a Garda, based in Meath but angling for home again if the chance arises. His probation period over, the papers are lodged and now it’s a waiting game.
He’d spent his youth dreaming of being the next Shay Given.
Gaelic football had been sampled but left behind at under-12 in favour of the pathway through Irish development squads.
Trials in England and Scotland didn’t turn to contracts but he was good enough to be given a League of Ireland debut by Finn Harps at the age of 16.
His career was now headed down the domestic soccer route but he’d come to learn the hard way the lack of security it provides.
Having turned to Gaelic, he’s moulded a reputation. Some would place him at the head of the list of goalkeepers but he’s had just one Allstar nomination. Other parts of his game still require some finesse but in terms of kicking, nobody comes close.
Eamon McGee tweeted in the aftermath of St Eunan’s semi-final win over Kilcar two weeks ago: “Don’t think I’ve seen a better exhibition of kicking in a club game than what Shaun Patton did tonight.”
Patton is a freak, in the best possible sense of the word.
His pen pic says he weighs 13 stone. Most of it is hidden in quads never seen from behind the knee-length cycling shorts.
His hero Given was six-foot even and Patton measures up around the same.
“At a push, he’s maybe 6’1”,” says James Gallagher, his goalkeeping coach with Donegal the last two seasons.
Gallagher’s own background is very similar, having been a Finn Harps stalwart himself and only dabbled in Gaelic football. Same with Andy McGovern, Patton’s coach with the county before Gallagher came in in 2019.
“His legs and glutes are way more developed than his upper body.”
The frame is a cod. There’s nobody else in Ireland can do what Patton can do off a tee.
On one occasion against Kilcar, he launched a kickout almost 70 yards over the top of the opposition’s midfield, right into the arms of a moving target.
Two years ago, Donegal were trailing 0-5 to 0-2 against Tyrone in the knockout Covid game.
Rain pouring, wind howling through MacCumhaill Park, he takes on a kick that very few would even think about.
Tyrone outnumber Donegal four-to-one in the middle. Towards the far 45’ stands Peader Mogan. Patton has the belief and ability to drill the ball right through the white shirts, skidding off the turf beautifully into Mogan’s hands.
From his boot to the roof of Niall Morgan’s net via Michael Langan’s finish, it was ten seconds. Donegal went on and won a game they barely deserved to, and didn’t look like winning at that stage.
“What I like about him, when you try difficult kicks a lot as he does… If he can see three options, a high-risk one, a medium risk and a low-risk, he’ll generally go for the high-risk one because it’s the most beneficial for the team.
“It’s the most chance that he’ll make a mistake and it won’t get there but if it does, it’s the most beneficial to the team. More of them get there than don’t get there.”
Other goalkeepers could have taken on those kicks surely. But particular the one against Kilcar, there’s nobody else could have kicked it with a single step for a run-up and kept the trajectory so low that it went like a bullet.
Less than 10 per cent of his kicking time in training is spent on that big kick over the top.
“There’s no magic formula,” his coach admits.
“You’re not gonna teach that to anybody, really. There’s a whole mixture of stuff there - the technique, the timing, power and strength in his legs and his core that he works on a lot. There are naturally good strikers of a ball and he’s one of them.
“To be able to take one step and boom it like that, there has to be a certain amount of power and strength involved too.
“There’s no point having tree-trunk-strong legs and your technique and timing not being right, or you might have a nice sweet strike but not the power to get it 70, 80 yards.
“Technique, timing, power, strength – a lot of boys will tick two of those boxes, two-and-a-bit, but he ticks all of them in the kicking department.”
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MANY have tried and failed to get him to rebalance his body.
Donegal have kept on at him about bulking up at the top end but he’s stayed on his own path, as far away from it as he can be.
It’s the opposite of being work shy because that he isn’t, but perhaps it goes back to his days with Sligo Rovers.
Rodney Dalzell was his goalkeeping coach there and at Derry City.
At Rovers, training sessions were tailored so that they’d do some heavy work two days out from a game.
That one morning a week, Dalzell would bring out the medicine balls and weighted vests. He’s always felt Patton, given that he’s just six foot, needed his spring more than he needs extra muscle.
“We had the 10kg weight vests. The difference in the aerial ability when he hadn’t the weight vest on was massive.
“If Shaun was to put on 10kg of muscle and you measured the height difference [of his jump] on the same cross coming in, he wouldn’t get the same height.
“I’m a fan of lean goalkeepers. I don’t like them being too muscly up the top. Players might bounce off them but they’re slower to get there.
“My philosophy is you can walk there and still get the ball if you’re lean and dynamic. It doesn’t suit Shaun to be heavier, the way he plays.”
He’s a shot-stopper, agile, great at moving his feet. But it’s the other side of what he does with his feet that marks him out.
Everyone knows it but when he has the ability to pick his kick and launch it 70 yards with one step, there is no code to crack. He’ll just play the game he sees in front of him.
Speaking on the pitch in Celtic Park after a game in 2018, Patton told of his insatiable appetite for improvement. Similar to what the late Cormac McAnallen used to do, he’d go home after every game and write down his stats, and mark himself on all aspects of his performance.
“It’s a thing I’ve always liked, to keep up-to-date on my stats and find areas I can improve on,” he told The Irish News.
“My goal is to get as high a percentage as possible of kickouts kept in games.
“But I mark myself on everything, all different aspects of the game. Goalkeeping’s not just kickouts at the end of the day.
“It might be one of the most important parts of the game but there are a lot of technical abilities – saving shots, high balls, all this different stuff that it’s taken time to get used to.”
That hasn’t changed.
“He’d be sore on himself – silly sore,” says Gallagher.
“It’s something I’d be working on him. He is a bit of perfectionist and he has to understand there are days and sessions where he’s not gonna be perfect.
“He starts then a big inquiry into why it’s not perfect and you’re trying to say to him ‘look, Jesus, it could just be a mixture of work or sleep or one of those days’.
“We’re not robots, you’re gonna have ups and downs, but he’d just go ‘ah nah, that wasn’t good enough’. Analyses the shit out of training sessions and games.
“Training wise, I think I was kinda getting through to him a wee bit to calm down.”
Speaking of mistakes, he was roundly canned for the two short kickouts in their qualifier defeat to Armagh that led to first a gilt-edged goal chance that Stefan Campbell missed, and then a penalty that Rian O’Neill scored on top of a first career black card for Patton.
Both kicks went straight to the man. Odhran McFadden-Ferry spilled the first and Brendan McCole dropped the second. Patton got the abuse.
If there was a mistake it was in the choice, not the execution, of the kickouts.
“It is what it is. Armagh dispossessed our defenders on the ball. Maybe ball in hand isn’t everything sometimes. Playing a wee bit more of a risky game can pay off too,” he said himself to Colm Parkinson in a recent podcast.
The dugout row that day with Patrick McBrearty wasn’t all it seemed either. The camera missed the bodies in between them with whom the words were actually being exchanged.
But Patton was so annoyed at the situation that led to his black card and McBrearty being sacrificed that he broke a bone in his hand punching the dugout on his way off.
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WHEN Shaun Patton was playing MacLarnon Cup football with St Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, he was keeping Donegal’s sub minor goalkeeper out of the team and was sent to trials for the college Allstars.
A form was handed to him asking for a few details. The usual stuff, name, age, height. Under club, he wrote ‘Finn Harps’.
The story is well-told of how he pulled St Eunan’s out in their 2014 Ulster Club campaign, stepping in against Roslea and Omagh. He’d never played a single adult game before an Ulster quarter-final, and when they lost to Omagh he didn’t play another for three years.
At 22, the realities of a career in soccer bit hard. The precariousness of year-to-year contracts of the League of Ireland bit him hard when he got injured in the last game of the season. Sligo, with the second smallest budget in the league, weren’t going to pay a player that couldn’t play.
Donegal had tried to bring him in when Rory Gallagher took over in 2015 but he turned it away. They came back when he got injured in 2017 and offered him their medical services in return for taking up the offer.
Snow beating off his face as he arrived at Convoy in a cast the first night, he’s spoken before about how he was instantly taken by the unity of the huddle the team had in the freezing cold after the session.
Still, Donegal and St Eunan’s have been in some way fortunate to get their hands on him.
Patton was in talks with Cork City when they came calling. As much as his injury was ill-timed, so too was his skillset.
2017 was just as Pep Guardiola has arrived in England. The waves have lapped the Spaniard’s impact right to these shores too. Walk on to a pitch anywhere in Ireland on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll see teams now trying to pass the ball through the lines, far from the Jack Charlton methods that have always dominated the amateur scene.
“His distribution is the best I’ve ever seen,” says Dalzell.
“He could land the ball on a 50 pence piece from 60 yards away. He’d knock a bird out of a tree.”
Chances were few and far between though. Gerard Doherty was an immovable legend and stalwart at Derry City, whereas Micheál Schlingermann held the number one shirt at Sligo having come from a GAA background himself in Mayo.
“The only difference was Schlingermann had more experience basically,” recalls Gerard Lyttle, who was Rovers’ manager at the time.
“We were fighting to stay up and it wasn’t ideal to throw a ‘keeper in that didn’t have that experience.
“He could kick the ball miles for a soccer goalkeeper. He could ping a good ball. If you wanted Shaun to hit the corner flag, hit anyone on the pitch, he could do it with his eyes closed. Really talented that way.
“His whole personality and demeanour, he was a happy lad and he put the hours in. He always stayed behind after training to do a bit extra.”
In training sessions, they’d often play five-a-side games in which the reserve goalkeepers stood in and Patton and Schlingermann played out to get them used to having the ball at their feet under pressure.
“Shaun would be a good number six or eight on the pitch, his feet are that good,” says Dalzell.
He was up in Michael Murphy’s sports shop a couple of years back when Patton was working there and jarred him about a return to soccer.
“No more in his notion. He’d be a commodity now for teams, some teams, absolutely.
“If he was playing soccer now, if he wasn’t in the lower leagues in England he’d be playing for one of the top clubs, north or south.
“He was in big demand. I had boys phoning me asking, teams like Cliftonville and Crusaders.
“I spoke to a few clubs about him, he was getting a good wage and they were letting him play Gaelic as well. Not interested. He loves the Gaelic now and he’s quite happy there.”
