THE first time I felt the symptoms, it was a good few years ago now.
Whatever drill it was Hazy was trying to explain to us, the message wasn’t sticking.
The group of four had whittled down too quickly. A pass gone to the wrong place, nobody picked up and the next thing there’s nobody at the cone to give the ball to.
We just can’t get it right.
Liam Millar’s standing behind me. He can see the vein on my temple that turns bright blue in bad temper starting to colour up.
“Quit being so crabit,” he jokes.
The head gasket blows. I turn around with the ball in my hand and from three yards away, drive it at him full belt. Somehow, I’ve missed him.
The temper’s up. Now enraged at both the state of the training drill and the fact that I’d missed him from that distance, I lift another ball and drive that at him too.
I miss again.
He doesn’t.
In the middle of the thing moving everywhere around us, Liam Millar socks me up the jaw. Rightly so.
Just a wee quick right hook, enough that I know the second ball was just a step too far.
In an instant, the ball’s there, I’m at the front of the group and I’ve to take it.
By the time the drill, by now running smoothly, is over, I’ve calmed down.
Like any good row at training, we both apologise and that’s it over.
That was the first time I’d ever felt the effects of being the Grumpy Old Man.
In the grand scheme of things, early 30s is not old.
But as a footballer, that’s when it begins to really creep up.
The cheques that the brain is writing are bouncing when the legs try to cash them.
Six years ago, I strained my Achilles. Every morning I wake up now, my heels wish they were tucked up in bed for another 20 minutes.
It’s like the walk of a 93-year-old in to lift the baby out of the cot, half worried you might drop her. (I can already hear them saying ‘it would be like you to drop her’).
It would be a feat of superhuman mental strength to accept the effects of ageing without trying to blame the world for it.
One minute Seamus Mullan’s writing about the young goalkeeper in the Mid Ulster Observer; the next, Hazy’s young lad is coming off the Derry minors and you’re relegated to about fifth-choice, hanging on because it’s the bare 15 and the rest are in some way useful outfield.
The difficulty in small rural clubs isn’t staying around too long – it’s being allowed to retire.
With weekend work and weans, my senior days were done a couple of years ago. With no reserve team at home, I made the difficult decision to transfer to Ahoghill at the start of this season.
As much as it infected Antrim football's intermediate reserve league with a collection of bad goals and misplaced kickouts accompanied by an impressive array of swear words (if I may say so myself), it kept my hand in playing.
It’s one thing becoming the Grumpy Old Footballer, but it’s another becoming the Grumpy Old Journalist.
The minute you stop playing, it becomes an intellectual wrestle to understand Gaelic football.
After 120 years with very little tactical evolution, the game has spun so fast on its 21st century axis that it’s almost impossible to keep up.
Change is happening so often and so rapidly that it is not the same sport it was.
Players’ roles and team shapes are changing so much.
It can be a really difficult sport to analyse properly.
That’s a big part of why football gets such a bad press.
The easiest thing to do with something you don’t understand is criticise it.
Why are they kicking the ball backwards?
Why are they handpassing so much?
Why is the goalkeeper kicking it to the corner-back?
Why won’t they kick one in?
At times it deserves to be criticised, just not as often as it is.
For years, the primary job of a manager was to motivate his players and pick the right team. The greatest trait you could have is the ability to read a game and switch the corner-back if he was taking a roasting.
That role has changed so much, particularly in football. Hurling’s tactical panes are less stained, for sure.
In this year’s Munster hurling final, Clare were missing Conor Cleary at full-back so they put Cian Nolan on Aaron Gillane. Grand in itself. But Gillane was running riot after 15 minutes.
He was still running riot after half an hour, and 40 minutes until eventually they made the switch with 20 minutes to go.
Brian Lohan left Nolan on him, one against one, for all of that time. It was very obvious because hurling still has more man-on-man contests and is easier to dissect.
So by the same token it perhaps explains why hurling pundits tend to be more positive about the game, because it’s just easier to talk about. They’re never stuck for a soundbite or a story, whereas with football, if you can’t see it clearly, best to just say it’s crap.
What you quickly realise when you stop playing is that the players who were for so long the same age as you are suddenly 15 years younger and have held a newspaper about as often as they’ve played a kick-pass in to the full-forward line.
It’s why a lot of inter-county teams are turning to coaches in their late 30s and early 40s. Old enough to have gained a bit of experience around the place, and young enough to still be as on top of a chameleon of a sport as you can be.
Unless you go into coaching and surround yourself with those younger influences, the first thing you lose touch with is the mindset of people younger than you.
Every generation will speak their own life language.
No matter how many trips you take to Turkey or if your cupboard is full of skinny jeans and white trainers, you can never fully understand what it is to be someone younger than you.
When inter-county players are asked now about criticism, you’ll hear them say that they don’t pay attention to the outside noise.
That is very true. Why would they? Take the bits you were sent on WhatsApp for motivation and ignore the rest.
This is a generation less concerned by negativity and more interested in finding what can aid them. They’re into podcasts and self-help books and nutrition and owning coffee shops (the most recent estimate suggested 82 per cent of all inter-county players run an artisan coffee shop).
There’s very little in the past that will improve them so why would they bother with it?
It’s irrelevant.
And of all the things that can eat at the Grumpy Old Man, nothing has sharper teeth than irrelevance.
