In 2014 Jack Guiney was seen as the future of Wexford hurling. He had just won his second Leinster Under 21 Hurling Championship and had been a key member of the Wexford Senior Hurling team for three years already. Now 27, he lives in San Francisco and is currently not playing the sport he grew up with. Guiney had hoped to do some hurling with Rathnure in 2020, but Covid-19 put paid to this.
The county was just coming out of the hurling wilderness. That summer they gained their first significant championship victories since 2007. They defeated the reigning All-Ireland Champions Clare after a replay and followed up a week later with a win over Waterford.
Guiney made the Senior team in 2012, his first year out of minor. It was also Liam Dunne’s first year as Wexford manager.
“Liam Dunne did a trial game” Guiney said while speaking on The Hurling Podcast. “I was the only lad from Rathnure that’d go into the thing, the rest of them felt a little bit insulted that Liam Dunne didn’t pick up the phone himself. I had no bother going, any chance to get on the thing.
“We got to a relegation final the first year, lost to Antrim in my first game. That’s the level we came in at, was a relegation final in division 2 of the league.”
After the improvements in 2014, coupled with the underage success, more was expected of Guiney and his Wexford teammates for 2015. In the Leinster quarter final that year, Wexford defeated Westmeath in Mullingar with Guiney playing 46 minutes in an underwhelming performance to set up a semi-final with Kilkenny. However, on the following Wednesday he was dropped from the panel completely.
Speaking prior to the semi-final the Wexford manager told South East Radio, “We set standards and the players set standards as you go along, and players buy into it. If you don’t want to come up to that standard or if you can’t give the commitment required, this set up is nowhere for you to be. And at the moment, Jack just can’t give that commitment.
“I would love to have Jack Guiney, the players would love to have Jack Guiney, the management would love to have Jack Guiney, but I am not so sure that Jack wants us as much as we want him”.
This became national news which Guiney says was a “bit of a sore point”. It can be heard in his voice how “being dragged through the media” took its toll on him.
“I ended up back in Mullingar after playing Westmeath. I ended up going out with a few of the college lads. I was hurling with DIT at the time. I went out that night in Mullingar and a lot of lads weren’t happy.
“I ended up going to training Tuesday, what didn’t help me on the Tuesday was I drove Mossy (Tomás) Waters’ car down to training and they had training on in Ballygarrett for some reason and we’d never trained there before.
“Whatever destination we put into the map we ended up down the bottom of the town of Gorey. We were 10 minutes late for training and that didn’t look good, now I was coming in late for training as well as after being out on the Sunday.
“There was no rule against it, there was a few players went out in Enniscorthy Sunday and stuff but, it’s kind of a combination of things I suppose. On the Wednesday I got a phone call off Liam telling me I was dropped off the panel, I couldn’t really believe it to be honest, I thought I might be dropped for the game, fair enough.”
Guiney sighs and says he was then looking forward to a club game he could play in since being relieved of intercounty duties. “I said here now, I’ll show these lads”. He scored four goals and five points, which also became national news. Wexford ended up losing to Kilkenny by 24 points.
“I didn’t like the way it was used as our excuse for getting a hammering off Kilkenny, because that certainly wasn’t the case. There was no way I was going to make up whatever it was (24 points).”
Post-game, Dunne was quoted by the42 as saying “The player in question has potential to be one of the best players in Ireland, let alone in Wexford.
“You have to treat everyone the same. You’ve 33 guys in a panel that are rowing the one way with you. Sometimes you have to make decisions and tough calls. I want my best players available to me at all times but no one man is bigger than the team.”
He holds no grudge against Dunne, but still questions the way it played out.
“Everyone thinks I fell out black with Liam, I didn’t, I still have great time for Liam Dunne. I think it was more influences behind Liam that had made the call and Liam felt obliged to go ahead with it.
“It could have been kept in house and no one would have said anything about it, it was just taking the attention off the fact that Kilkenny gave us a hammering in my opinion. Really to me it could have been just kept in house, no one would have batted an eyelid.
“I probably shouldn’t have gone. There was no plan to do it, I just got carried away with the whole thing. I was after playing so poorly against Westmeath and I was taken off. I felt I needed to reset and sometimes you reset with an oul night out or whatever, that’s what I felt I did and felt I would have got the head right for what was to come.
“I had, maybe a bit of a reputation for taking any chance to go out, which probably mightn’t have helped either. It probably came from a place of lads wanting to put the foot down coming up to the Kilkenny game and display how serious they were about it and they didn’t see me as part of that.
“Whoever was involved it doesn’t matter at the end of the day, if they felt they were doing right, well then they had to go with their gut. I don’t think it was overly personal. I don’t think as a panel we were in a good enough place to be calling out anyone for things like that, probably would have been better off focussing on everyone’s own performance.
“If you had typed in my name into Google at the time or if I was going for a job, an employer was looking you up like they do, all that would of come up was discipline issues and I don’t think that’s fair on anyone. Your sport should be separate from the rest of your life, you should be allowed that bit of privacy.”
It must be stated that Guiney returned the following year under Dunne’s management, but ended up leaving for personal reasons. He was also part of the set up with Davy Fitzgerald, however he left in 2018 due to a troublesome knee injury.
We must remember that these are amateur athletes, human beings, they have lives and families outside of playing for their county. Not many criticised Liam Dunne for letting Guiney go, but maybe the manner in which it was conducted could have been handled better.
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