By John Harrington

Where did it all begin for Stephen Cluxton?

When was he first put on a path that will lead to the latest incredible career milestone of a 200th appearance for the Dublin senior footballers when they play Tyrone in Sunday’s All-Ireland SFC Final?

With most great sportspeople there’s rarely one obvious fork in the road, instead their journey is a series of less dramatic twists and turns, dips and rises.

No so in Cluxton’s case. Were he not in the right place at the right time in his life, then there’s a good chance he would never have become what he is now – the most influential Gaelic Footballer of his generation.

As a boy growing up in Coolock, Gaelic Football wasn’t Cluxton’s passion. His sporting preferences were for badminton and soccer.

It was only when he went to secondary school in St. David’s CBS in Artane that he was pulled towards Gaelic Football by a teaching staff who were steeped in the game.

Former Galway footballer Brian Talty was one of his first school mentors and can’t help but shake his head in disbelief when you ask him about the journey that Cluxton has gone on as a Gaelic Footballer since he first walked through the gates of St. David’s.

“It's unbelievable,” said Talty. “Sometimes when I sit down and think about it I say to myself, 'Is this a dream or what is happening here?'

“You're looking at it and saying 'Gaelic Football has changed so much because of this little fella that came into St. David's.’

“It is fascinating for myself and the lads who were in the school at the time to see he has gone on to become such an influence on Gaelic Football because sometimes he had to be pushed to get him out there.

“Sometimes I'd sit down and shake my head and say I can't believe he's had such an influence because I can still see him as a young kid coming in St. David’s.”

Talty and the other teachers in St. David’s reckoned they could make a decent inside-forward out of the left-footed Cluxton, and so that’s where he played during his early years on various school teams.

The move to goalkeeper happened by accident rather than design. When the regular goal-keeper for the school’s U-16 team was unavailable for a match, team manager Seamus Reilly, a Meath man, surveyed his options and figured Cluxton was his next best bet.

Talty recalls the teenager “wasn’t overly impressive” on his first outing between the posts, and he was soon playing back out the field again.

He was given another chance shortly afterwards when the regular number one was unavailable again, and this time he did enough to make the jersey his own.

Meath supporters may be holding their heads in their hands at the thought of one of their own first putting Cluxton on the path to goalkeeping superstardom, but Kerry supporters are also entitled to think the misery Cluxton has put them through in recent years is somewhat self-inflicted.

There’s a chance he might never have made the leap from being a handy school-team goalkeeper to making the grade at inter-county level were it not for the faith shown in him by two Kerrymen – Brian Lavin and Brian Moran – who were teachers in St. David’s.

Lavin was a selector with the Dublin Minor Football team in 1999 and Moran was their goalkeeping coach.

The first-choice goalkeeper on the team that year was going through a dip in form so Lavin and Moran put their heads together and decided it might be worthwhile to call up Cluxton and see if he had what it took.

Cluxton grabbed the opportunity with both hands and ended up starring on a Leinster Championship winning team that also included Alan Brogan. The accidental goalkeeper was now very much committed to the path that would in a short period of time make him a household name.

“That just goes to show how huge the St. David’s connection was for him,” said Talty.

“He was in the right place at the right time as much as anything, because the other Dublin minor goalkeeper was also in St. David's at the time and he wasn't going well at that particular time so the lads brought Stephen in.

“Brian Moran worked with Stephen and could see that he wanted to improve and work hard at it.

“Early on even his kicking off the ground wasn't great. But he worked so hard at it. That's the biggest thing with him, he always tried to improve and always tried to get better.

“Maybe he would have come through anyway, but it's amazing that he went from that minor stage to becoming what he has.

“As I always say, the Dubs are awful lucky to have the culchies up here finding all the talent for them!”

Cluxton might have been in the right place at the right time when opportunity first knocked, but it’s thanks to his own natural ability and dedication that he has become the phenomenon he has.

Goalkeepingwas a relatively late vocation for him, but once he committed himself to it he was dead-set on becoming the very best he could be.

He made rapid progress. Just two years after being given his big break with the county minor teams, he made his senior Championship debut for Dublin against Longford in 2001.

By the following year he was Dublin’s undisputed first-choice goalkeeper, but then in 2003 his inter-county career hit a jolting speed-bump when he was red-carded in an All-Ireland SFC qualifier after kicking out at Steven McDonnell.

Armagh came from behind to win the match, and Cluxton was blamed for Dublin’s defeat by the then manager Tommy Lyons.

“When he made that mistake against Armagh he could have thrown his hat at it,” said Talty. “But instead he just became even more determined to better himself.”

Talty saw up close and personal just how much Cluxton dedicated to himself to his craft because he coached him at both club level with Parnells and then at inter-county level when he served as a selector under Pillar Caffrey from 2005 to 2008.

“Everybody thinks he just had this natural ability, he didn't, he did loads of work,” said Talty.

“He would go out on the 50-yard line kicking the ball over the bar just to get the accuracy and people would be wondering what he was doing out there, why isn't he just kicking it out the field, but that just shows you he was thinking about it as well at that stage about the importance of an accurate kick-out.

“He was always working on his game. Strangely enough, being the brilliant coach that I was, he was talking about short kick-outs and I was telling him to kick it out to the middle to the two big men. That was me being the traditionalist midfielder!

“If often say that at coaching courses, that my claim to fame is that I told him not to be kicking those short kick-outs. But he could also place a long kick-out as well, in my defence.”

Cluxton gained an ally on the merits of short kick-outs when Gary Matthews, a former League of Ireland soccer goalkeeper and qualified UEFA coach, was brought on board by Pillar Caffrey for the 2006 season as Dublin’s goal-keeping coach.

Matthews had seen first-hand how a goalkeeper’s distribution in soccer had evolved and become a much greater part of a team’s tactical plan.

No longer were teams content to go direct from goalkeeper to centre-forward and play second-phase football.

The penny had dropped that it made little sense to kick a 50-50 ball down the field when you could keep possession by simply getting a goalkeeper to kick it short or throw it to a full-back.

Short kick-outs in Gaelic Football presented more of a challenge because there’s less chance of a corner-back being left unmarked than a full-back in soccer.

But Matthews still felt the same principles generally applied as far as the importance of possession was concerned, and in Cluxton he had a goalkeeper capable of turning the short kick-out into an art-form.

“He was very receptive,” Matthews told GAA.ie. “He had a very healthy interest in soccer anyway. He follows Manchester United and he would have looked up to Peter Schmeichel.

“He saw how he kept possession of the ball while still moving it further up the pitch.

“So when I was throwing these ideas at him he didn't see them as silly, he recognised them as something that was already being done in football.”

Making their shared vision a reality required a lot of work, and, quite often, a good deal of frustration for Cluxton.

Not because he didn’t buy into Matthews’ methods, but because he’s his own hardest task-master.

“He's a perfectionist,” said Matthews, who worked with Cluxton for seven seasons. “When he understands something and buys into it, he tends to see the end result of where he wants to get to. He sees that quite quickly.

“It's grand when everything is going according to plan to get him to that point, but when there's a curve-ball or a bad night in training, he gets frustrated.

“He's not frustrated because he doesn't believe in what he's doing, but because he's not getting to where he wants to be quick enough.”

Cluxton doesn’t just demand high standards from himself, but from others too. And when they don’t meet them, he’s not shy about letting them know about it.

When Dublin manager Jim Gavin appointed Cluxton his captain for the 2013 season the decision initially raised a few eyebrows because the goalkeeper didn’t seem the type to deliver inspirational speeches or put an encouraging arm around a team-mate.

Gavin knew what he was doing, though. He wanted a captain to set standards that everyone else in the panel would have to strain to reach, and in Cluxton he had the perfect man to set a high bar.

“When it comes to the preparation of the team Stephen wouldn't be happy unless you did it perfectly,” said Brian Talty.

“I'd say as captain as well the way he operates goes through the whole group. He wouldn't accept anything that's not right.

“You won't hear much from Clucko but he'll still go about demanding it off fellas to do the right thing.

“Sometimes it takes a while for fellas to take to a guy like that. You'd have fellas saying, 'who does he think he is'. But they soon realise that he's some operator.

“You prepared correctly, he wouldn't accept it if it wasn't done right. It was the same with the club.

“He had his ideas on how it could be done and sometimes it might not be what you'd be thinking but he was always prepared to say it and question why we wouldn't do this or that.”

Cluxton has never been the type to wear his heart on his sleeve or reveal too much of his inner thought process.

He doesn’t engage with the media, but did offer some insight into what makes him tick when he spoke on camera for Dave Berry’s documentary of a season spent on the road with the Dublin footballers in 2005.

Dublin had beaten Laois by a point in a dramatic Leinster SFC Final, but Cluxton didn’t hang around long to savour the moment.

"I went up first (to the podium) and I kinda looked around and said to myself, 'This is not really for me'," he said in that documentary.

"So I said hard luck to the Laois lads and I went back down into the dressing room. I was the first one in there. I'm out to play football and that's really all it is. It's nothing else."

That attitude was even more apparent when he famously nailed the winning free for Dublin against Kerry late on in the 2011 All-Ireland SFC Final.

It ended Dublin’s 16 year wait for the Sam Maguire Cup and will go down as an iconic moment in the modern history of Gaelic Football, but Cluxton didn’t exactly bask in the moment.

Kerry’s Tomás Ó Sé handed him the match-ball shortly after the final whistle, presumably as a token of his respect, but Cluxton kicked it away without a second thought as he quickly made his way to the Dublin dressing-room while all his team-mates celebrated with gusto on the pitch.

“That's just the kind of person he is,” said Talty. “He goes in, does the job, the job is done, that's it.

“It's probably the same with teaching. He goes in, does his job, there's no messing around.

“That's his personality. Sometimes you'd say, listen, enjoy yourself sham will you, for God's sake. But his enjoyment comes from getting better, doing things right and making sure they're done right.

“He's a science teacher, you see, so it probably comes from that mentality. Cause and effect.”

It’s fair to say that Cluxton has shaped Gaelic Football as a sport more than any one player since Mayo’s Sean Lavan pioneered the solo-run in the 1920s.

Cluxton’s excellence has effectively redefined the role of a goalkeeper. Retaining possession from re-starts is now the central plank of every team’s tactical strategy, so it doesn’t matter how good a shot-stopper you are, if you can’t accurately ping restarts both short and long, then you won’t cut it as a goalkeeper at the highest level.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we now have a generation of goalkeepers breaking onto the scene who have clearly modelled their approach to the game on Cluxton’s.

Monaghan’s Rory Beggan is the leader of the pack in this regard, and he doesn’t mind admitting that the Dublin goalkeeper has been his role-model.

“When I was 16, 17, 18, Cluxton was it for me,” said Beggan recently in an interview with the Irish Times. “As everyone says, he has revolutionised goalkeeping. The standard across the country now is very high and that’s down to him.

“It’s down to a lot of managers copying the Dublin way and trying to make their goalkeepers better. It’s not the fat kid who goes in goals anymore. It’s a skill position because of him.

“Goalie coaching is based a lot on what he does and what the Dubs do. It’s down to a lot of managers wanting to have the Cluxton method in their team.”

As good as Beggan has been this year, it would still be a brave person who’d nail their colours to the mast and say without a shadow of a doubt that he has overtaken Cluxton as the best goalkeeper in the country.

Cluxton will be turning 37 shortly, but his standards haven’t dropped appreciably. Gary Matthews is convinced he’s actually still getting better, and has many more years left at the highest level if he so chooses.

“When you look at Gaelic Football and study the activity of a goalkeeper, the majority of what he has to do is kick-outs,” said Matthews.

“There are other components, but if you put it on a pie-chart that pie-chart would be completely dominated by kick-outs.

“In that respect Stephen is well capable of continuing on kicking out a ball and organising a defence for a few years yet.

“Experience has made him more knowledgeable about the game so he's actually getting better at communicating with his players.

“To me, he's actually still getting better as a goalkeeper so it's basically up to him and his body when it's time.

“If you were asked to recruit a goalkeeper in the morning for Dublin and Stephen wasn't already one of them, you'd be saying, 'Yeah, he's the one'.”

There’s a very good chance that Cluxton will mark his 200th appearance for Dublin by winning his sixth All-Ireland medal and fifth as team captain.

Not bad going for badminton player who only fell into goalkeeping by accident.

“Unbelievable!”, says Brian Talty. “And no sigh of him giving it up.

“I thought over the years, I was kind of saying to myself, Clucko has two or three All-Irelands now he might pack it in because he's such an age and yet here his is now and he's still flying.

“But Clucko could decide in the morning too that I'm going downhill, so that's it.

“There would no emotion about it at all, just, 'That's it. I've done my time, I've done my business, and that's it, I don't want to hear anymore about it.

“And when he’s finished, he might be just as happy to go back to the badminton again!”