championship<\/a>. Galway play Kildare at home next weekend in the first match of the All-Ireland series and, all going well, they\u2019ll be kept busy until the end of July. Love Island, meanwhile, films for the guts of three months, with the live final usually going out in early August. So, a bit of a clash, then. <\/p>\nAgain, in the old days, young Fitzgerald might have had time to head away off and get his few weeks of rumpy out of his system and still be back for the All-Ireland quarter-finals. Love Island is big on the bombshell introduction, the new contestant thrown in mid-series to shake everything up. But sadly, the dates won\u2019t align for Galway to bombshell him back in. Yet another casualty of the split season.<\/p>\n
Galway have had nine games in league and championship so far this year. Fitzgerald played all 70 minutes in four of them. He played every minute of their games down the stretch last summer. He was probably going to get squeezed for gametime this summer, but it wouldn\u2019t have taken many calf pulls or hamstring strains for him to play a significant part. He will be a loss to Galway if it happens.<\/p>\n
Which it still might not. At the time of writing, there\u2019s no certainty as to whether or not Fitzgerald will make the Love Island cut. Certainly, he fits the bill. Young, athletic, a jawline you could sharpen your pencil on. He has a hefty social media presence, which never hurts \u2013 just under 100,000 followers on TikTok and almost 4.5 million likes for his videos. A primary schoolteacher in real life, he comes across as a sound kid with a big personality.<\/p>\n
And yet, you can hear it, can\u2019t you? That low grumble of disapproval, that tut-tutting chorus of sneer. The very idea doesn\u2019t sit right, that an intercounty footballer from one of the top teams would sacrifice a run at Sam Maguire for a few weeks of oiled-up canoodling by a Balearic pool. It\u2019s just not done. <\/p>\n
You play intercounty, you play intercounty. That\u2019s the long and short of it. You\u2019re expected to forsake all other avenues of expression, to suppress any and all other interests. Weddings, communions, family occasions \u2013 they\u2019re for normal people. Intercounty footballers and hurlers can have no time for that sort of carry-on.<\/p>\n
People will just about give you a pass if you want to go away studying. But they won\u2019t be overjoyed about it. Fitzpatrick\u2019s young team-mate Matthew Thompson missed the league because he\u2019d been accepted to Berkeley University in the US. Fine. Okay. At least he won\u2019t be wrecked playing Sigerson. <\/p>\n
But then the news came through that he had picked up an ankle injury over there and couldn\u2019t play in the Connacht final. That wasn\u2019t part of the deal. This lad was on the shortlist for Young Footballer of the Year last year. How dare he not come back from California ready to tear it up again?<\/p>\n
![\"There’s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/E67K76VMXBHBJIKUSUEY6RRNLM.jpg\")
There\u2019s no certainty Galway\u2019s Se\u00e1n Fitzgerald will make it into the Love Island group. Photograph: Bryan Keane\/Inpho <\/p>\n
And how dare Fitzgerald, 25 years old and in the prime of his life, swerve Galway\u2019s All-Ireland campaign to try his hand at reality television? On the one hand, you have a silly game played out for the enrichment of TV executives and rapacious advertisers, put on annually to entertain bored audiences through the empty months of the summer. On the other, you have Love Island.<\/p>\n
A few weeks back, we mentioned in these pages that former Kilkenny great Andy Comerford had a go at a couple of the current players, Huw Lawlor and Billy Ryan, who were off travelling as Derek Lyng\u2019s team laboured at home. He doubled down on it after they lost to Galway, suggesting that Kilkenny players be made sign up to some class of promise that they\u2019ll stick around.<\/p>\n
\u201cListen, there has to be a prerequisite,\u201d he said on Community Radio Kilkenny City. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to sign into Kilkenny set-up and you\u2019re a minor or you\u2019re an under-20, and we as a county are going to pump in as much effort into you, coaching players, and then the next thing they decide they\u2019re going off a sabbatical at a crucial period.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis has happened with players gone by that we have pumped [an] unbelievable amount of time [into], coaching them both with their clubs, coaching them with Kilkenny underage, and the next thing they decide, \u2018We\u2019re off on the holiday.\u2019 Listen, that can\u2019t be happening. There\u2019s too much invested in them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Comerford was a brilliant leader for Kilkenny and a fantastic captain when they won the 2002 All-Ireland. With three All-Irelands, two All Stars and six Leinster titles, he has more than earned the right to his opinion. But he\u2019s dead wrong on this one. GAA players are as entitled to their lives as anyone else.<\/p>\n
More luck to Se\u00e1n Fitzgerald, or @fitzy007, as he goes by online. Life is short and the GAA always won\u2019t love you back. <\/p>\n
Not the way a 24-year-old influencer in a bikini will, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018Tis a long way from liver fluke, lads. Time was, the humble GAA player concerned himself only with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[30883,93,61,60,1397,282],"class_list":["post-453131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-galway-gaa","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-love-island","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}