"[With the club] we don't live as a generic tribe of happy folk, content once we have ash to swing and leather or rivals to strike. We have the usual trials and tribulations. We lose our jobs. Our friendships break. We fight. We love. We scar. We heal. We die."

Donal Óg Cusack, 'Come What May'

ONE of the major upsides of the burgeoning industry that is the GAA book is the diversity of stories we're now getting to hear. Up until a few years ago it was as if only the thoughts and exploits of All Ireland champions and All Ireland champions only were worth documenting, even if some of those champions were quite reticent about divulging how their teams came to be just that.

Thankfully, it has dawned on people, especially publishers, that while winners might write the history, it's losing that invariably produces the literature, and the journey, not the destination, that provides the narrative. In 2008 Pat Critchley's Hungry Hill revealed a man's love affair with the GAA, sport and life in general, following a trail blazed but not really followed since Sambo McNaughton's All or Nothing 10 years earlier. Damian Lawlor's chronicle of a season with the Waterford footballers was one of the most delightful sports books of 2009. Damian Tiernan's account of the joys and especially the lows of their hurling counterparts is one of the most engaging reads of 2010, while Tony Griffin and Dan Shanahan, each an All Star but neither an All Ireland champion, have offered up the two most insightful, colourful and skilfully-written GAA autobiographies of the year.

The most distinctive GAA book of the year, however, and probably the best, is that penned by Christy O'Connor, who chose an entity that has never before been the subject of a mainstream GAA book even though we keep hearing it is the most basic and valued unit of the GAA: the club. Fittingly that is the title of his book and while the club in question is St Joseph's Doora-Barefield, the appeal of the book is that everyone in the GAA will be able to see their own club in it. Ninety-six percent of players in the GAA are club players only and almost that much again don't win their county championship in a given year. In this book we finally get to hear their voice.

The cheapest and most overused word in reviewing GAA books is 'honest', but O'Connor's is particularly so. The book is an account of the 2009 season with the Clare club for whom O'Connor was entering his 20th season as their first-choice goalkeeper, and what triggered him to document it was the premature deaths of his own daughter Róisín and his great friend and former teammate Ger Hoey within a week of each other at the start of that year. The book is a tribute to them both and the impact their loss had on him is achingly yet subtly covered.

But what also makes the book so honest is how it captures the life and language of the dressing-room and the clubhouse. Not since Páidí Ó Sé's autobiography has the F word been so liberally used in a GAA book. Teammates confront each other in the showers after a championship defeat. The tension and politics that goes with being a dual club, AGMs and the election and pursuit of a coach and manager to the senior team is vividly illustrated. At times senior players and mentors despair that younger players enjoy the summer nightlife so much. Another time those same players and mentors join them for a night on the tiles, glowing in the satisfaction of a championship win that sustains the dream. The forced optimism and the earned optimism; the forced chemistry and the natural chemistry; it's all here.

It would be a shame though if the book was regarded as only an enjoyable and brilliant read. It is as much and as valuable a discussion document as anything a subcommittee of Christy Cooney's will offer. It highlights again the issue of club fixtures. While O'Connor credits the Clare county board with offering club players a decent number of competitive games – in contrast, say, to the Byzantine-style and random nature of the Cork senior championships – the timing of those games are another matter. O'Connor recalls a 112-day wait between his first championship game of the summer and his second, and another time, a championship game called off 24 hours beforehand at the demand of a county manager.

"Last year [2008] was a complete joke," he writes. "We started training on 16 January and didn't play our first championship match until 15 August… it's no wonder so many players walk away from their clubs each year; they just can't handle the hassle. The ordinary club player often exists on a week-to-week basis, not knowing when or if the county board has decided to fix a game. We've become conditioned to feeling like second-class citizens. It's almost as if county boards assume that club players don't have jobs, they don't take holidays, they don't have family commitments, they all still live at home with their parents and there's no such thing as divorce."

O'Connor, thankfully, isn't talking from experience on the latter count, but he recounts how he was nearly not married at all, his now wife once breaking it off for a week months before their engagement because he chose to attend a championship match rescheduled at late notice instead of a wedding she'd pencilled in for nearly a year.

Páraic Duffy could also do worse than consult O'Connor or his book before finalising his imminent document on the payment and movement of managers. "The problem I have with outside coaches," says O'Connor, "is there are a lot of clubs out there looking for the quick fix and bringing in an outside coach on the circuit, maybe even one without a good track record or coaching qualification, and neglect their underage structures in turn. But the other reality is there are also a lot of clubs out there who rightly feel that their players won't respond anymore to one of their own while an outsider will have greater expertise and a more objective view because he's not related to any of the lads."

But as much as The Club raises those issues, it is a work of literature, not a commissioned report. It is a picture of a club for what it is, warts and all, but one painted only by love.

kshannon@tribune.ie

'The Club: Hunger, Conflict and Heartbreak – An Extraordinary Year in the Life of a GAA club' (Penguin, Ireland) costs €14.99. Half the royalties from the sale of the book go to the Jack and Jill Foundation and to Croí