Hot Press meets Dublin GAA midfielder and Hill 16 icon Michael Darragh McCauley

”Michael Darragh – wicked. This is Oliver from The xx and I want to wish you the best of luck on Sunday. I hope you kill it.”

Dublin’s star midfielder, Michael Darragh Macauley, has just played me a message Oliver Sim of art-rock maestros The xx left his phone several years ago. A friend of the footballer’s was interviewing the musician and duly prevailed on him to provide Macauley with a few words of encouragement.

Perhaps it will kickstart an unlikely trend of avant-indie mavericks giving pep-talks to GAA sides, and Ariel Pink being co-opted to the backroom set-up of a leading inter-county team. Then again, maybe not. What is certain, though, is that Macauley is a man who knows his music. A whistlestop tour of some of his recent listening includes Four Tet, Rejjie Snow, LCD Soundsystem and other acts unlikely to be mentioned on The Marty Squad. A big hip-hop fan who devoured the Netflix series The Defiant Ones (“a big thing I took away was Jimmy Iovine’s work ethic”), Macauley was present for one of James Murphy and co.’s barnstorming three shows at the Olympia last year.

“That was unbelievable,” he enthuses. “I was in the front row upstairs and when the beat dropped on ‘Dance Yrself Clean’, I nearly fell over the edge! That was a serious gig and I had an incredible night. I’m raging I’m missing them this summer – the schedule doesn’t allow it.

“But I was at the Rejjie Snow gig in the Olympia a while back as well and he’s blowing up too. The Irish scene is amazing at the moment – I’ve been listening a lot lately to an album by Dermot Kennedy, who’s a hugely talented Dublin singer-songwriter.”

Also on Macauley’s agenda, of course, is the All Ireland football championship, with Dublin’s four-in-a-row bid kicking off against Wicklow in O’Moore Park, Portlaoise on May 27. Having reclaimed the National League title in the spring with a win over Galway in the final, Jim Gavin’s charges – with Macauley forming a formidable midfield partnership with Brian Fenton – are in excellent shape going into the championship, and the bookies’ favourites to once again claim Sam Maguire.

“Realistically, this team is going to be judged on what happens in the summer,” says Macauley. “It doesn’t really matter what happens before that. It’s good that we have a medal in our back pockets after the league, but with the way this team has been going over the last while, people will only remember what happens in September. That’s the facts of it and hopefully we’ll be there to compete.”

Dublin’s dramatic one-point victory over Mayo last September in one of the all-time greatest football finals secured the three-in-a-row, making them the first team to achieve that remarkable feat since Mick O’Dwyer’s great Kerry team in the ’80s. However, with Macauley absent for the campaign through injury, he admits he didn’t get fully swept up in the euphoria.

“It was tough because of the year I had, coming back from injury,” he reflects. “I wasn’t involved as much I’d like to have been. Obviously, it was euphoric for Dublin, but personally, I still have a whole lot to prove. It’s all to play for this year. I have zero excuses this season – I feel good, the body’s good, so come what may this summer.”

Macauley – who was Footballer of the Year during Dublin’s All Ireland winning 2013 season – and Fenton established themselves as the top midfield pairing in the country with some sensational performances in the spring, but such is Dublin’s current strength in depth, the squad are acutely aware of the necessity of maintaining peak performance.

“I know people keep talking about competition on the team, but it is mental,” points out Michael Darragh. “I mean, it’s been going well so far, we’ve no complaints. Still, it doesn’t what your name is or what awards you have, it doesn’t mean you’ll be in the starting 15 – it doesn’t even mean you’ll be in the squad these days. That’s how crazy the competition is. We’re all pushing each other and seeing where that ends up.”

A basketball international at underage level, Macauley says that when he was considering which sport to choose at 18, “the GAA showed me a much shinier path when there was that fork in the road… That was a part of what informed my decision, definitely.”

Looking ahead to this summer and the reformatting of the championship with the Super 8s mini-league in July, the midfielder says it hasn’t affected Dublin’s approach that much.

“Not really. Jim handles all that – whatever gets reformatted goes through him. We just push ourselves like lunatics and see what happens! But no, it doesn’t affect our focus or anything. I don’t even fully understand it, to be honest. I don’t get bogged down in this kind of thing. I believe there’s a Super 8s going on – I genuinely couldn’t tell you too much about it.”

Away from the pitch, Michael Darragh is a school-teacher and also an ambassador for Concern, in which capacity he visited Nairobi earlier this year.

“They asked me to go and look at some of the projects they have over there,” he explains. “It was a brilliant trip. I wasn’t overly aware of what they were doing beforehand, but they’re heavily involved in education, working in the poorest of the poor places.

“I got to look at what they’re doing and how they help the different schools and individuals. I’m a teacher here and I set up a bit of a link programme between the class here and another class over there. “We’re going back and forth with letters and so on. It was a very interesting experience and I’d love to go back over at some stage.”