‘Tis a long way from liver fluke, lads. Time was, the humble GAA player concerned himself only with training twice a week, playing a game after Mass on a Sunday and maybe, if the thing was going well enough for long enough, eventually getting a gig selling some class of farmyard chemical. Now they’re going on Love Island. Well, at least one of them is. Or is hoping to. As revealed by Love Island insider John Fogarty in the Examiner on Thursday night, Galway full-back Seán Fitzgerald is in the shake-up to appear on the upcoming series of … okay, what’s the appropriate Second Mention here? The UK’s number one dating reality show? Britain’s most thriving cultural artefact? The universe’s ultimate repository of fake tan and baby oil. Three weeks ago, Fitzgerald lined out against Leitrim in the Connacht championship in Carrick-on-Shannon, where he marked Ben Guckian and kept him scoreless from play. A fortnight from now, filming starts in the Love Island villa near the rural Mallorca village of Sant Llorenç des Cardassar, where the assignment amounts to the same thing. If you can do it in Carrick, you should have no bother in Casa Amor.Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that a fortnight from now is slap-bang in the middle of the championship. Galway play Kildare at home next weekend in the first match of the All-Ireland series and, all going well, they’ll 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. Again, 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’t align for Galway to bombshell him back in. Yet another casualty of the split season.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’t 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.Which it still might not. At the time of writing, there’s 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 – 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.And yet, you can hear it, can’t you? That low grumble of disapproval, that tut-tutting chorus of sneer. The very idea doesn’t 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’s just not done. You play intercounty, you play intercounty. That’s the long and short of it. You’re expected to forsake all other avenues of expression, to suppress any and all other interests. Weddings, communions, family occasions – they’re for normal people. Intercounty footballers and hurlers can have no time for that sort of carry-on.People will just about give you a pass if you want to go away studying. But they won’t be overjoyed about it. Fitzpatrick’s young team-mate Matthew Thompson missed the league because he’d been accepted to Berkeley University in the US. Fine. Okay. At least he won’t be wrecked playing Sigerson. But then the news came through that he had picked up an ankle injury over there and couldn’t play in the Connacht final. That wasn’t 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?There’s no certainty Galway’s Seán Fitzgerald will make it into the Love Island group. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho And how dare Fitzgerald, 25 years old and in the prime of his life, swerve Galway’s 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.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’s 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’ll stick around.“Listen, there has to be a prerequisite,” he said on Community Radio Kilkenny City. “If you’re going to sign into Kilkenny set-up and you’re a minor or you’re 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’re going off a sabbatical at a crucial period.“This 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, ‘We’re off on the holiday.’ Listen, that can’t be happening. There’s too much invested in them.”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’s dead wrong on this one. GAA players are as entitled to their lives as anyone else.More luck to Seán Fitzgerald, or @fitzy007, as he goes by online. Life is short and the GAA always won’t love you back. Not the way a 24-year-old influencer in a bikini will, anyway.