‘There was a great bond between us at that particular time,’ says Mikey Sheehy. ‘People say we mightn’t have been as close as the Dubs, but I don’t know. We were all great mates: the Stacks lads and the other lads who would’ve been around Tralee then: Ogie, Jimmy Deenihan. You wouldn’t meet up that often nowadays, but in those days we were very tight.’
They would need everything they could manage for the year to come. The team returned on Friday, 9 November, and headed for their first league game against Dublin in Croke Park three days later, tanned and uninterested. The team photograph captures them looking plump, brown and hopelessly bored beneath a dull, grey sky. Eleven of the All-Ireland final team lined out wearing another new jersey: all green with gold stripes across the shoulders. Dublin were keyed up and Kerry laboured. Their finishing was poor but the afterburn of a long summer was enough fuel to get them home by a goal. ‘I got a slap of a fist at some stage,’ says Liston, ‘but sure you didn’t even react. We were still in Hawaii.’
The following Sunday they travelled to Roscommon and concluded a hectic month in Charlestown against Mayo with Jimmy Deenihan in goal and the rest of the team still woozy from a civic reception in Crossmolina the previous night. A last-minute point from Martin Carney gave Mayo victory and as Kerry turned their eyes to the All Stars, they were bottom of the league table and glad of the rest. The following Friday they picked up nine awards. Pat Spillane hobbled up to collect a record sixth award, while Páidí Ó Sé collected his first. At the banquet they toasted Páidí, and worried about Spillane.
‘I have absolutely no idea whether I’ll be able to play for Kerry in 1982, or at any future date,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be trying out my leg until next June and I’ll see what happens then. All I can do at the moment is keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.’
In another part of the banqueting hall, Mikey Sheehy was hobbling around on the same foot that had been frozen with painkillers the previous September against Offaly. His season wouldn’t start till late spring, but at least they knew he would be back. For Spillane, the battle to save his career had begun.
While he recuperated, the team mercilessly pushed on without him.
PART II
THE CLIMB
8 THE HILL
The first meeting of the Offaly County Board after the 1981 All-Ireland final was soundtracked by a familiar, if unexpected, chorus of derision. Delegates were happy to endorse Eugene McGee’s appointment for another year, but this time they wanted an advisor appointed to assist him. At the top table Fr Heaney pleaded for calm. An inquest into the 1981 final, he said, ‘would not help the cause of Offaly football.’ It was too late.
McGee’s tactics were torn apart. The non-selection of former centre-back Mick Wright in defence was questioned and became a lightning rod for the delegates’ dissatisfaction. One delegate said he was happy with the selectors, but unhappy with the team manager. It was the spark to light a bushfire. Another backed calls for an assistant to be appointed. As the flames started to rise on five years’ work, the fire brigade finally arrived, sirens blaring.
A representative from Wright’s club conveyed a message from Wright, backing McGee and his selectors. Brother Sylvester, assistant county secretary, added that Wright had been suffering from a knee injury and had completed just three training sessions out of the previous twenty. The recently retired Eugene Mulligan was proposed as assistant to McGee, but Mulligan refused the post. Then Richie Connor spoke, as he had years before when he had saved McGee’s hide. The players had met the Monday after the All-Ireland, he said, and they were fully behind the management. The proposal was put to the floor, and after a vote, McGee clung on again. Everyone who had witnessed the ferocity of the attacks sighed with relief, but McGee took no notice.
He was already thinking about 1982.
* * *
Offaly’s tactical errors in the 1981 final tormented him. Losing Tomás O’Connor and Johnny Mooney had been too much for a small panel to bear. McGee had concentrated too much on Kerry and sent out a team that hadn’t been convinced about how good they were. Lads were jumpy on the day. It was all new. He needed the players to see the All-Ireland final as another game, not an occasion. He turned again to the elders on the team for counsel.
‘There was a lot of talk between myself and himself,’ says Richie Connor. ‘The type of ball going in was crazy. Terrible bad ball. Gerry Carroll – what could he do if he was loose for a ball and somebody kicks it to his man? Who’s at fault? Gerry Carroll? It’s the guy that kicks the ball. He was made look bad by the inadequacy of the backs. There would’ve been way more emphasis on: right, control the ball and make better use of it.’
That would be the cornerstone on which the coming season would be built. McGee already knew that to beat Kerry his players needed to be precise in everything they did, but he was learning about Kerry all the time too, just as he had about Dublin.
Over the years, when Kerry invited them to play challenge matches, Offaly accepted every opportunity. Some of the beatings they shipped were criminal, but McGee never left without adding a new piece of information to his file. The painstaking work of making his players believe they could match Kerry was taking time, but 1981 had a profound effect on them.
They had limited Kerry to a wonder goal. Remove that, and the gap was down to four points. In 1980 it had been five. They looked around the rest of the championship. Ulster was negligible. Galway looked useful in Connacht. Dublin were in the horrors and the rest of Leinster were a distance behind even them. That left the unknown potential of Cork – and Kerry.
If Offaly got through Leinster, the championship draw placed them against the Connacht champions in the All-Ireland semi-final. That meant Kerry in the final. Of all the teams that started out in 1982, only Offaly were capable of stopping five-in-a-row.
That January, the players returned to the lonely slope of Clonin Hill. The hill is now sanitised by the presence of a neat bungalow at its foot, but in 1982 it reached into the pitch black for an eternity with no sights to lighten the evening until the players reached the summit.
This was where the stamina that would carry them through the summer would be put into the players’ legs. The idea was born in McGee’s mind, and put into practice by Tom Donoghue. All the boys loved Donoghue. He had a sense of fun, an intuitive ability to know when the players had reached their limits and the skill to push them further without prompting a revolt. Without Donoghue, the horrors of Clonin Hill could have provoked mutiny.
The hill’s hidden tricks were the worst thing. About halfway up, the ground imperceptibly steepened and started to extract its toll. When you looked back down at the slope below, it suddenly seemed like running up a wall. Clonin Hill was more than training. It was a cause.
For three months they slogged up and down, making mud of the ground beneath them. It hardened their bodies, but also their minds. Where O’Dwyer had his wire-to-wires in Killarney to reinforce his team’s belief that no one trained harder than them, McGee now had Clonin Hill. No team could be fitter than them. Not even Kerry.
They trained there twice during the week and on Sunday mornings. They ran laps around the field and straight sprints up the hill. One exercise was called ‘sprinting to exhaustion’, where the players dragged themselves up and down until their bodies couldn’t withstand any more.
‘Those nights were torture,’ says Tom Donoghue. ‘Of them all, Sean Lowry epitomised that. I saw him on the ground so many nights, moaning in agony. For the sprints to exhaustion he would go as far as he could, flat out up that hill. We might do six in a night. They were absolute crucifixions. Sean suffered more than most, but he’d give every ounce.’
While Sean Lowry wasn’t made for the hill, Liam Currams and Pat Fitzgerald glided around the course like two thoroughbreds on the gallops. ‘Pat Fitzgerald was like a long-distance race horse,’ says John Guinan. ‘We’d have to lap the hill and after about two laps, Fitzgerald would be so far ahead he could stop
at the top, have a piss, and he’d still be in the lead.’
‘I used say to guys like Liam Currams, Matt Connor and Stephen Darby if there wasn’t a fence at the top of the hill they’d go further,’ says Donoghue. ‘You couldn’t flatten Liam Currams. No matter how much you’d give him, he’d nearly smile at you and say: give me more.’
One night Donoghue ordered them all into pairs and ordered one man to piggyback the other up the hill. Guinan’s partner was Liam O’Connor. Guinan was a light forward, and he conceded several inches and two stone to O’Connor. O’Connor tossed Guinan on his back like a rucksack and trundled steadily up the hill. The test came when they switched round.
‘It nearly killed me,’ says Guinan, ‘but I wouldn’t let that beat me. I carried him up. Even if I was Paddy Last, I’d get there. As soon as I dropped him, Liam picked me up and clapped me on the back. He says, “That was fabulous.” Everyone appreciated what everybody was doing. No matter what we did on the hill we found ourselves helping each other, praising each other. That happened a lot in Rhode. McGee sensed it.’
‘You would literally get sick at lunchtime at the thought of facing it,’ says Liam O’Connor. ‘It was outrageous, but it did the trick.’
Some nights the players made their own fun. One night, as the players descended the hill for the final time, Richie Connor decided to push harder. ‘One more, lads,’ he said. The players groaned, but pushed on. As they reached the summit, Liam O’Connor caught up with Richie. By the time the scrum of players had dispersed, they had taken all his clothes with them. The players sprinted down the hill and across the road into the dressing room, leaving Richie to gingerly pick his way down the hill.
Back in the dressing room a slab of milk cartons was left on the ground. Some players managed to drink their carton. With their stomachs still churning from the effort, more left theirs behind. As they drank and regained their bearings, McGee might take the opportunity to open up a forum on a topic he had been chewing on during the week.
‘You’d be in a cold dressing room after running up and down a hill all evening and ready to go home,’ says Sean Lowry. ‘This could be ten o’clock on a winter’s night. This man will start talking about some method of playing or training. It used drive me crazy. But he was after reading something about it or finding out something, and he wanted to pass it over.’
Crucially, they had all bought in. One night Gerry Carroll drove from Newport, County Mayo, to Tullamore after a day’s work for training and returned to Mayo that night. Liam O’Connor was leaving work in Heuston Station every evening for Portarlington and driving until he met Richie Connor’s car along the road. Some nights Richie had called to O’Connor’s house in Walsh Island to collect his tea, and carried a plate with a rasher, sausage and slice of bread on the passenger seat. Padraic Dunne was cadging lifts from Dublin with Tomás O’Connor, and thumbing down from Newlands Cross when he missed his ride. At the end of March, they finished their work on the hill. Planning for the next phase had begun months before.
Back in deepest winter, Sean Lowry was looking at the All-Star team and thinking about Offaly. When the All Stars toured America the following May, Offaly would be left without a trainer, a manager and a chunk of their panel. Training would grind to a stop, and making up the ground on Kerry didn’t allow for that sort of delay. Offaly would need something to keep the wheels rolling.
It was late November when Offaly travelled to Roscommon for a league game. A meeting had been arranged after the game. Lowry’s idea was simple. The team would take a training holiday in Spain while the All Stars were away. They would raise the money themselves, organise the flights and accommodation, and crucially, bring along the wives and girlfriends.
This was revolution on a scale McGee would admire. Teams never thought this way. The only trips abroad ever enjoyed by county players came either with the All Stars or a surreptitious trip to America for a weekend to make some money playing with a local club. To match their ambition as footballers, Offaly needed to think big. If Kerry could tour the world, Offaly could get to Spain.
At the back of the room, Fr Sean Heaney took a breath. John Dowling wouldn’t like this. In mid-December 1981 a deputation from the team attended a county board meeting seeking official approval from the board for the team to take a holiday. Eugene Mulligan had been absorbed into the board as PRO following his retirement in 1980 and supported the idea. Fr Heaney said he’d like to see the tour go ahead, but no money would be available to help fund the trip. Some delegates maintained the holiday was tantamount to professionalism and washed their hands of the idea. One evening John Guinan received a brief summary of the likely outcome of the event from his father. ‘What are you going to do out there?’ he said. ‘You’re going to live it up and ye’ll come back not able to walk.’
The public thought differently. Ordinary people donated what spare cash they could find in their pockets. The big hitters dug deep. A letter was sent to every business in the county and was followed by a visit from Sean Lowry and Richie Connor armed with a persuasive sales pitch. Each player sold raffle tickets. They organised fundraising nights in their local bars. Toyota donated a car for a raffle. In the end, two weeks in Torremolinos worked out cheaper than one, and Sean Lowry and selector Leo Grogan booked the trip through a travel agency in Birr. When the travel agent checked the vast travelling party assembled, he threw in two free seats. Another raffle with a free trip to Spain for two as a prize topped up their war chest.
They were ready.
As McGee and the rest headed for America with the All Stars, a party of fifty-two Offaly players and partners flew to Torremolinos. Leo Grogan was tour manager, and guardian of the kitty. Stephen Darby and Mick Fitzgerald were chosen to oversee training schedules designed by Tom Donoghue along with Grogan. A few weeks later the 1982 World Cup would kick off and Scotland were booked into the same hotel as Offaly. Until they arrived, the pitch was free. It was immaculately prepared, and was encircled by a running track. Perfect.
For two weeks the players trained every second morning from half ten until midday. The training was short but intense, and while the rest of the day was the players’ own, they were obliged to be ready to train. One morning Gerry Carroll and Matt Connor struggled back from a night-long expedition charting the local nightclubs and were late for training. The clock was ticking towards midday when they arrived, but their punishment was merciless. They started lapping the pitch. The sun was sitting high in the sky and the heat was beating down on them. Ten laps later, they were still going.
As the locals watched these strange pale-limbed visitors pound around the running track every other morning, some wondered whether Scotland had arrived early. They challenged the Offaly players to a football game against a local selection, and soon Torremolinos was covered in posters announcing a friendly game between Offaly FC, Ireland and a local team. Matt Connor danced through the game, Offaly won 5-1 and before the end tempers got frayed, the tackles got wild and the locals left the field in protest.
The trip was filled with fun. The players commandeered the swimming pool every day and usually brought a ball with them. As they threw the ball across the pool to each other, they watched for Matt’s arrival. The water terrified him, but he occasionally might brave the pool. When he did, the next ball would be lobbed in his direction. As he prepared to catch it, a pile of Offaly men would splash their way towards him across the pool. The ball would go one way, Matt the other.
One afternoon John Guinan and Mick Wright hired a pair of tennis racquets and took to the court. With his shaggy curly hair and pristine white shorts and polo shirt, Wright looked the part. When he topped it off with sweatbands for his head and wrists, he looked a little like John McEnroe. On the court beside them, two women were playing a game.
‘See those women, John,’ said Wright. ‘Watch this. I’m going to carry on the same as McEnroe.’
Wright serves first. It goes long and he races up to the net, pounding the cord and berat
ing Guinan. The women pause to watch. He returns to the baseline, serves again. The women smirk. As far as they knew, John McEnroe was left-handed.
With their wives and girlfriends in tow, the trip bound every element of the panel together: those who trained and sacrificed their weekends to football, and those who were left at home when they did. ‘We didn’t want people away from home for two weeks, and we didn’t want any hassle at home,’ says Sean Lowry. ‘The one thing I wanted all the time was that people enjoyed going to training. I’d go down some night for a meal and sit beside someone. The next night it could be someone else. You’d go to different pubs and have the crack. When we came back from Spain, the amount of people we had missing from training any night was one. They were all bonded into it.
‘They also realised the effort people were making. The women got into it and they wanted us to win as well. It became: You have to go training because we all want to win. It’s all in the psyche. You go to a match and the wives know each other. There was no stand-offish stuff. It was just a bigger, happier family.’
After two weeks, they came home tanned and rested. One unlikely dream had been fulfilled. Now, they turned to face another.
* * *
After the 1981 All-Ireland final, Johnny Mooney needed to get out of the country. Work at home was scarce, and his money had almost run out. A friend of his promised him work on the sites in San Francisco. All that was left at home was a winter scraping a few pounds together and the muck and hassle of another National League. Mooney didn’t need that, but for all the trouble and fights and stress, McGee knew Offaly badly needed him. A few days before Mooney left for America, Offaly played Longford. After the game McGee cornered him.
Kings of September Page 9