Forty years a- growing: Dublin football’s rise from obscurity

It didn’t start when it was meant to. Tomorrow Dublin face Wexford in a Leinster football semi-final at Croke Park. The match falls within weeks of the 40th anniversary of the counties’ meeting in the 1974 championship.

That match marked the starting point of Kevin Heffernan’s mission to restore Dublin football to the top of the game, a project whose seismic consequence was ultimately the positioning of Gaelic games at the heart of modern sporting life in the capital.

The day it should have been played was May 19th. Two days beforehand, Dave Billings, selected at corner back, was at home and picking up fragments of information and rumours of a major bombing in the city. In fact there had been three, in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street –26 people died as a result.

“I was working in Citibank in Stephen’s Green at the time,” says Billings, “and had just come home. I lived on the North Strand and in those days there was no instant Sky News or even live radio coverage. We knew something had happened but there was no definite news.

“My father and some of his friends went into town and he said it was so bad that it reminded him of the time the Germans bombed the North Strand, which he remembered.”

The postponement of a championship match for a week didn’t register very profoundly in a traumatised city and it wasn’t until the following day that the Dublin team actually knew about it.

“A few of the players wouldn’t have even had phones let alone mobile phones. One of Kevin’s innovations was bringing us in on Saturday mornings to Parnell Park and I suppose it must have been there that we heard the match was off.

“It wouldn’t have been a big deal at the time. The city was in shock and Dublin wouldn’t have been high-profile and this match was going to be just a curtain-raiser for the football league final [Roscommon v Kerry].”

The story of how the Dubs were born is a familiar one but there was little evidence of what was to unfold in the team’s first championship match. Heffernan had been given free rein and liberated from the common constraints of having county board officers, representatives of the county champions and sundry others all on an unwieldy selection committee.

Circuit training

“I remember around then Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin writing at the time in the

Evening Press

under a headline, ‘Can Anyone Save Dublin Football?’,” says Billings. “Straight away we were doing things differently. He was the first to introduce circuit training – ‘circus training’ fellas used to call it.”

The Irish Times didn't even have a staff reporter at the Dublin-Wexford match. But whoever got the marking wasn't impressed by either side although Dublin had clearly been better in a 3-9 to 0-6 victory with a late scoring flourish indicating the team's improving fitness.

“There were however moments when Dublin’s neater forwards were just as guilty as Wexford of some scandalous attempts to land points. There were at least a couple of guffaws from the mainly Roscommon-Kerry interested crowd on the Hogan Stand.”

Wexford at that point were one of the top hurling counties. All-Ireland winners six years previously and in 1970 beaten finalists, they were destined to reach another two finals in the decade without winning. Martin Quigley had the misfortune to arrive on the senior team just after th win in 1968.

From the legendary Rathnure club – home of the Rackards and where it was said they only played football when it was too dark to hurl – he managed to sustain a dual career for 10 years and played centre back in Croke Park that day in 1974.

“Football was very much a secondary interest behind hurling but we won a minor Leinster football title in 1969 and beat Dublin in the final. There were some of the ’70s team playing then – Robbie Kelleher, definitely.”

Stands out

Does he remember anything of the match itself?

“I actually do. There’s not too many I remember but that day stands out. We were on before the league final so there was nobody in Croke Park when we were playing. I was at centre back on Tony Hanahoe and I remember looking up the far end – I was about 50 yards from the goal when the ball came back down and when I looked around Tony was on the 14-yard line.

“That became very familiar as Dublin progressed. They’d bring Bobby Doyle out and Tony Hanahoe used to drift. Most of the time I hadn’t a clue where he was; he certainly wasn’t a traditional number 11. I just remember that feeling: ‘where the hell is he gone?’”

Quigley had a hurling season to look forward to afterwards and a career which earned him the bittersweet reputation of being one of the best hurlers never to win an All-Ireland. Was he surprised at Dublin’s success?

“I would have been. Whatever about Leinster I’d have thought both Cork and Galway would have beaten them.”

Dave Billings did win his All-Ireland medal but by then had lost his starting place to Gay O’Driscoll. He remembers a peculiarity of Heffernan’s side that year. “We’d no sub goalie. If anything happened Paddy Cullen it was down to Les Deegan and me and he was injured a lot that season.”

Sure enough, the 1974 All-Ireland programme shows Billings at number 16 amongst the replacements.

There was only one other difference between the team that provoked mirth amongst Roscommon and Kerry supporters and the team that won the All-Ireland four months later.

Famously, Jimmy Keaveney came out of retirement after the Wexford match and played at full forward.

Bernard Brogan, father of Alan and Bernard, and John McCarthy, father of James, both started on that day 40 years ago. Injury would end Brogan’s summer before the final.

Billings – who has served extensively as a Dublin selector – looks back fondly. “You remember the good days and Dublin had good days in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Every generation does its bit.”