THE MIDDLE THIRD:As Tipperary timed their run to perfection to dethrone Kilkenny last Sunday, the footballers of Cork and Down will have been looking in for some pointers ahead of their big day out
THE HURLING final is over for another year. It’s funny but the hurling final means more to footballers than the other way around. As a footballer looking in on the first Sunday in September you study the stage you are going to be walking out on, try to imagine yourself there, you look at the length of time lads spend on the pitch before the ball even gets thrown in. On days like this Sunday you wonder how two teams couldn’t get themselves perfectly right for the big occasion. It’s a big advantage for all footballers to see the hurlers first.
Tipperary were brilliant, of course. They timed their summer perfectly and on Sunday they played to a level that even they might have thought was beyond themselves. All-Ireland finals are like that, something bursts out of you that you weren’t sure was there. Adrenalin, nerves, hunger. You are doing things faster, more ferociously, harder than you did all season.
And Kilkenny. I identified with them because I have been watching them so long. What an amazing bunch of players they are and will continue to be. As a Kerry football man I owe them a genuine thank you for the enjoyment, entertainment and the inspiration they gave over the years. We always modelled ourselves on them and gauged ourselves by them. We loved to watch how they would adapt and tune themselves in to big occasions. The ways they would find to win big matches. They were a yardstick of excellence in the years when they won and on Sunday, with their humility in defeat, they were a yardstick of how to carry yourself.
For all the footballers who were watching on Sunday the passing of the hurling final means this week is the last chance to do anything meaningful on the training field. The days before the final are for tapering down and conserving the energy. This week there will be serious training twice during the week and probably a full scale “trial” game on Saturday. Ideally, management will know their team for that trial game but very few fellas playing in it will be certain of their place. It’s a chance for one last good blowout.
It’s a lovely time to be training and whether you like it or not the hype boils up anyway. After the semi-final for us, the very next night we would train and Seán Hussey, the local tailor, would be in to measure us for our suits. There’s an old story from the press nights the team in the ’70s used give of a Kerry player telling a journalist to put him down for whatever he said the previous year. A lot of us would be hopefully asking Seán to just put us down for the same size we were the previous year.
Suddenly the crowds at training sessions might be as big as you would get at county championship games. And everybody wants to talk to you. And you notice that the evenings are getting a bit shorter, a bit colder and a bit more damp. You start taking care of yourself very well suddenly. You don’t want a cold or the flu so you are wrapped up in a tracksuit top and warming up fastidiously. There is nothing like the relief and contentment when you get into your car on the Thursday night before the All-Ireland final after the final training session, knowing you have made the team and made it through without injury or sickness.
In the week leading up to the final there is an anxiety about getting all the tickets out of the way. You have to wait an amount of time after the semi-final before the tickets are issued. And then wait another while till the tickets get better. The first round the tickets for competing counties are usually very bad. As a player you don’t want to complain about them because they’ll say you aren’t thinking about the game. So you have to get a negotiator (Pat the Bag and John Joe O’Carroll were our men for that) to keep on top of those things.
Being one of three brothers on the Kerry team often gave people the impression we were awash with tickets and we always tried our best to look after genuine GAA people. In the fuss one year I noted two good stand tickets I had were missing. I blamed Amy, my wife, and I blamed Marc, the brother. A week or two before Christmas I found the two tickets in the inside pocket of a suit. That’s what it is like.
You’d keep a list and be promoting fellas and demoting fellas on the list. Nobody ever properly factored in the Paidí-factor though. Páidí, year in and year out, had the greatest regret in even asking you, or mentioning to you, the issue of tickets. His regret, his pain at asking, was an art form in itself. On the other hand as he would point out, if he couldn’t talk to his family about this who could he talk to! It hurt him more than anybody.
Anyway he would only raise the issue at all because he was at the centre of a particular tragedy or embarrassment or deathbed pledge which obliged him to get tickets – otherwise many lives and reputations would be ruined.
Before you knew it he could have hit myself, Marc and Tomás with the same heart-rending story in the space of half an hour and we’d be cleaned out. He’d have more tickets than the three of us put together. The master! He’d come at you then from different angles and different places. Ambushes. And no matter how great the tragedy he was dealing with he didn’t want any crap tickets either! Myself, Marc and Tomás would be so busy with Páidí we hadn’t the time to be nervous before finals.
I didn’t like the media side of things myself. I suppose the Kerry press nights (the “festivals of yerra”) were never a huge attraction for journalists. I kept myself to myself and a lot of Kerry fellas did. Other fellas wouldn’t mind too much. Dara Ó Cinnéide, for instance, would pick up the slack for a lot of us. Sponsors would want to get as much coverage as possible. Rightly so. We all want the holidays afterwards and the best sponsors can give us during the year.
By the time of my last All-Ireland with Kerry we were in a groove. We had a routine and a bit of a pattern. You could enjoy it more then. A lot of new lads coming in will experience it as too big to be enjoyed.
Management won’t enjoy it. They have to keep 35 fellas happy and in good health. Fuses are getting shorter. Fellas all have various things they want. Issues they didn’t have all year. Managers are under pressure and getting cranky. All that snowballs into something big, a huge sense of nervousness and a sense of occasion.
The real trick of it all is to ramp the form up to the very top level for the final. The likes of Tommy Walsh and JJ Delaney played well last Sunday but I have never seen them under so much pressure on the ball. On a given All-Ireland final day in Croke Park, with a full house roaring at you, your body is capable of springboarding you on to a different level for 70 minutes. You would look back afterwards and wonder where it came from. It would be fascinating to see the speed at which everything had been done. For Tipperary this was the culmination of a year’s work, they had the right level of hunger and experience to get the most out of their adrenalin. On days like they had on Sunday you don’t feel the bangs and the hits.
You give yourself every chance to get it right but the last few weeks are probably the easiest training you will do.
With the hype and the fuss building there is a nice refuge to be had in just going training. There’s a feeling you are all really in this together. You look out at everything that is going on in the build-up and you take everything you can, within reason, to motivate yourself.
Kilkenny were under huge pressure the last day. There was nothing they could do but the Henry Shefflin thing was a distraction and there was nothing they could do to control it or contain it. Henry had to be given his chance and he had to train. It all just built up.
Both teams are in a decent position that way coming to the football final. Cork know what they have to do. They have been here before. None of the Down players was around in 1994 but that win was recent enough that the county knows the build-up and its own metabolism, etc.
Next thing you are running out on to the field on All-Ireland day. I always liked to be the last out. Always liked to put my left boot on before my right boot. Small things but they would reassure you. You are out there on the field for a long time before throw in. You have the parade, the shaking hands with the President and then you go to your position and shake hands with your opponent.
At that moment there are handshakes. And there are handshakes. The handshake is a language of its own.
On the Sunday night if you sit down in the winners’ hotel with the TV cameras there, your friends and family around you and the fans milling around outside, if you sit there in your suit with a beer in your hand, you just wonder what all the fuss was about. You need to have sat in the losing hotel in silence some previous year to have a perfect idea of what it was all about. It’s about the difference between those two places.
