Tale of the sorrowful mysteries

LIMERICK HURLING: Keith Duggantalks to Henry Martin about his new book which chronicles his native county's story of effort, frustration and unfulfilled promise

IN MODERN times, the Limerick hurling experience is often reduced to the last five minutes of the 1994 All-Ireland hurling final, when a title that seemed to have become real and solid and bound for Limerick simply dissolved.

The outrageous manner in which Offaly closed out that match, scoring two snap goals in 30 seconds to turn all logic and form on its head, is well known.

But it is the role that Joe Quaid, the Limerick goalkeeper, played which takes central stage in the analysis of that match in a bold and comprehensive new book on Limerick hurling. Quaid candidly admits he was to blame for Offaly’s first goal in that he didn’t organise his defence well enough to stop a fairly pedestrian, low-struck free from Johnny Dooley.

But in popular lore, a quick and errant puck out from Quaid led to Pat O’Connor’s goal, which crushed the Limerick men as Offaly pushed clear thanks to three late points from an asthmatic, labouring Billy Dooley.

But as Quaid recalls: “I didn’t rush back to goals. I went back and picked up the ball, walked behind the goals like I normally would. [Ger] Hegarty was out in the middle of the field on his own. I dropped the ball into his hand 70 yards out from goal. He caught the ball and, in contact, the ball squirted out of his hand.”

Bravely, Hegarty confirms Quaid’s reading of events and acknowledges it was a ball he would have safely dealt with 99 times out of one hundred. As Dave Mahedy succinctly put it; “A stats man would consider that to be clean possession won from the puck out.”

The sequence of events cannot change the outcome, however. Henry Martin, the author of Heartbreak Unlimitedhas a slow- motion recall of those two late goals. Like many Limerick people, he was in the Cusack Stand and, with the score at 2-13 to 1-11, was thinking of the after-match celebrations. He remembers Joe Quaid restarting the game after Dooley's nerve-wracking goal but, because RTÉ showed the replay of the first goal, very few people got to see the build up to the second: when live transmission was resumed, the ball was still dropping fatefully towards Pat O'Connor.

“I think RTÉ showed it just once in all the years afterwards when they did a programme on the three Dooley brothers one Christmas time,” Martin says now.

“I have a video clip of the puck out and it shows it clearly. Joe Quaid shipped the blame and there were all sorts of jokes going around. It wasn’t analysed properly at the time; there was possession won from it. Maybe, whether possession was won or not, it should have been slowed down. But the thing that stuck out in the entire chapter for me was when Joe had instructed the hurley-carrier to come around and collect his hurleys with five minutes left because he didn’t want to lose them afterwards.

“And when he did come around, Limerick were five points up but Joe said: ‘No, this game is not over yet.’ It was like a premonition.”

The impact the defeat had on the psyche of Limerick hurling is made explicitly clear by the chapter title: 1994 (2) Holocaust. But the cast of players from that match are just several of some 114 interviews that Martin conducted for his research into this book.

It spans the breadth of Limerick’s All-Ireland hurling heritage, from the six All-Irelands secured by 1940. But it is primarily concerned with the struggles and near misses every year since then, apart from the lonely, glittering season of 1973.

Martin has presented the book as an on-the-record account of those lost games and the many managerial and in-house melodramas that seemed to distract Limerick hurling people from the task at hand down the years. Martin is part of the generation who experienced the 1994 season as a vivid, heart-wrenching summer of sport and he feels, because his county ultimately failed to win an All-Ireland title during that wonderful, unpredictable few years for the sport, they were airbrushed out of history.

“Limerick brought a wave of green to the city then. They were the Munster rugby in 1994 in Limerick city, before anyone was wearing the red. Limerick was the start of the cars sprayed in colours and all that – Clare didn’t start all that razzmatazz.”

But he was also motivated and spurred on by others who believed there should be a comprehensive record of how the people central to the evolution – to the success and failures – of Limerick hurling see things. “Not everyone agrees on how things happened but their views and their opinions are out there now,” he says.

It makes for compelling reading. Here is Tom Ryan reviewing the 1995 season, in particular the Munster final defeat to Clare: “I got the call completely wrong with our tactics. Leading up to the game it got very nasty and Loughnane started to spew all sorts of s**t. I knew what they were going to do. I knew their tactics. I said these c***s are going to slate all round them. What Clare did to us in 1995 in Thurles was that they timbered us. They timbered Mike Nash, Dave Clarke, Declan Nash, Gary Kirby and Damien Quigley. They f*****g blackguarded us.”

And on the legacy of those years: "We lacked any kind of support in any boardroom; maybe it was our own doing, maybe we were too isolated in ourselves. On top of that, the team never got f***ing recognition for f*** all – there and then, before or after. Never. Even Ciarán Carey's point didn't get on the top 20 score competition and we didn't make [Denis Walsh's] Hurling: The Revolution Years."

Or here, on page four is Tommy Cooke, the only survivor from the Limerick 1940 team, taking issue with Mick Mackey’s tendency to go it alone. “And he would walk out through them and would hit one or two of them a belt of a shoulder and knock them. The Cork fellas used to make out that he used to put the ball under his shoulder. Mackey ruined hurling actually, over his soloing. Christy Ring did a bit of soloing but he only did it on and off. Mackey was doing it the whole time.”

Or Joe Quaid’s last journey on a Limerick team bus, after a poor display in the opening round of the league in 2003. “We stopped in Charleville for a few pints and they were organising house parties and having a singsong on the bus. I was sitting beside the driver at the front of the bus and said: ‘I have had enough. If after being beaten the way we were today makes them want to sing, I don’t want any part of it’.”

Some of the dramas of the day – the various managerial putsches and stand-offs between management and the county board executive, the messy way in which Mike Nash was released from the county squad, the “20 questions” experiment that followed the 1996 All-Ireland final defeat – have been half-forgotten.

But laid out in chronological order, there seems to be a volatility and argumentativeness at the heart of Limerick hurling. And, rightly or wrongly, the administrative wing of the sport seems to be perpetually at loggerheads with elements of the coaching wing. As Eamonn Cregan asks rhetorically: “Why are executive officers and managers at opposite ends except in Kilkenny and Kerry?”

Several of the interviewees seem to be settling old scores and the overall tone could substantiate the old view that Limerick hurling people have been their own worst enemies. But the testimonies reproduced here prove the very men who clashed most fiercely at board-room level and in the dressingrooms had in common a devotion to Limerick hurling. And what it amounts to is a legacy of frustration and an uncertainty as to how best to proceed. In other counties, the bounty of All-Ireland Under-21 titles has led to senior success but Limerick’s victories soured into failed promise and more disillusionment.

And as well as internal strife, Limerick teams had to face the other contenders – Kilkenny, Cork and the rest of the eight or nine counties that make up the top tier of hurling. Every season of falling short can be explained, for better or for worse. Martin’s last chapter is entitled “The Nadir”, it is plain he is not expecting a stark turnaround any time soon.

“The major problem with Limerick GAA is that there is too much politics,” he says. “Limerick GAA is rife with politics. Even the county board is not pulling together. I personally feel that we need to clear out certain officers – and not necessarily those who have been long-serving. I am not sure how the reaction to this book will be but it is an on-the-record account of Limerick hurling.

“People have different views of incidents and they disagree with each other but they have said it. As for the future of Limerick hurling, well, the last few years have been shambolic at minor level and we are going to pay the price for that in the next few years.

“But some good work is now being carried out at underage level. I have just been appointed secretary of Cumann Na mBunscoil and I have talked the talk with this book so now I have to walk the walk in terms of working for Limerick hurling.”

Which, in fairness, all of the 100-plus people who met with him for Heartbreak Unlimited, have done.

Heartbreak Unlimited: The Inside Story of Limerick Hurling, is published by Collins Press. It will be launched tonight at 8pm in the Cuchulainn Lounge, Patrickswell by JP McManus.