Take a trip back in time to An Tochar’s magical 1995
A look back at that superb An Tochar journey of 1995
‘THE over-riding thing for me from all of that was the sense of being part of a team.
‘I still feel that I have a great bond with all those lads that we played with. Just to have achieved something with the group.
‘I think the club has a really special place in the GAA and in broader society because just the life lessons you learn from being part of a team and having other fellas depending on you and you depending on other fellas, and to have achieved something.
‘And for me, I was fortunate to have two of my brothers playing along beside me, I think it’s very hard to replicate that.
‘We’d some great nights out after those games, it was great craic as well as being a great sense of achievement. There was a real sense of fun. It was fantastic’.
The words above are from Sean Nolan who at 25 years of age led his An Tochar football team out on to the field in Aughrim against the nine-in-a-row chasing giants from Baltinglass in the county final on Sunday afternoon, September 24, 1995.
What Donal McGillycuddy’s men achieved that day will never be forgotten.
Sandwiched in between those two historic eight-in-a-row runs from the Baltinglass and Rathnew powerhouse sides of that era came An Tochar’s only Senior crown under that name that brought magical glory to Roundwood and sent them on a wonderful adventure through Leinster only to suffer defeat to that ruthlessly strong Éire Óg team from Carlow after a replay in Newbridge.
Amazing work at underage had produced some immensely talented footballers, among them three sets of brothers, the McGillycuddys, the Nolans and the Cullens as well as the likes of Brendan Brady, Murt Davis, Joe Price and Skibbereen’s Pat Murphy. An Tochar had been coming but the task they faced that day in Aughrim was an enormous one, none more so than the task faced by the team captain who would be trying to curtail the mighty Kevin O’Brien while his brother Nick would be left to handle Robert McHugh in that star-studded Baltinglass attack.
‘I felt that we were never 100 miles away from winning a county championship but we could never get over Baltinglass. The game itself, the thing that sticks out in my memory most about it was that I was marking Kevin O’Brien which was a bit of a tough ask. He didn’t score anything that day, which was great for me,’ said Sean.
‘I think the final score was 1-9 to 1-7. We only just barely won. I felt we should have won a few championships, I think we were unlucky not to win some either before or after 1995, at the same time we were very lucky to win the one that we did.
‘The goal came when Brendan Brady kicked a long ball in and Ken Quirke let it slip through his legs into the net. I’d say he was thinking about what he was going to do with the ball when he had it in his hands and instead of that he was picking it out of the net and we ended up only winning by a point.
‘They had won eight in a row, including the All-Ireland. We had played them in the county final in 1992 and they beat us. That was the only county final we had got to before that. They probably beat us in other years, just not in the county final.
‘There were three of us on the field. Nick was marking Robert McHugh and I was marking Kevin (O’Brien), Shay was playing midfield. There were three McGillycuddys on it; Philip was playing centre back, Donal was playing centre forward and Enda was playing corner-forward. There were two Cullens, Liam and Shay. That was eight of the team made up of three sets of brothers. We were very lucky. We had a couple of good years where we won a couple of Minors and under-21s and my Shay and Murt Davis and Donal McGillycuddy were only 20 years of age and they would have all played on the county Minor team together who got to a Leinster final and were beaten by Meath.
‘The like of Seamus Miley, Keith Byrne, Stephen Byrne, they were all on that Minor team with Shay and Donal and Murt so we had a good crop. The likes of Philip (McGillycuddy) and Nick (Nolan), those lads were all 26, I was 25, so we had two good years there and we had another good year four or five years after that, so we ended up with that whole team kind of came together around that time.
‘We were all given a man-toman task. My task was to mark Kevin. I just tried to stick as tight to him as I possibly could, not to give him an inch and to cut off anything getting into him. To be honest – and I know it’s a bit of cliché - but the harder work was done out the field where people were putting huge pressure on the players around the middle and they weren’t able to get good ball into the full-forward line. Philip got man of the match. He had a super game that day, playing centre back.
‘The final whistle – I suppose the one thing that stuck in my head, I think it was Philip who commented to me afterwards when he had looked at the video, and he said when the camera went around you could see in one snapshot 12 of our lads on their knees on the ground in disbelief.
‘It was fantastic. It took us a while to get to the stand to get the cup. I didn’t really have anything prepared; I hadn’t dared to think about anything like that. To give credit to Baltinglass, I think it was Tommy Murphy came in and congratulated us and wished us all the best regarding the Leinster championships. The Leinster championship was the last thing on our minds. We hadn’t even considered that but then we went on and had a fantastic run in the Leinster championship,’ he added.
The An Tochar manager at the time was Donal McGillycuddy and the Kerry native says they were confident but very wary of the Baltinglass threat on the day.
‘We were confident but we were always very wary. We said that if the day goes right for us, we’ll beat them, if it doesn’t, we won’t, because they had beaten us the previous year or the two years before that. Baltinglass were an exceptionally strong team. We were very, very young. We had won Minors in 1987, 88 and 92, and that was the bones of our team,’ said Donal.
‘At the end of the day there were 10 of them that you had to watch – Rocky, Hugh Kenny, Billy Kenny – they were just a massive outfit and they had won the All-Ireland and they were very strong, Con Murphy and all those.
‘We were very, very young. My main interest all through the thing was playing football, not that we’d always win but we always hoped that it would carry us through on the day and it did I suppose to a certain degree but on the long term it didn’t do us any good, we lost a few players and we didn’t have the area and we didn’t have any back up and that was it, basically.
‘We could have won four or five championships, we were good enough to do it but a bit of bad luck let us down,’ he said.
‘I was always hoping that we would get a good start. I said to the lads, play it nice and steady for a while. And we did. After about seven minutes or something like that, Brendan Brady kicked in this ball from about 40 yards, short of Quirke and I was on the line and lost the head, twirled around, but by the time I had twirled back around the ball had slipped through his hands and into the back of the net.
And was Brendan Brady about the get an earful?
‘Absolutely. He was a dead duck,’ added Donal.
It was on to Leinster then and Sean Nolan says that the shackles came off once they were faced with teams that they weren’t as familiar with as the ones they battled with constantly inside the county boundaries.
‘For us, I think we probably played our best football in Leinster because the shackles were off. We had battled for years in tight games in Wicklow where you knew the opposition inside out and you were constantly playing against the same fellas, marking the same fellas and trying to get one over on them and sometimes those games were very tight and the football might not have been brilliant in them,’ said Sean.
‘Our first game in Leinster was against St Mary’s of Ardee up in Ardee and I remember we had a clash of colours with them and we had to wear the Wicklow colours that day. It was a great day for us. We had no expectations going into that match and we went and we played some fantastic football. I think we scored 3-12 that day, that would have been a huge score for us to clock up. We really opened up and we able to really play football.’
‘On to Dunderry then in the semi-final, that’s Tommy Dowd’s club; I had the pleasure of marking him that day. I had a fairly torrid time from him, but, as a team, we played very well that day.
That was a double header in Newbridge. Éire Óg were playing Ballyboden the same day.
‘They (Éire Óg) might have won a couple of Leinsters in a row at that stage and that wasn’t their first one, definitely. I don’t remember too much about either game in terms of details but as is often the case we didn’t take our opportunity the first day and generally the underdog lives to regret that.
‘They were red hot favourites coming into that. Maybe they underestimated us that day. We maybe should have won it the first day. We had a few opportunities to win it. The only thing I do remember is Joe Hayden scored a point from right out on the sideline at the very end to level it, and then obviously we were fairly well beaten on the second day.
The adventure is tinged with sadness for Donal McGillycuddy who watched his charges fall at the final hurdle to what was a superbly talented Éire Óg side from Carlow but the over-riding emotion he takes is one of immense pride at what they achieved but also the manner in which they did so.
‘The saddest thing of all from their perspective, we played the first game against Éire Óg and we drew, but we had two chances at the end of the game and, unfortunately, we missed. I’d be sorry for them but they were young and they’re healthy and they’re still interested and that’s the over-riding factor. You have to go to the very end but you need the breaks as well, the breaks are very important. If you don’t get the breaks, that’s it,’ said Donal.
‘They were good. The number of lads we had sent off over the years was absolutely zilch I’d say, and that’s something to be proud of.
‘They played a good standard of football and you can’t ask for more than that.
‘Pure football, and that’s the way it should be played all the time,’ he said.
Teams from the county final An Tochar: Liam Cullen; Nick Nolan, Sean Nolan, Alan Jenkinson; Pat Murphy, Philip McGillycuddy (0-1), Joe Price; Murt Davis, Shay Nolan; Ken Power, Donal McGillycuddy (0-3), Brendan Brady (1-0); Seamus Cullen (03), Fergal Mulligan (0-1), Enda McGillycuddy (0-1). Subs: Paul Brady for N Nolan.
Baltinglass: Ken Quirke; Declan Humphries, Hugh Kenny, George Bradley; Damien McMahon (0-1), Billy Kenny, Brian Fitzpatrick; Raymond Danne, David Whelan; Liam Horgan (0-1), Paul Kenny (0-2), John O’Keeffe; Andy Owens, Kevin O’Brien, Robert McHugh (1-3). Subs: Tommy Murphy for J O’Keeffe, Thomas Furlong for G Bradley,