Who will ever forget those magical days in Aughrim?
The year the Garden County bloomed
THE capacity crowd in Aughrim had fallen silent as Tony Hannon approached the ball deep into injury-time of Wicklow’s All-Ireland qualifier against Down on July 18, 2009. As the last kick of the game, the responsibility was on the shoulders of the Hollywood man to split the posts with the 45 and send Wicklow on their way to the final round of qualifiers. It was the latest chapter in a storied, romantic campaign for Wicklow, managed by the iconic Kerryman, Mick O’Dwyer.
In truth, the lead up to their 2009 national championship run was soso on paper, in terms of results. In Division 4, they had finished fifth, having recorded three wins, two draws, and three defeats from eight games. As for Leinster, they beat Longford in the first-round before losing to Westmeath, who had won the provincial title in 2004, in the quarter-finals.
It was in the All-Ireland series that ‘Micklow’ exploded into life and captured the hearts and minds of the nation. After beating Fermanagh and Cavan in the first two rounds, they met Down, who had been crowned champions of Division 3 of the national football league a couple of months earlier, in Aughrim.
After a back-and-forth, tense encounter, it was on Hannon to shrug off his fatiguing muscles to send one last-ditch strike up and over the bar, sealing the monumental upset.
‘I was probably thinking, ‘please don’t top it,’’ Hannon jokes. ‘I think I had picked up possession in the half-back line and laid it off to Jacko, who tore down the righthand side of the pitch and sent it across and, next thing you know, it is over the line for a 45.
‘I kind of trudged up the field, thinking about if I had the legs to get it anywhere near the goals. I knew it was a big opportunity. If it goes to extra-time, you never know what was going to happen, but it was the last kick of the match and a chance to seal the deal and get us over the line. I kind of knew it was boom or bust, at that stage.’
While Wicklow would go on to come up short to Kildare in the final round of the All-Ireland qualifiers, it would be more than fair to consider the 2009 championship run as being one of the fondest memories of the county’s senior footballers. It was an indication that, while they remained in the bottom tier of the national league, when it came to the summer, Wicklow were there to play.
There had been signs of Wicklow’s burgeoning capabilities under Micko a year earlier when, against all odds, they dramatically bested Kildare in the first-round of the Leinster championship, an occasion that is still fondly remembered 12 years on. Suddenly, two years on from his first season in charge in 2007, Mick had instilled a belief and arrogance around the panel that he had put together.
That panel was suited with some of the finest talents to have played for Wicklow since the turn of the millennium, all captained by Rathnew’s Leighton Glynn, who had already represented Ireland in the International Rules Series before 2009, and who would go on to be nominated for an All-Star at the end of that season, alongside teammate Ciarán Hyland.
‘I was always disappointed that we never got to a Leinster semi-final, we were good enough, and then not to get to an All-Ireland quarter-final. If we had got that, it would have nearly been a dream come true, to play in Croke Park against a Tyrone. You kind of look back on it as a missed opportunity,’ Leighton confesses, demonstrating the ambition that was pulsing through the team at the time.
‘People would probably say that we were punching above our weight, but we were so close. We had beaten Kildare in 2008, so they were never going to take us lightly in the final round in 2009, but we still had the confidence to try and win that game. Maybe playing four or five games in a row kind of caught up on us. Maybe we didn’t have the panel large enough to get over the line, but certainly, if I was to pick one to rerun, it would be that game against Kildare. it would have brought us into an All-Ireland quarter-final and you never know what would have happened from there.’
This essence of how highly the players thought of themselves is echoed by Hannon, who holds the view that the team itself was as excellently talented as it was, and Mick had the experience and knowhow to bring it all together like the maestro conductor that he was.
‘I think it was probably Micko bringing everything together. Don’t get me wrong, we had really, really good players. When you go through the team there; Leighton Glynn, Seanie Furlong, Padge McWalter, James Stafford, Damien Power, Dara Ó Hannaidh, Paddy Dalton, Paul Earls, Jacko Dalton, Thomas Walsh, Mervyn Travers in goal, players of a really high quality and all of a sudden, Micko had come in.
‘Other years, for loads of different reasons, other players would have had the other priorities to other sports and other teams. Micko gave everyone the motivation to come in and be part of the team. Micko came along and it was the place to be. Everyone wanted to play, and then you have that little bit of success and other people look at it and say, ‘jeez, I would love to get involved with that.’’
In more recent years, the emphasis of county managers and coaches has been to get Wicklow out of their Division 4 quagmire. Current boss Davy Burke has made it clear that his short-term goal is to build a team that can gain promotion to Division 3 and stay there. That was not the case in 2009. According to both Glynn and Hannon, O’Dwyer – while not necessarily neglecting the national league effort – was not shy in prioritising the championship.
The training during the winter months was still rigorous in the lead up to the traditional pre-season O’Byrne Cup preparation,
I kind of trudged up the field, thinking about if I had the legs to get it anywhere near the goals
before turning hellacious in the few weeks between the national league and the championship. That pathology can be seen throughout the county’s performances in the championship and league, respectively.
Where the league is concerned, Wicklow were condemned to Division 4 after the 2007 season with three wins and four losses, while they finished fifth in said tier in 2008 and 2009. They placed fourth in 2010 before putting in their best showing in O’Dwyer’s final year, in 2011; they ended third, one-point shy of gaining promotion, having ended with a 4-3-1 record.
The approach paid off as Wicklow became more of a presence in the championship during Micko’s tenure. In 2007, they won the Tommy Murphy Cup with a 3-13 to 1-17 win over Antrim in the final in Croke Park. The next year, they made it to the final again, but lost out to Antrim. The Tommy Murphy was then scrapped, setting the stage for Wicklow to go on their extraordinary 2009 run. Subsequently, in 2010, they were again knocked out by Westmeath in the provincial quarter-finals, while they were beaten by Cavan in the first round of the qualifiers.
In 2011, they were beaten by Kildare in the opening round of
Leinster, before they were beaten by Armagh in a replay of their second-round qualifier, having handily disposed of Sligo in round one.
‘We would have loved to get out of Division 4, but you always had that belief, when it came to championship, and I suppose it came from Micko because he really emphasised it all the way through the year that, say you were playing Kildare in the first-round of the championship, he would talk about that game more than anything, and if you lost a game in the league, he would nearly dismiss it; saying we would be right for whatever team we play in the championship,’ Leighton Glynn admits, while Tony Hannon says: ‘The training really stepped up a level when the ground got hard and the opportunities to train that bit harder came in after the league campaign finished up. The training was ferocious at the best of time, but when you got to that period after the league but before the championship came in, the intensity went up, the speed went up for everybody. Suddenly, the distances were down and it was all about how fast we could move across the pitch, from wire-to-wire, and you had those runs where you would start from the middle of the pitch, go around the one goal, down to the other, and we would meet again in the middle.
‘We never went out to lose league games but, obviously, there was a bit of fine-tuning with our training. It was far less scientific back then, even allowing for Micko, who would have been more old school than the other managers, but if you were to go through the rest of the camps, it was less scientific than what it is now.’
All of the work put into training sessions over the previous years built to the summer of 2009. After narrowly losing out to Westmeath in the quarter-finals of Leinster, they kicked off their national exploits on July 4 when they welcomed Fermanagh to Aughrim. Despite the sendings off of Tony Hannon and Tommy Walsh, they did enough to edge out their opponents 0-17 to 1-11.
Next up was another home tie, this time against Cavan on July 11. This one was far more routine than the Fermanagh game, with Paul Earls scoring a goal and Tony Hannon scoring 0-5 in seven-point, 1-12 to 0-8 triumph.
Remarkably, their next game, that fateful match vs Down, was also a home tie; their third consecutive home advantage. This allowed for a carnival atmosphere on July 18. The stands in Aughrim were at capacity, with people making the trip from Hollywood, Wicklow, Arklow and Bray and beyond.
‘It was fantastic. I will always remember the noise and colour in Aughrim those days. The TV cameras were there. It hasn’t been like that in a long time. We are ten or eleven years on now, so look, it would be nice to get them days back, but they certainly were fantastic at the time,’ Glynn remembers fondly.
‘There were probably more reporters and we were probably on TV more times than any other team in 2009. it was all that momentum that Micko could bring. You have to win the games, but the media focus was on Micko and Wicklow at the time. That gave us the confidence. We felt, at times, that we were one of the top teams. Players will respond to that; good players will respond to that, more often than not. We rolled with it and, at times, we believed that we could beat anybody.’
Glynn mentions an interesting aspect of that era of Wicklow football. Since Mick O’Dwyer’s arrival at the end of 2006, all of a sudden, there was a greater level of attention and more eyes on what was happening in the Garden County. What was so special about football in Wicklow that they could attract and eight-time All-Ireland winning coach.
Introduce their storied run in 2009, and you have a powder keg of media intrigue into what Micko was creating around the county. Instead of this attention putting pressure on players who may not have been used to such scrutiny, the Wicklow players reveled in it, while any unwelcome spotlight was intercepted by their manager, as Tony explains.
‘Mick was a great man for taking any of the pressure off. You look at the likes of (José) Mourinho these days.
‘He does, in a more calculated or self-conscious way, he would say something to take pressure off the players.
‘Micko is a great man for the way he handles the media. He was a bit of a media darling; he would whistle a tune and the rest of ye would sing along, so any pressure that was out there, Micko was absorbing a lot of it.’
The media focus would not stop Wicklow when they met Down on July 18.
Feeding off the hometown support, Wicklow made a bright start to the affair and went into halftime 1-9 to 0-9 thanks to Leighton Glynn’s goal. The division three champions came back strong in the second-half but were found wanting in front of goal. Ambrose Rogers and Aidan Carr both chances after Benny Coulter had brought the sides level.
Wicklow very nearly snatched victory with extra-time looming, only for James Stafford’s late effort to be saved by Down goalkeeper Brendan McVeigh. When the ball crossed the line, the stage was set for Tony Hannon. The centre-forward stepped up to the plate from 45 meters out. Despite his legs tiring from the shift that he and his teammates had put in, Hannon conjured the will to smash the ball goalwards, watching the ball bend in from the right and go straight between the posts. Cue jubilation, elation, celebration, and history.
‘The mind goes blank, to be honest with you.
‘Once you strike a ball like that, you never quite know if it is going to go over because you have had shots before where you think it is going to go over, and then it tails off. As soon as I kicked it, I thought that it had a chance. I didn’t think that it was definitely going over. I think, in my own mind, there was too much on it to think that it was definitely over, but it was great to see it come in off the right and go inside the post.
‘As the fella who takes freekicks, you live by the sword and die by the sword. It either goes over, and thankfully it did go over, and you are the hero, or there are other times where you take freekicks and it goes wide. People tend to remember the ones you miss. It is equally brilliant for that one to be such a big moment in our team’s journey and for it to be pretty much the last kick of the game.’
Tony’s skipper adds: ‘I remember he had put in a savage amount of work in training before and after that match. He kicked really well in the qualifiers, in poor conditions against Fermanagh and Cavan. It was one of those where I knew it was going over.
‘It was never in doubt. I knew Tony was going to split the posts.’
The only regret from a tremendous time for Wicklow football, is that they were unable to capitalise on that win over Down.
Both men admit that the Kildare and Westmeath games, in particular, as being games they would have liked to have revisited.
Although, if Division 4 Wicklow being disappointed not to have reached a Leinster semi-final and All-Ireland quarter-final isn’t a metric of how much belief and confidence they had in 2009, then I don’t know what is.