TREATY LEADER WEARS HEART ON HIS SLEEVE
‘My instinct was to fight and protect. I’m a protector, I’m a teacher, I’m a parent’
IN THE butchering of Killeedy and Billy Joel 23 years apart, John Kiely revealed the passion that has helped him drive Limerick hurling through heaven’s gate.
In the week that was in it, a clip of old VHS tape was digitally remastered for our consumption and subsequently went viral.
It shows the 1995 Limerick Junior B county final, with Kiely lifting Galbally’s first hurling trophy in nine years, and the earthiness and intimacy are at full volume.
‘I don’t care what Limerick jersey you wear, to win anything with your own club is better than anything else. I don’t care what it is,’ he shouted.
‘There was one night a fortnight ago and this big lash of rain came. It was a pure storm and we got covered in s**t outside on the field. That’s what wins a championship, that’s what wins county medals,’ he said to roars of approval from the circle that was gathered around the presentation party.
The crowd was a tad bigger last Monday evening in the Gaelic Grounds, when he offered up a less melodic version of Joel’s iconic hit Piano Man, but it has rarely been more lustily cheered.
As an encore, he screamed into the microphone: ‘GO ON LIMERICK’. Twice.
Of course, there is a lot more to winning an All-Ireland after a 45year wait, but without pride of place, and passion for the cause, there is no starting point.
Displays of pride and passion come easy at the end of a successful journey, but to be able to find it when all hope has been extinguished is what marks out the leaders from the cheerleaders.
It is a yarn now well-worn in its retelling, but Limerick would still be a hurling county in drift if Kiely did not take it upon himself to swim against the tide.
In the aftermath of the 2009 AllIreland semi-final, when Limerick had been humiliated on a 6-19 to 2-7 scoreline by Tipperary, he made a personal vow from the steps of the Hogan Stand.
‘For some strange reason I turned around at the top of the steps and looked out over the pitch and I said to myself: “I am going to do something to try and make sure this doesn’t happen again”,’ he recalled.
‘I said it to my wife Louise but she didn’t realise I was serious.’ Instead, she told him to shut up and get into the car for the long drive home.
Except he didn’t shut up and a phone call to the then Limerick chairman Liam Lenihan the following day flicked a switch in the latter’s head when the county went searching for an intermediate manager the following year.
From there, to Under 21 selector, to senior selector, to All-Ireland-winning U21 manager to the top of the world he now occupies, Kiely made the most of the pride and passion which opened that door in the first place.
In many ways, he was an unlikely choice. In an age when so much is invested in the star quality of a big name, he owned a playing career that was garnished with relative ordinariness.
He was a member of Tom Ryan’s panel that reached the 1994 AllIreland final, and he captained the Limerick footballers back in the late 1990s, but you never did that for the fame, just the pride.
There is more to him than that, though. He brought the smarts and organisational skills that have seen him thrive off the field — Kiely was appointed as Abbey CBS principal in Tipperary town in 2014 — to his management of Limerick.
And he has invested heavily in the players he has helped mould.
Declan Hannon, Graeme Mulcahy and Shane Dowling were all members of the 2011 Munster U21 winning team on which he was a selector while he started last Sunday with eight of the 2015 All-Ireland U21-winning panel he managed.
His duty of care to those players is always evident. In the aftermath of last month’s semifinal win over Cork, before taking questions at the postmatch press conference, he warned journalists that he would ‘shut the whole thing down’ if there was any attempt made to contact his players in the build-up to the decider.
It was a move that had a hint of paranoia, but this week he insisted it was motivated out of a desire to protect.
‘When I’m put into a corner, I will fight. That’s the bottom line,’ he said. ‘I fought that day because everybody came down off those benches and landed on with their (recording) devices and my instinctive reaction was to fight and protect. I’m a protector, I’m a teacher, I’m a parent. ‘I wanted to protect the people that mean most to me and I was protecting the Limerick players,’ he explained last Monday. And in that he has been consistent. In just his second game in charge of Limerick, he saw his team take a seven-goal trimming from Cork in a Munster League game. Even though it was just a pre-season outing, he heard the jibes from the stands and it cut far deeper than the result. ‘There were quite a number of people in the crowd who were extremely abusive and it was not at all appropriate that players be treated like that on the day, ‘If there are people out there that aren’t behind the team, we would rather they stayed away,’ he warned. Pride and passion should never be used as a vehicle for doling abuse. They are too precious for that and Kiely offers the proof.