Hitchcock twist can’t stop Treaty exorcising their ghosts
Limerick leave language of their past behind to finally end county’s spell of heartache
IT ends with Tom Condon, ball in hand, slewing clear from the Canal-end traffic and all the tangled roots of Limerick doubt suddenly snapping in a thunderclap of sound. To the end, the Gods squeezed them. They gave one last chase with all the markers of their past, the great horseshoe bowl thrumming like a giant cello. But in that moment, in the 80th minute of this faintly unhinged, melodramatic game with its Hitchcock twist, Limerick left the language of their past behind.
John Kiely turned towards the Hogan Stand, his face a florid rosette of emotion, the entire backroom team tumbling towards him in exhausted embrace.
They were champions. The invisible hands that kept generations down could no longer be felt on Limerick chests. Freedom. What did it mean?
“You know we felt over the last 45 years we were second-class citizens when it came to hurling” Kiely said, red-eyed and hoarse. “We were always the bridesmaids!”
He know there was always going to be something ungovernable about this day for him and his team. Sure, you could try to condition restless minds into thinking of this as just another game, but the green sea around them always offered a jolting contradiction.
No end of sports psychology can stop stomachs creeping up towards young throats when all around is a jumble of reminders that, in the haunted house of supporters’ minds, this day had the capacity to terrify.
All the antique photos of ‘73, all those grainy images of a grey day in a grey land just kept reminding them how this game offered something beyond words.
So they ran screaming to their destiny in the end. As Joe Canning’s last free, from close to the Hill-end ‘45, began dropping towards Limerick’s square, you had to think that a Galway goal then would be a cut that might never heal.
So we ask Kiely what kind of storm was rolling through his head as he watched the sliotar descend. He tries to bluff. “I was calm now to be honest with you!” he lies. “I was very calm all day today .... ”. He has to cuts short the sentence realising that Darragh O’Donovan, sitting next to him, has broken into a chortle.
The truth?
“I was saying to Pat Ryan there this morning” grins O’Donovan “that I was watching Chelsea playing last night and John reminded me of Maurizio Sarri on the sidelines!”
“So calm?” suggests Kiely with a smile.
“Ah look” sighs O’Donovan “I had my own head inside a towel watching it like. I was after coming off and you’re looking at probably one of the greatest hurlers of all time stepping over a ball.
“And I remember last year, Tipperary played them in the semi-final and he got a free from that same position. The ball came back out to him...that’s all I was worried about.
REDEEM
“But Tom Condon was there. Tom’s been a great leader and I suppose he was able to redeem himself from what happened earlier in the year (being sent off in Ennis against Clare). That was some vital ball to bring out there at the end. Jeeny Mac, to have the coolness and the head to just catch it there ‘cos you had big Johnny Glynn inside like. “Anything could have happened.” It shouldn’t have come to that, of course. But, then, maybe this wouldn’t have been Limerick if it hadn’t. There were, after all, just two minutes of normal time remaining when Shane Dowling’s Hill-end goal put them eight points clear. Soon after, the board went up for added time. Eight minutes, it read, the collective response a banshee shriek.
And, sure enough. Limerick’s safety cushion was counterfeit. This day wasn’t done.
Glynn finally got his Gulliver act going with a 71st-minute goal and then Canning nailed a 20-metre free. And Galway, suddenly, had the air of men called back from the scaffold for a pardon. It would have been a travesty had they rescued the day, yet it was a measure of their character as champions that it became a possibility.
Canning’s especially. The Portumna hurled with that familiar mix of grandeur and defiance when so many around him were at odds with their game. As Kiely described him, a man “for the ages”.
But this story is about Limerick. About them changing the philosophy of their game. About a group of young men stepping away from the county’s past of hurling maybe with too much heat and not enough light. Every time crisis crept up on them this year, they faced it down with near stoic indifference.
When Galway almost had a boot on their throats during the pivotal 1B League game in Salthill, they calmly, almost methodically reined them back in. To Kyle Hayes (inset), that was the first signal.
“To come back against the All-Ireland champions on their own field, it’s through things like that you know there’s something special in the group” he said.
This Limerick was more tactical than any Limerick team we’d known. This Limerick had a deeper sense of kinship. Last December, the entire squad participated in a fund-raising night of boxing at the South Court Hotel, team-mates climbing through the ropes to test one anothers’ chins.
It might have seemed an unorthodox route to characterbuilding, but that became its legacy.
As O’Donovan explained, the preparatory spars in St Francis’ Boxing Club revealed a small multitude about themselves. “I remember crawling into the boxing ring in St. Francis’s with this man at the end of October, we were goin’ in literally batin’ the heads off each other” he said, nodding towards Hayes. “I’ll tell you that is where this thing was earned.
“John has been saying it all year like, we had to fight with ourselves first before we went fighting with anyone else. You know, we had to respect ourselves. John’s always saying that about training. If you went down to our training sessions, you’d go home thinking some of us aren’t talking to each other.”
They led by four points at half-time but, really, it should have been twice that. Galway were trying to solder cracks all over the field, but energy was their problem. More specifically, a dearth of it.
That was where the only relevant mis-match was unspooling. Not in Johnny Glynn playing schoolyard bully against Mike Casey on the edge of the Limerick square. Not in the modern arithmetic of puck-out strategy or
specific overloads in the middle third. Galway just looked like a team with something weighing on them.
It had been what we thought we’d see in Limerick but, if anything, they looked emboldened, at least until fate caught them in a clinch during those closing flurries.
And that clinch almost made their heads explode.
“It’s surreal” admitted Kiely after. “I really do feel like somebody’s just going to shake me and wake me. That this has all just been a crazy dream. I suppose the fact that it was so tough, so hard-earned, makes it all the more special maybe as well. We withstood that onslaught.
“The storm was a little late I suppose. And God it was tough. It’s only these boys know how tough it was. They had to win those vital balls at vital stages in the closing minutes.
“But they were very relaxed this morning. We had some great craic on the way up on the train and the back of the hotel before we came in. We knew what we needed to do like. There was no mystery about it, there was no tactical conundrum that we had to solve.
“You know it was just wanting it badly enough. Of course, your mind does stray to other things. When we got in the car this morning to go to the bus, your mind does drift. But maybe young fellas don’t think about the past and the weight of history too much.”
Finally then, they could leave that weight behind them.
“It’s just an awful pity it took so long” said Kiely soberly. “There were such fantastic teams there back in the Eighties, ‘80, ‘81, ‘94, ‘96, 2007. Those groups would have fancied themselves other years but it was a knockout situation so...”
The perverse side of a big lead in hurling is that the first sign of it dwindling can set off sirens in the head. And Kiely could always feel that cold breeze in his chest.
“I didn’t want to get a massive lead up early doors at all because it becomes an awful weight on you when it starts to close down” he said now. “It’s an incredible thing when a lead is going away and momentum is shifting back to the opposition, it’s so difficult to actually stunt that momentum,” Kiely continued.
“We’ve spoken about that, the need to respond in games when things are going against you. Richie Hogan’s goal in Thurles. Here against Cork, six points down. Something had to happen. We had to respond.”
That they did and, now, every molecule of their world has been re-drawn, re-aligned. The past has fallen silent.