Thrills, spills and rancour of ‘95 is blast from the past
THIRTY players, two sets of goals, a referee and a country engrossed in the occasion will be the elements that today’s football final shares with the 1995 edition.
Beyond those general similarities, the games will have practically nothing in common.
The differences will be most marked in the styles of play, dictated by more detailed tactical preparations but also the improved fitness of modern footballers.
As a historical resource, though, the meeting between Dublin and Tyrone is fascinating. It reveals a time when Dublin were a big name hollowed out by years of underachievement and when Tyrone were good but not good enough to sustain the blooming of Ulster that had so brightened the first half of the 1990s.
And the match is more, too, than a dry relic of a passed age. It marked the best day in the playing career of the Dublin manager, Jim Gavin, and two of his selectors this afternoon, Paul Clarke and Jason Sherlock.
Gavin has turned Dublin into a team for all time, and Sherlock has been influential in moulding their forward line into the precise unit that eschews chance in favour of ruthlessness.
Twenty-three years ago, they were part of a side that won Dublin’s first All-Ireland in 12 years, the one blue blip in 28 years that separated the 1983 win and the 2011 renaissance.
Tyrone were inspired in the final by 24-year-old Peter Canavan, who will today analyse the game as one of the best-respected and most reasonable pundits in the country.
He kicked 11 of his side’s 12 points in a suffocating clinch of a decider, and from then on the talk started of Canavan being cursed as the greatest player never to win an All-Ireland.
It would be eight years before he corrected that, but in the mid-1990s Tyrone were nothing like the force Mickey Harte would harness.
Football was nothing like the game it would become, either.
As the football championship of 1995 dawned, Leitrim were defending Connacht champions.
Galway would take their crown that season – their first provincial title in eight years.
Cork completed a three in a row of wins in Munster in 1995, as Kerry still lolled in decline.
Dublin’s Leinster championship that season was their fourth in a row, underlining a local dominance that they couldn’t extend to the country.
They were managed by Pat O’Neill, a hero of Heffo’s Army and who took over after the county lost the 1992 final to Donegal.
They lost a semi-final to Derry by a point in 1993, and a final by two points to Down in 1994.
They were the almost-men of their time.
Tyrone were not at that level, their Ulster title in 1995 was the county’s first since 1986. They reached the final that year, too, losing to the last iteration of Kerry’s Golden Years.
Dublin were hardened by three years of disappointment but also high-level experience by the time they got to the 1995 final.
They had more in common with the team Pat Gilroy dragged to the final in 2011 than the tremendous side Gavin leads out today.
Like Gilroy’s crew, they were in a final trailing years of disappointments. And they had nothing like the aura of Gavin’s conquerors.
This was still the era of the straight knock-out championship, and of the league that started in the autumn and finished in the spring.
Dublin had been relegated from Division One, along with Down, in the spring of 1995.
Clare and Tyrone were promoted from Division Two.
The kind of solidarity that teams have, everyone has to buy into that
Laois had finished top of Division One before the knock-out rounds, which ended with Derry beating Donegal in the final.
Galway and Mayo were relegated from Division Two.
Experimental rules were trialled during the league, including a ban on consecutive hand-passes.
The following season, Louth would finish just two points and a place below Dublin in Division Two.
All of this sounds so improbable to ears tuned to accounts of Dublin’s greatness.
Tyrone were the latest reconditioned power to come out of the north. Down twice, Donegal and Derry had won the previous four All-Ireland championships.
Three of those four victories had included defeats for Dublin in either a semi-final or final, nourishing the notion that O’Neill’s side couldn’t cope with Ulster sides.
Yet they were the hard-bitten pragmatists when referee Paddy Russell threw the ball up for the final.
O’Neill caused a surprise earlier in the year when promoting Sherlock straight out of minor into the midst of tough group simply desperate to win an All-Ireland.
‘We had made it clear that we were giving it just one more year no matter what happened, and I think that helped,’ Jim Brogan, one of O’Neill’s selectors, later remembered.
‘We were able to make and take high-risk decisions or calculated gambles without anyone questioning, like bringing a player, Jason, in from minor.’
It remains one of the most judicious selection decisions made by any inter-county manager.
Sherlock became a sensation that summer, the GAA’s first modern star and the focus of the Hill’s devotion. But he also brought talent and speed to a functional forward line, allowing for the deployment of Dessie Farrell on the half-forward line, which suited his clever style, too.
Most of all, Sherlock made an old, hard side feel fresh.
But the crustier virtues were as important in seeing Dublin through to the longed-for title. Jayomania brightened the summer but it was more modestly talented warriors like Jim Gavin that helped beat Tyrone.
Gavin had spent the summer as a prototype of what half-forwards would become. Like Sherlock, he was playing in his first final.
O’Neill deployed him as a tracker against raiding wing-backs like Graham Geraghty of Meath. He gave himself willingly to the job.
‘I was open to it,’ he said years later. ‘It came from my former background in the military.
‘It’s a team game. Every player has a particular task at hand. They’re all individual battles on the field of play. Collectively, that solidarity teams have, everyone needs to buy into it.
‘When I was asked to do that, there weren’t any questions. If that’s what the manager wants, that’s what he gets.’
Gavin spoke those words after becoming Dublin manager himself. The expectation that players will put what is best for the team ahead of any other consideration has
become gospel over the past five years.
There is an image of Gavin from the final whistle that day. He has fallen to his knees, his head is lifted and his two fists are in the air.
Behind him, the first intimations of defeat are causing a Tyrone player to spread his hands in helpless resignation.
As befitted a team that had played and lived through so much disappointment, Dublin’s eventual win was a grind.
The day is remembered, chiefly, for Russell sending off Charlie Redmond and the Dublin forward staying on for a further three minutes, before Russell spotted him and marched him to the sideline.
It was one of the last decisions Russell made that lingered in Tyrone, however. Sean McLoughlin thought he had levelled the match with a late point, but Canavan was penalised for handling the ball on the ground before passing to McLoughlin.
‘I remember taking the pass from Peter and having enough space to kick the ball between the posts,’ McLoughlin said in these pages last year.
‘I knew at the time it was the equalising score, so I was pretty pleased about it. But when I was jogging back to position, I saw this look of dread on Pascal Canavan’s face.
‘I didn’t know what it was at first because I knew I kicked it over the bar. But then I saw Paddy disallowing the score. My mood went from an unbelievable high to a low within seconds.
‘I went from kicking a point in an All-Ireland final, such an important score too, to have it taken away from me. John O’Leary kicked the ball out and Paddy blew the game up almost immediately.’
Russell took huge criticism from Tyrone supporters after the match – but not all of them. A priest in the county sent him a card offering his support.
Others weren’t as gracious, and it nurtured a sense in some Tyrone fans of injustice.
Ten years later, Canavan would jump on Colm Cooper and drag him to the ground as Tyrone rebuffed desperate Kerry attempts to scramble back into the 2005 final.
Winners find a way, as Dublin did 23 years ago.
That remains the case, even if everything else seems to have changed over the last quarter of a century.