When a picture truly does speak a thousand words

AFEW years ago the GAA powers that be did what many felt was impossible: they held back the sea. The sea of supporters of the newly crowned All-Ireland football and hurling champions that comes crashing down in relentless, colourful, thunderous, delirious waves on the sound of the full-time whistle.

Health and safety protocols have consigned the post-match pitch invasion on All-Ireland Final day the way of half-time cigarettes for players and crepe paper hats on supporters, but back in 1997 - whether Kerry or Mayo won - time nor tide wasn’t going to hold back the winning supporters.

Olympic sprinter Linford Christie said the key to winning a race was to ‘go on the ‘B’ of Bang!’ and it would seem that the annual All-Ireland final full-time dash went on the ‘w’ of whistle.

Players from both teams had about four seconds to let the realisation of the result dawn on them before the tsunami of people hit them.

In 1997 Brian White had barely brought his whistle to his lips for the last time when the dam burst, as brilliantly illustrated by Ray McManus’s award-winning Sportsfile photograph.

Team selector Tom O’Connor and goalkeeper Declan O’Keeffe are met mere seconds after the final whistle by Tralee native and Kerins O’Rahillys player at the time, Cathal (CJ) Sheehy, far right, and Donal Murphy, present day Rathmore club chairman and father of Kerry footballer Paul.

“I’d have been there with the usual suspects from Strand Road, probably Ken Savage, my brother Hughie, a couple of more,” Sheehy recalls. “We had good enough tickets, Lower Hogan Stand, along the ‘fifty’ just a few rows in from the front. There was a couple of stewards down in front of me and I was trying to work out which was the heaviest steward so I could get in (past him).

“I was playing football myself that time and I’d have known a good lot of the Kerry players. I’d have gone to a lot of the games, even the League games, around the country at that time.

“I’d have known Declan O’Keeffe through playing football but all I’d said that time was probably ‘congratulations’. I’d have known Tom O’Connor too,” Sheehy, 34 at the time, remembers.

“It was just the emotion of the day. Kerry had been through an eleven-year drought, which was an incredible long time after winning All-Irelands so regularly through the Seventies and Eighties. I’ve often been asked about it and I say if I’d been in the Cupper Hogan I’d probably have jumped off of it.

“We’d just a couple of seconds before the crowds were in on top of us. It was just a real outpouring of emotions. And I still remember the buzz of the day afterwards and the next few days. Incredible time.”

Donal Murphy was Rathmore team mate of O’Keeffe’s at the time and considerably more hirsuite, as the photograph shows.

Like Sheehy, Donal was also in the Lower Hogan Stand.

“Because it was Kerry’s first All-Ireland in eleven years the ticket situation was a lot more chaotic than it is nowadays. I was in the Lower Hogan, a good seat, but I was in with all these corporate types, people from neither county and with little interest in the match. In fact, one man read a newspaper through a lot if it. I remember a couple of minutes before the end I made my way down a few rows to near the front. The second the full time whistle went I was gone. Obviously, Declan was a club mate and a team mate of mine but it was just chance that he was the nearest player to me. Great memories from the day.

“There’s a copy of the photograph up in Cahill’s Bar in Rathmore. For a good few years I didn’t know the other fella in it but someone tracked him down. Paschal Sheehy’s brother from Tralee, isn’t it?” Murphy said.