All-Ireland final dream smashed in 16 minutes

At 3.30pm on Sunday, September 28, 1997 Billy O’Shea’s lifelong dream became reality: he was playing for Kerry in an All-Ireland senior football final. Sixteen minutes later it was all over. He told his story to PAUL BRENNAN

GARY O’Sullivan, radio sports broadcaster and general wit, knows his sport. One of his favourite questions to spring on those who think they know theirs is: ‘Who came on for Billy O’Shea in the 1997 All-Ireland Final?’

Most people consider their options for a moment - Brian Clarke, Mike Frank Russell or Johnny Crowley and most people venture the answer they know to be correct: Crowley.

O’Sullivan grins and delivers his punchline: “Wrong. It was the St John’s Ambulance!” JUST a little after a quarter to four on Sunday afternoon, September 28, 1997 Billy O’Shea lies prone on the Croke Park pitch. He has just turned 25 years of age and is about 16 minutes into his first All-Ireland senior football final with Kerry, but he knows his day is done. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him either. One look down at the tibia bone in his left leg looking back up at him is enough for O’Shea to know it’s ball burst, game over. FOR the last few years O’Shea often sits alongside Gary O’Sullivan in the press gantry at Croke Park, working as Radio Kerry’s match-day football analyst against O’Sullivan’s running commentary.

In 1997 the nascent radio station’s double-act was Liam Higgins on lead microphone with Weeshie Fogarty riding shotgun in Billy’s role.

Higgins: That’s knocked by Barry O’Shea to Liam Flaherty away up the wing for Billy O’Shea. Billy O’Shea is going taking on his man here, threw out a hand. Then he sends that ball inside for Ó Cinnéide, grabs it, knocks it down towards Billy O’Shea again and he’s collided with Maurice Fitzgerald as they both went for the same ball on that occasion. And along to mop up was Fergal Costello from Mayo. Fergal Costello doesn’t succeed in clearing it but back there is James Nallen. James Nallen working the ball out of defence. He’s about forty yards out and the referee has blown his whistle. And Billy O’Shea appears to be in trouble here. He’s on the twenty-one yard line from that skirmish there. I didn’t exactly see what happened to Billy there but attention’s been called for. And Billy O’Shea looking quite positive in the early stages of this game.

Fogarty: Looking very positive but Billy O’Shea, I’d say, is in big trouble, Liam. It appears to be from here on first looking I think he’s in big trouble. What happened there, a ball was passed back, Billy O’Shea went for it, Dara Ó Cinnéide passed the ball back, Billy O’Shea went for it and Maurice Fitzgerald went for it, and the two of them collided together, and down went Billy O’Shea. It was a very, ah, bad mix-up by the two Kerry forwards and one of them was going to come out the worst out of it. It appears to me as if Billy O’Shea is going to go out of this game, unfortunately for the Laune Rangers man. The stretcher is coming on, he seems to have an ankle injury or a knee injury, something in that aspect. The Kerry selectors are over, they’re in a bit of a conflab. They have a few players warming up, now the thing is what’ll they do? Will they now bring on Michael Francis Russell, his club mate, or will they bring on Brian Clarke and put him in full forward and put Dara Ó Cinnéide in the corner, we’ll have to see? Seamus MacGearailt is going up to Paidi Ó Sé over on the far side of the field, they’ve their arms around each other, and now Jack O’Connor is after joining them there to decide what to do. It’s going to be Michael Francis Russell who’s going to be, Brian Clarke possibly, (that’s) the decision they’re going to make, Liam.

Higgins: Well, both of them are warming up on the far side, both Mike Frank Russell and Brian Clarke are warming up. Who gets the nod, well I would fancy it might be Mike Frank Russell for the corner forward berth on this occasion.

[Additional analyst] Sean Barry: [comments briefly on the midfield exchanges] Going back to Billy O’Shea’s injury, as soon as Doctor Dave Geaney came in and looked at him he signalled to the sideline immediately that Billy O’Shea had a broken leg. He crossed his fingers and that’s the first aid sign for a broken leg. Unfortunately for Billy he had a great start to the game and he was really, really buzzing inside there in the corner and it’s a very, very sad day for him. Fogarty: ...if the worst has come to the worst and if Billy O’Shea has that very bad injury we sympathise with him. It’s fierce tough luck because the man has been absolutely lifting in training. I saw him running a few nights and I didn’t think he was touching the ground he was going so fast, Liam. Higgins: Well he certainly played excellently when he came on in the semi-final against Cavan. And, well, tragedy there, and they seem to be putting a splint or something on his leg before they move him. A tragedy indeed for Billy O’Shea just back to his best form this year and getting back on the Kerry team for this All-Ireland by dint of his own hard work. It’s been a great summer’s, a great year’s training and it had been paying off in recent weeks. He had been really buzzing, as Weeshie said there and, well, that it should end with a serious leg injury here in the All-Ireland final is, indeed, a very, very sad thing. TO understand just how sad a day it was for the then 25-year old O’Shea one has to go back to the beginning. It’s a little known fact that Billy O’Shea is a Listowel man. His father, Patrick, born and reared in Killorglin, qualified as a doctor and located to Listowel where he worked as a GP. It was there that Billy was born - one of two boys and two girls - to Patrick and his wife Imelda, an Offaly woman. It was also there where a young Billy O’Shea first kicked football, heading along to the local Emmets club as a giddy under-12.

As the teenage years loomed for his son, Dr Patrick prescribed a change of scenery for young Billy: a year in Killorglin with grandmother Ann - a schoolteacher in the local Tech - might enhance Billy academically. And to it was that the 13-year old Billy O’Shea swapped the Feale for the Laune and never, essentially, went back.

If the Emmets were the sleeping giant of the north, things were already beginning to re-awaken for Laune Rangers in mid Kerry. O’Shea fell in love with his new town, and found a new football club. By 1989 he was breaking into the senior team and his contribution to the side that won the Bishop Moynihan Cup at year’s end got him a call up to the county minor panel in 1990.

That year’s Minor Championship is notable for two things: having played all six games that brought Kerry to the All-Ireland final that August, O’Shea got his first taste of Croke Park as a player, and despite losing 2-11 to 2-9 to Meath, O’Shea liked the Big House.

The second is that O’Shea - who would make his name with club and county as a dangerous forward - played all six games as a wing back.

The next year he was part of Mickey Ned O’Sullivan’s Under-21 panel that went to the All-Ireland final only to be hammered 4-15 to 1-5 by Tyrone. O’Shea’s blushes were spared in Newbridge that day but only because he had broken his right leg in the Munster Final win over Cork.

“Mickey had brought me into the Under-21s that year because Pa Laide was injured at the time. And I didn’t want to go in. I was doing the Leaving Cert at the time and I didn’t want to go in. I didn’t feel right about it, I felt I was too young. The next thing [County Board chairman] Sean Kelly approached me, he actually called to the house, and said ‘look, we’re stuck, Pa Laide is injured. So I said ‘fine, grand’. And Aidan O’Shea got injured as well. He was out, Pa was out and they needed someone to cover for the wing forward position. Because of that campaign Mickey had his eye on me then, so when I came back after the leg break - full recovery, it was a straight-forward break - he brought me in for the National League.”

In October 1991 O’Shea made his Kerry senior debut against Kildare, scoring a point. That senior debut came in the first of three years as an Under-21. After the ’91 All-Ireland final loss to Tyrone, a semi-final defeat to the reigning champions followed in ’92, and O’Shea’s U-21 days ended with Kerry losing another All-Ireland final, this time to Meath in Portlaoise.

Things were no better with the seniors. The years, and the famine, rolled on.

Scoring a goal on his Championship debut - a 10-point hammering of Cork below in Cork - the 19-year old O’Shea would have been forgiven for believing he had arrived at just the right time. Eight weeks later Kerry’s world came crashing down when Clare, in that infamous Munster Final, put a stick in their wheel. 1993: lost to Cork. 1994: beat Limerick, lost to Cork. 1995: beat Limerick, beat Tipperary, lost to Cork.

“We were coming. There was always the sense we were getting close,” O’Shea recalls. “I mean, Cork never annihilated us. It was always only a couple of points in it. Myself and Seamus Moynihan were living together in college in ‘95 and we kind of said to ourselves ‘is this ever going to change for us?’ Seamus had played in that Clare game, he came in in ’92. I’d come in in ’91. We had four years there with no