Kerry had to lose ’96 to win ’97
Kerry’s 1997 All-Ireland win had its genesis in many places but nowhere more so than the ’96 semi-final loss to Mayo, according to Dara Ó Cinnéide as he tells JOE Ó MUIRCHEARTAIGH, who looks back on what was a defining year in the Kingdom’s modernday foot
MAYO man John Maughan.
Welcome to Kerry’s nightmare. 19 July, 1992 and stunned Kerry supporters who made up the majority of the 24,015 in The Gaelic Grounds traipsed slowly from the scene of the crime.
“You can have your Foinavons, the North Koreans and James ‘Buster’ Douglases,’’ thundered The Cork Examiner, but now “in the history of great sporting shocks” you had the “Men of Clare” beating Kerry in a Munster football final.
The men of Clare masterminded by Mayo man John Maughan, with the fallout being the thousands of bewildered and bedraggled looking Kerry men walking away so slowly it was as if they’d just discovered that disciples of the Flat Earth Society were right all along as they treaded carefully for fear they were about to plunge off the cliff face at any time.
In truth, they’d fallen already. It was the end of the earth as Kerry football knew it. Six years since they’d won an All-Ireland and after this it was hard to see when another one would be won.
Welcome to that nightmare, one that wouldn’t go away for many years yet. “These were the dark years,” says county board chairman of the day Sean Kelly. “Supporters didn’t accept we weren’t good enough, they felt we had to be good enough, that we should be winning and we weren’t winning.”
For those who chose to drown their sorrows that Munster final day the nightmare was only beginning.
Outside the Davin Arms where the first post-Munster final pints were being pulled you had tee-total musician Brush Shields, who had helicoptered down to Limerick to support Clare, getting drunk on it all and all at the expense of Kerry.
“I made up a song there and then to the air of Spancill Hill,” he recalled, “one that brought in the names of the Kerry players, the Clare players and John Maughan of course.”
All because Mayo man Maughan was the man, but more messiah.
And so it was again four years later when he brought his Division 3 side Mayo to an All-Ireland semi-final and his next Championship day out against Kerry.
“Mayo six points clear with four minutes remaining and Páidí Ó Sé suddenly back-pedalled from the touchline as if feeling nauseous,” reported The Irish Independent. “Just yards away, Maughan was punching the air and slapping high-fives. Substitutes frolicked like lambs in a big field, supporters hollered and hooted. Mayo don’t get these days too often.” Welcome to Kerry’s second nightmare. 1992 all over again. “John Maughan looks like a sculpture and gushes like a fountain. He stands on the bench, grinning down at a blob of men, their tape machines pushed towards him like outstretched palms awaiting communion. Benedictions blossom in every corner of the room. “Maughan’s shirt is off, his hair is dripping. ‘Never doubted we would win it,’ the manager’s voice booms. ‘Never doubted it’.” For the Kerry players down the corridor in their dressing room under the Cusack Stand it wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were Munster champions for the first time in five years, with the Kerry Kop acclaiming the 0-14 to 0-11 win over Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh even before the end when bursting into a rendition of England’s Euro ’96 anthem of ‘Football’s Coming Home’.
It would be the All-Ireland next, until Maughan and his Mayo side intervened. Now, in walked Maughan to the Kerry dressing room, with the shock of what was a decisive 2-13 to 1-10 defeat still swirling.
“You know the way you take a perceived slight, even though there was none there, or none intended,” recalls Dara Ó Cinnéide. “Maughan came with a pair of shorts on him. He was strutting, like a peacock. We were very vulnerable at that time. We knew what was ahead with the Kerry supporters. We took it that Maughan was preening a bit. I’m sure he wasn’t, but it riled us. Mayo had an X across their backs.” It wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t happen again.
DAnd it didn’t. ARA Ó Cinnéide kept a diary of the 1997 season and now at a remove of 20 years one constant screams from the pages of his personalised account of Kerry’s year to September. “Looking at it again, it’s all Páidí,” he says. “All about Páidí. He’s everywhere.” All about his beautiful obsession of bringing an All-Ireland back to Kerry, with his chance to work and live the dream having finally come when he was appointed manager in September 1995. “He was obsessed,” says Ó Cinnéide. “When he took over the Kerry team he gave an interview to The Kerryman and said he was going to put the spirituality back into Kerry football. “We were going ‘what’s this fella about, what does he know about spirituality’. But that’s exactly what he did. He started getting fellas, maybe lads who had taken a knock, and got them to believe in playing for the jersey again. It was primitive, old fashioned values. He got that going.” After an early league victory over Donegal he noted “ours was a very spiritualistic performance”, but that spirit would be severely tested along the way before the mountaintop was finally reached.
“He got badly stung in the winter of ’96 after that defeat to Mayo,” remembers Ó Cinnéide. “The stuff that had rained down on the top of Ogie Moran was starting to rain down on him, but Páidí had a very thick skin.
“Whatever pressure was there Páidí sucked it up. He took it on himself. He went out and did the interviews. He did all the talking. He told us from the word go when he came in to stop thinking about the teams he had played on, not to carry their baggage.
“There was a toxic enough environment within Kerry for the first three years that I played — ’93, ’94 and ’95 under Ogie Moran. Ogie felt the brunt of that and got a lot of abuse because we weren’t a good team. It was as simple as that. Páidí absorbed every single punch that was thrown at the time, so that we had to just go out and play.
“The dynamic was perfect. Kerry had won the minor All-Ireland in ’94; we had two All-Ireland Under 21s in ’95 and ’96. The players coming onto the team from the minor and Under 21 sides were the final pieces in the jigsaw.
“And Páidí took everything on himself