Give away your jersey and you are giving away your scalp
‘BIG JOE’ SAM MAN TO DELIVER ALL-IRELANDS
YOU can almost see the wheels turning in his head as Joe Kernan relives it all as if it were yesterday.
Play by play. Blow by blow. It’s as if a big screen has rolled down in front of his eyes and he’s watching it all over again, mesmerised.
Or, in some little corner in the back of his brain, he has it running on a loop. Why not?
And it’s so beautiful. As clear as day. Two decades on.
Sitting in the front room of his home on the Newry Road in the heart of Crossmaglen, teleported back to when he patrolled the Croke Park sidelines, head to toe in black, his sides — orange or black and amber — always a force to be reckoned with.
“Benny Tierney won a ball and early in the year he would have kicked to the corner backs,” begins Kernan.
“We got that out of his head. He kicked it long and hit the wing. Barry O’Hagan won it, gave it to Aidan O’Rourke and Aidan hit the pass of the Championship.
“A diagonal ball to the left of the D and Stevie (McDonnell) on the outside caught it and just turned on the left foot. “Stevie’s hands that year. “Stevie came from being a poacher at the start of the year, running in behind looking for a handy ball to coming out and catching ball.
“He was a lethal finisher. He turned from a great poacher into a player of the year the following year.
Vice-grips
“He has a pair of hands like vice-grips. For his All-Ireland winning point he never even looked. I can see that.”
And with that Kernan is fully back in the room again.
McDonnell’s point would prove to be the winner in Armagh’s first — and only — AllIreland triumph to date.
There would be no more scores for the last 12 minutes of that 2002 All-Ireland final against Kerry, as Armagh defended a one point lead like no other team could.
Then the eruption.
It’s a mini one, and very polite, as Joe’s grandson James — son of Aaron — enters the living room with a stand he’s building for his football cards.
The wheels are turning there too. At a rate of knots.
“This man is going to be an engineer,” says Joe. “He has a great eye for putting things together. Empty a lorry load of stuff and he’ll build a city.
“It’s dangerous going to the shop.You have to get the dough out for soccer cards.”
James’ younger brother Joe lands then, looking for toast.
Kernan’s home is a hive of activity.
The office of the family business is literally the front half of the Kernan home, with two of Joe’s sons, Stephen and Aaron, working out of it.
‘Big Joe.’
Meath had one. Dublin had one. Sheridan and McNally.
But Armagh’s was the original and outstandingly successful at it, with the pain that defined his playing career with Armagh replaced by four AllIreland titles as a manager three with Crossmaglen and one with his county.
There are stories and there are stories.
Kernan was on the Croke Park tour a few years back.
The tour guide pointed out a broken tile in a dressing room where Kernan apparently hopped his 1977 runner’s up plaque off the wall at halftime in that 2002 final.
“There was a bigger hole in the tiles. Somebody obviously hit it with a hurley or something to make the story look better,” he laughs.
“It’s mentioned. This is where Joe Kernan threw the plaque off the wall and there’s where Brian Cody broke the hurley off the table.
“Myself and Eamon Mackle (Armagh backroom member) were talking before the final. ‘I need to do something’.
“Says I, ‘I have something that I don’t like. It’s the plaque.’
“I said to Eamon, ‘I’ll use that’.
“It was a bit of timber. There was a bit of silver plate on the front of it. Over the years, the plate fell off it.You could see a shadow on it.
Ideal
“Eamon says, ‘I have an AllIreland winners’ medal.’
‘This is ideal. Set the two things together. I don’t want you to have that. I want you to have this’.
Mackle had bought the medal at an auction. It belonged to a Wexford footballer from their four in a row side (1915-18).
“Nobody knew what we were doing,” says Kernan. “We just kept it to ourselves because we wanted to hit the spot, if we needed it.
“We walked in at half-time and we did need it.”
First they checked for injuries. Then they had a chat as a management team, while the players relaxed.
Then they talked about what they thought they needed to do in the second half.
“‘Geezer’ (Kieran McGeeney) or Paul McGrane would then (below) say something,” recalls Kernan.
“I said, ‘Boys, just before you go out, I want to show you something. I have had something in my house and every time I look at it I feel like I’m a loser. Every time I look at it, I feel sick.’
“I showed it to them and hopped it off the wall in towards the shower.
“I went around every player. “There was a silence in the room that was deafening. Did it refocus? I don’t know. Did it work? I don’t know.
“But we went out and we took the game.”
Armagh turned a foreboding four point half-time deficit into a glorious one point triumph on the biggest day in the county’s history.
Kernan had learned a world of invaluable lessons from the big days with Crossmaglen and he was always looking for an edge.
Plan
For the semi-final encounter with Dublin, he also had a plan for half-time.
“I often wondered about teams,” he muses, despite his success at gauging the mood and setting the right temperature over the years.
“You can rev teams up but sometimes you just need to cool them down and get them