Brian Murphy combined talent with defiance

By Kieran Shannon

Former Cork and Kildare footballer Brian Murphy knows the value of an awakening. His Cork career was bedevilled by injury and it was under Mick O’Dwyer he finally achieved his inter-county dreams with his adopted county. He has since guided a generation of Lillywhite talent and hopes winning the ‘Newbridge or Nowhere’ battle proves a touchstone moment.

Growing skill requires deep practice. But deep practice isn’t a piece of cake — it requires energy, passion, and commitment, a motivational fuel which I call ignition… Ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that create our identity; the moments that lead us to say ‘That is who I want to be…. If they can do it, why can’t I?’ We usually think of passion as an inner quality, but [it’s] more something that comes first from the outside world.”

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

He’s Kildare through and through now. That’s only natural when you’ve scored the most important goal in the county’s history (20 years ago this month, actually), been coaching either its minor or U21 team for most of the past decade, and your three children are Lilywhites. Yet any conversation with Bryan Murphy invariably leads back to his roots. Home. Cork.

When reflecting on the potential significance of Newbridge, he references another result, last weekend, that pleased him: The Cork hurlers, captained by Seamus Harnedy, winning the Munster title again. Murphy subsequently saw the picture this paper carried of Harnedy as a child, back in 1999, with the Liam MacCarthy Cup and Mark Landers and Joe Deane, the pair of them from Killeagh, just 10 minutes up the road. The two events were hardly unrelated.

“Obviously, there was a dream there of aspiring, one day, of playing for Cork and maybe captaining them to a Munster or All-Ireland title. A seed was sown. And it’s one of the unwritten and underplayed things that keeps the dominance going in a lot of places, like Kerry, Kilkenny, Tipp, Cork. This whole subconscious thing, where they’re reared on stories of the great players and teams that went before and then being brought to the big match, seeing their heroes delivering on the big stage, and then going home and aspiring to be one of those guys.

“You can imagine the amount of young fellas now, in Dublin, going to bed, dreaming of winning All-Irelands. Whereas, in places like Kildare, they haven’t quite got that. I remember one year [as U21 county manager] asking the lads how many of them had been at an All-Ireland final and only three out of the 35 put up their hand. But you’ve got to start somewhere.”

The same young fellas who were in that room could be the ones to start it. Especially after an awakening like Newbridge.

“If you look at the guys who are there now [in Cian O’Neill’s senior squad], almost all of them, to a man, have been involved with county minor and U21 teams, where they came up against players who have gone on to form one of the greatest teams ever in the current senior Dublin side — the Ciaran Kilkennys, the Paul Mannions, Jack McCaffrey, Johnny Small, and so on. And yet, in all that time, Kildare competed very strongly against them at minor and U21, bar one year [2011], when Dublin were exceptional; I’d say Dessie [Farrell, then minor manager] would say that was the one that got away, but then they won it [the All-Ireland] the following year. In 2013, then, we beat them [en route to winning Leinster in minor and U21].

“So the [Kildare] fellas know they’re very competitive against them. And it goes back to that line about there comes a tide in the affairs of men. I think these guys are searching for that.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that these fellas have the ability. I never walked away from a game in all the years I was involved, saying, ‘God, I would love to have that fella over my fella.’ They’ve always been able to compete with any team. It just comes down to a bit of self-belief and backing yourself.”

In Cian O’Neill, they have someone not lacking self-belief and, as Newbridge clearly illustrated, not afraid of backing himself, either.

Murphy knows him well; O’Neill gave him a hand preparing the 2011 minors and then Murphy returned the favour five years later, serving as a selector in O’Neill’s first year over the seniors.

And he knows, from personal experience, how O’Neill’s defiance was just what Kildare, as a football county, needed. In 2015, Murphy was over a Kildare U21 team that won through to play Dublin in the Leinster final. The game was originally fixed for Portlaoise, a venue Kildare were well familiar with, from playing a couple of previous games there. Then, it was switched to Navan, where Dublin had just played their previous game. Kildare couldn’t even be accommodated with a training session to help familiarise themselves. In the end, they narrowly lost in an epic.

“Cian was right. I remember, when I first started with Kildare, I was living in the house with [Kilkenny hurlers] Liam Walsh and Charlie Carter and [Dublin hurler] Aonghus O’Grady, and one of their friends who called over said: ‘Why would you train with those hoors for? Sure, they roll up the white flag before the game even starts!’ And I said to myself, when the whole [Newbridge or Nowhere] thing was brewing: ‘If they surrender on this, they may kiss good luck to Kildare football forever.’ In fairness, they didn’t. They stuck to their guns and got the result.”

Murphy would stick with the Kildare footballers that time, as well. Again, it was rooted in ignition.

As a young fella, he was reared on seeing Jimmy winning matches in the Páirc, Thurles and Croke Park, his father, Brian, pushing him over the wire in Killarney on Munster final days, Tadhgie Murphy scoring the goal that felled a Kingdom in ’83. Weeshie Murphy, the full-back on the 1945 All-Ireland-winning football team and the long-serving Cork and Munster chairman, was a first cousin of his father, which made Weeshie’s son, Dr Con, a cousin of Bryan’s.

By September, 1985, he was another exemplar of that finest of Cork GAA traditions — a dual player, lining out in both All-Ireland minor finals. The hurlers beat Wexford, with Murphy at centre-back.

A fortnight later, he played in the same spot for the footballers, against Mayo, but it was a miracle he did. The previous week, in a challenge game in Buttevant, against the Mallow U21s, an opponent fell on his knee. He’d ruptured his cruciate ligament, only at the time no one knew what a cruciate was. The week after the defeat to Mayo, he broke down again, playing hurling for the club.

By the time his minor team-mates, like John Fitzgibbon, Mark Foley, Ger Manley, Mickey Mullins, Cathal Casey and Kieran McGuckian, had won the U21 All-Ireland, three years later, Murphy wasn’t even back playing hurling with UCC. He was barely back with the club, the knee having given away his first game back, 12 months after doing the cruciate. All the walking and weights, trying to build up muscle around the knee, had essentially been in vain. Surgery was the only option.

Such a suggestion came from an unlikely source. Pair the names Pat Spillane and Bryan Murphy together and a notorious clip of ‘analysis’ from The Sunday Game comes up. At half-time in the 2000 Leinster final replay, Spillane rubbished Kildare’s prospects of overcoming a six-point deficit to Dublin and their forward options on the bench.

“If Karl O’Dwyer was still in Kerry, he wouldn’t be making the Kerry county championship side, and if Bryan Murphy was in Cork, he wouldn’t be making the Cork junior football side” (Much to the mirth of the nation, O’Dwyer and Murphy subsequently triggered the greatest comeback in Kildare history). Whether Spillane remembered that a certain guest to his house a dozen or so years earlier was the same junior footballer in question, Murphy isn’t quite sure, but Murphy remembers and appreciates Spillane’s hospitality and assistance at the time.

“There was nobody doing the operation, when it happened first. But when I was in UCC, Spillane was down doing a chat there, so I went up to him afterwards and he told me there was a guy [Dr Brian Hurson] back from the States now doing it in Dublin. I went down to Templenoe and everything and he showed me the exercises he did when he was coming back himself. So Pat Spillane was very helpful to me — at the time!”

By 1990 — that most glorious of all of Cork GAA’s glory years — Murphy was back playing with not just his club and college, but the county senior hurlers. He was a regular right through that year’s league campaign, manning the full-back position. His first night back after winning the Fitzgibbon Cup, though, he tweaked a hamstring, having played three games in as many days. The most sensible course of action would have been to sit out the following weekend’s league semi-final against Wexford, but Murphy felt obliged to struggle on.

“I shouldn’t have played. But it was a case of ‘If I put my hand up and say I’m injured, will I ever get the chance again’?”

Within 10 minutes, he had been carried off, his hamstring in bits and, with it, his hopes of winning an All-Ireland medal that September.

Back then, there was no extended panel, no planning for tomorrow, because there would be no tomorrow if you lost your next game. You were either in the 24 or you were out of mind and sight. Murphy spent that summer in Boston, where he’d win a championship with Cork. Wasn’t the same as winning with them at home.

He’d return to make the panel for the 1992 campaign, and was close to starting the semi-final against Down, in place of the injured Brian Corcoran, only for his studs to get stuck in the back of Mark Foley’s boot and go over on his ankle. While he’d win an All-Ireland with the county junior footballers the following year, and play a bit with the seniors under Billy Morgan in the league the next, there was always some injury — like osteitis pubis, another ailment he was among the first in these parts to discover. When work took him up the country, he commuted back to play for Bishopstown, but was resigned to his county days being over.

“In hindsight, the knee was like the tracking of a car. Once it was off, you were putting pressure on something else and causing something to break down there. You were always playing catch-up for missing those three years U21, and you were going in then playing senior afraid to make mistakes. You might play reasonably well with the club, but going into inter-county, you were always conscious that if you made a mistake, this was probably it. That’s one of the things I learned from it later, as a coach: Try to create that environment where young fellas can play without those inhibitions.”

By the autumn of 1996, he wasn’t even playing football with the club, just some inter-firm, with his new workplace, Dawn Foods, outside Naas. But that’s when Pat McCarthy came into his life and he came into Pat McCarthy’s.

McCarthy had fallen in with the same team, living up in Sallins and working as an officer with the Department of Agriculture. McCarthy had also been enlisted as a selector to the Kildare seniors by his old Kerry team-mate and coach, Mick O’Dwyer, who had returned as manager. They were scouring the county for possible talent, which meant even an injury-plagued, 29-year-old inter-firm player, carrying considerable excessive weight, qualified as a prospect.

O’Dwyer’s training regime that winter was as notorious as his contemporary, Ger Loughnane’s torturous sessions below in Clare, the racecourse in Curragh being Kildare’s Crusheen and hill in Shannon. Training a dozen consecutive nights wasn’t uncommon, just to weed out those who didn’t desperately want to play for Kildare. Murphy did.

“It was simple, really. I knew this was my last chance and I could do one of two things — either keep going or I could give up. And I just didn’t stop. Even though I could be lapped three times by the likes of Willie [McCreery] and [Anthony] Rainbow, I just kept going. ‘No matter how hard this is, stay the course.’ No matter how embarrassing. I’d be running along the dual carriageway on the Curragh, by myself, after a four-mile run, and see Johnny Crofton [the Kildare trainer], 10 years older than me, flying on the other side of the tracks and then coming back to me.”

The childhood dream to play county — even with another county — was too ingrained to quit. The following summer, he’d score a goal against Meath in an epic three-game series. And the following summer again, in 1998, he’d score another goal against Meath. That was 42 years after Kildare had won their previous Leinster title and 13 whole years after that promising minor had played All-Ireland final with a cruciate.

Murphy is reluctant to talk through the goal — he finds the attention it garnered “a bit embarrassing, to be honest”, as if that moment for the team was only about him and he’s only that moment. What he will volunteer is that shortly after he collected that pass from Martin Lynch, and slipped it as low as possible past Conor Martin and then the ref signalled full-time, he shared a moment he will take to the grave.

“The best part was going under the Hogan Stand and meeting my father. A few years back with the [Kildare] U21s, we did an exercise, asking the lads why do we do this and what it all means. And when I introduced it, I spoke about that moment with my father. Of all moments in my time in football and hurling, some were good, a lot were bad, but that was the one that sticks most with me. To this day, I couldn’t tell you the scoreline from that day or how much we won by, but I’ll never forget that moment.”

He’d eventually finish up at 35, but not before helping his adopted county to a second Leinster title (and prompting Spillane to call him and apologise). It turns out, though, his service to Kildare was only starting.

He’d coached a bit as a student during his layoff with that cruciate — taking a Bishopstown U14 team, featuring current county hurling selector, Donal O’Mahony, as well as Brian Cuthbert, to the All-Ireland Féile final, in which they’d play a Wolfe Tones team from Shannon coached by a Ger Loughnane. So he gravitated to helping out a few of the underage teams in his adopted club in Clane. When he asked a few of their talented minors why they weren’t playing with the county team, he was stunned that they hadn’t bothered even trying out.

“That was alien to me. Fellas used to be crying below in Cork, if they weren’t asked to a trial or didn’t make the team.”

From that came a conversation with county chairman, Syl Merrins, that led to Murphy helping out with underage county squads. From 2008 to 2016, he was coaching either the minors or U21s. Even when he stepped away, after taking too much on in 2016 — being a selector to the seniors as well as managing an U21 team that took Dublin to extra-time in the provincial final — he was roped back in; this year, he’s giving a small hand with the U14s. It’s not about results at that level, safe to say; in fact, he’d contend it’s not the primary goal at U21, either. It’s to instil good values and habits and skills. As he’d learn from O’Dwyer in the Curragh, the harder you work, the harder it is to quit. Express yourself within the team structure, but knowing while you do, someone else has your back and for them to do the same, you must have theirs. Enjoy it.

And dream the dreams he had as a kid, to have that moment like he had at 31, with his dad. Murphy has offered his share of ignition for Kildare.