Charlie Redmond remembers infamous red card: ‘There’s two fellas getting the gate here or nobody’
Charlie Redmond was in Omagh for Dublin’s Super 8s game last month when a couple of Tyrone teenagers cheekily brought up 1995.
“Young lads who weren’t alive when that game occurred were slagging me about it,” smiled Redmond. “This thing about the red card has just grown, I thought it would go away but it hasn’t.”
Redmond, of course, was the Dublin forward who netted in the ‘95 decider, a goal that ultimately won them the game, before being sent off with around 20 minutes to go.
To be precise, he was sent off in the 11th minute of the second half but didn’t actually leave the field until three minutes later, following another passage of play.
Referee Paddy Russell eventually caught up with Redmond and ordered him off again, spawning the legend of the man who was sent off twice in an All-Ireland final.
It was actually our free, I got fouled,” recalled Redmond. “I was going for a ball and I was fouled. I was lying on the ground, I had my back to him and Feargal Logan jumps down with his elbow right into the back of my neck, and I jumped up, livid with him. Then I got lined, and the fella who should have got lined was Feargal Logan! If I hadn’t done anything to him, he should have been sent off for what he did.
Red cards weren’t displayed at the time and Redmond, 23 years on, reaches for his stock joke that he thought Russell was ‘waving to his family’ in the crowd when he pointed to the stand.
Play resumed and it wasn’t until a subsequent stoppage and yellow card for Paul Clarke that Russell was informed Redmond was still on the pitch.
Redmond pleaded his case, in vain, and got a clearer picture when he met Russell at a function in recent years of what he actually said before leaving the field.
“He remembered it a bit better than I did, and I apparently said, ‘Paddy, you are making a huge mistake and you will be able to see it tonight on television’ and he said, ‘Well, that’s a mistake I’m willing to make’. And I said, ‘What about the fella who fouled me and dived in with his elbow in the back of my neck?’ And he says, ‘We didn’t get his number’.
Now that’s a bit hard to take. Like, did you get my number? But you didn’t get the fella who was standing right beside me? It was a little bit Irish and there was a linesman there as well, so that was hard.
Redmond acknowledges that he saw Russell directing him to the line but thought that was overturned when he overheard a conversation between the Tipperary ref and his linesman.
“The linesman called him over and said, ‘No, no, no’ so I thought he was after telling him I didn’t do it.
“So either there’s two fellas getting the gate here or nobody is getting the gate. If in doubt, stay on.”
There is another intriguing angle to the tale in that Redmond probably shouldn’t have been playing that day at all.
He injured his groin kicking frees at his club on the Thursday before the game and was fortunate to even start. He actually aggravated it sliding in to score the only goal of that game, close to half-time, and mightn’t have lasted the whole match anyhow.
He credits then Dublin manager Dr Pat O’Neill with a psychological masterstroke in the hours before the game.
“Pat O’Neill told me the day before, ‘we’ll look after you, we’ll give you an injection, we’ll sort it out’,” said the former placed ball specialist. “So in my head I was thinking I was going to have an injection that was going to sort me out. So 20 minutes before the game, I said, ‘Okay, Pat, I’m ready to get the injection’. He says, ‘I don’t give injections’.
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He says, ‘Charlie, I have never given a player a pain-killing injection and I never will, if you can’t play put your track-suit on. If you can play then get out and play’. He knew by telling me I’d get an injection that I’d relax from the Friday or Saturday. It was still in my head a bit that I mightn’t play but that was the greatness of Pat O’Neill.”
