Kieran Shannon: All-Ireland final trip to Croker a day we were all back on life’s great journey

A view of Jones's Road before Sunday's All-Ireland final. Picture: INPHO/Morgan Treacy

If there’s one thing almost as special as going to your first All-Ireland, it’s bringing one of your children to theirs.

Now that I think of it, Andrew was probably much more deserving of making the pilgrimage last Sunday than I was tagging along with his grandfather Brendan back in 1979.

He’s nine. I was seven. On the journey up, we calculated that he’s already attended over a dozen senior inter-county championship matches, including four All-Ireland semi-finals, not to mention a couple of other trips up to Croke Park he’s made like to see his own club Ballyea play in an All-Ireland club final. We could count on one hand the number of matches I’d been at prior to my first All-Ireland. Back in those days, you had no backdoor, no round-robin matches in Munster, and it wasn’t really until 1989 with Cork-Dublin in the football and Tipp-Galway in the hurling that anyone from my neck of the woods really bothered with All-Ireland semi-finals.

Not that you could describe Andrew as being deprived of his sport or the big occasion, prior to the pandemic anyway. The Christmas before last Santa gifted him a pair of tickets to the Camp Nou, granting us the lifelong privilege of witnessing Messi score four goals in what would be his penultimate game in front of the home crowd.

Last week I got to be Santa, helping deliver Christmas for him in August.

Naturally he was ecstatic. I can’t remember if I was as excited 42 years earlier when my father announced that he’d chosen me to accompany him for the then latest episode of the Kerry-Dublin rivalry, him at the start of that decade having shrewdly snapped up a pair of 10-year tickets for every big-ball final. What has never left me though is the memory of that weekend.

Heading up on the Saturday evening and staying in some B&B in Swords, the first time I discovered there was a place in Dublin with the same name as the weapons the three musketeers messed around with. Being lifted over the turnstiles by Dad; no electronic scanning in those days. The intake of breath upon realising just how high and vast and grand Croke Park and the Hogan Stand was, even if both were a mere shadow of what they are now.

And then there was Mikey Sheehy. It wasn’t even 10 minutes old when he was bearing down on Paddy Cullen and then violently blasting the ball to the net. Maybe it doesn’t resonate in the annals of GAA folklore as loudly as his cheeky chip over Cullen 12 months earlier but it has never left me and this past week especially has kept flooding back: being in my little wooden seat in the Upper Hogan alongside Dad and watching in awe Sheehy right below us fire past Cullen.

Technically I was a neutral back then but Andrew hadn’t that luxury last Sunday; even at his age he had enough cop-on to realise that if he was going to be accompanying a Corkman on hurling’s biggest day, the least he could do was pretend to be a Cork supporter for a day. On the Saturday evening we brought him over to a neighbour to borrow his Cork jersey in exchange for a match programme (he’ll have it over to you before the end of the week, Evan). And then on the Sunday morning we set off.

Much of the day went like clockwork. We dropped his sister off to camogie training for half-nine and by 12 had already parked the car in the same Phibsboro housing estate where his mother lived when I first met her 20 years ago.

The whole day was a bit like a walking tour of Dublin or our family history. On the way up we called Grandad and learned 1965 was his 1979 and 2021; he would have been 20 at the time of that Galway-Kerry final and a lot older if he’d been holding out for his native Fermanagh ever playing in one.

After parking the car we made our way towards a familiar haunt only to learn it’s no longer there: the Porterhouse Whitworth is now the George Bernard Shaw and there was no room in that inn for us to get our usual pre-match feed. But we got it just across the road in the Bald Eagle and then we walked along the Canal where the poor kid had to put up with the old fella at what had been the ticket pick-up spot before the All-Ireland in '92. By that stage he had only ears and eyes for the looming and ever-closer Croker.

Then it was down along Clonliffe Road, this country’s boulevard of broken dreams. Right now, Andrew, who wins this game is a mystery; we don’t know who’ll be happy or sad. By five o’clock it’ll be a fact and some crowd of supporters will be walking down here with their tail between their legs.

Finally Jones’s Road. A river of people which would sink the hearts of anyone in NPHET or the arts but lift anyone else’s. Security checking our bags and then electronically scanning our tickets; no lifting anyone over the turnstiles these days. And then it was up the mass-grey steps and up to the second-last row of the upper Hogan, towering right over the endline in front of what was the Canal End back in Sheehy’s time but is the Davin End now.

Normally Andrew shies away from showing his teeth in any photograph but when I asked him to pose for a picture with the Croke Park pitch as his backdrop, he couldn’t contain his glee. And then for the parade he took my phone and recorded something himself: the two teams following the Artane Band.

I’m now glad that he did. Before last Sunday, the standout pre-match parade I’d ever experienced was that prior to the 2002 All-Ireland semi-final between Dublin and Armagh, the same summer the new Hogan Stand and Croke Park was unveiled. Last Sunday was the equal of that. And it was only on our way home, listening to Andrew, that it dawned on me why that was.

It wasn’t just because much of the elements that made Armagh-Dublin so loud, so electric, were again in place, a county enjoying its greatest team encountering a traditional power seemingly on the verge of being back. It was that we were all back, not just Cork. It wasn’t just that it was Andrew’s first All-Ireland; it was that it was our first day out and back going to a match together in, yes, years. Even driving past Athlone and seeing a sign for Roscommon triggered a memory of us sharing a meal with the Clare footballers in that town after they’d won a qualifier in Carrick-on-Shannon, the kind of day out you could say we took for granted before but really even at the time knew was magical. 

As it transpired, there were Cork folks walking along Clonliffe Road with their tail between their legs long before five o’clock. The game as a contest was well over before then. Gearóid Hegarty became Andrew’s Mikey Sheehy, blasting an early goal straight down below us into the same end as Tralee’s finest did 42 years earlier, before adding a second later on. Whether he goes on to win any four-in-a-rows or not, Hegarty and his team are where Sheehy and Kerry were in ’79, already a team for the ages by winning back-to-back and with a third Celtic Cross in the pocket.

It would be sometime later before we’d be going back down the Clonliffe Road; Andrew insisted we stayed on so he could see Declan Hannon become the first captain he saw in the flesh lift the Liam MacCarthy Cup. But after he again insisted on giving the euros in his pocket to the couple of beggars he couldn’t understand why everyone else passed, we got out of Phibsboro and Dublin quickly enough.

By nine o’clock we were turning onto the Kildysart Road and passing the home of Tony Kelly, the man who Andrew hopes will give him this day out again next year, when he said to me, “God, Dad, today was brilliant!” And though my own county had been slaughtered by 16 points, I couldn’t help but go all Lou and Louis. Yes, it was a perfect day. I’m glad I spent it with you. What a wonderful world.