Celebrate and learn from Kirby moments
If you were to ask a Limerick person what immediately springs to mind upon hearing the words Gary Kirby and 1996, chances are they’ll go Liam Dunne, dropping ball,injured hand, and another All-Ireland that Limerick blew.
This column looks at Kirby and Limerick and ‘96 in a different light.
First, they became the first team in championship history to beat Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh — and hockeyed them by 16 points while they were at it.
After that they came from behind to beat the reigning All-Ireland champions, Clare, in an epic game on the Ennis Road. And then in the Munster final they came roaring back from 10 points down at half-time to bring Tipperary to a replay which Tom Ryan’s team would win.
Outside of perhaps Waterford’s 2004 campaign, we can’t think of a better Munster title won in the last 50 years.
Ciarán Carey’s immortal point against Clare wasn’t the only great clutch play they made in that string of wins either. A particular sequence in the closing stages of Saturday’s U21 All-Ireland semi-final brought home to us just what a marvellous and completely underrated play Gary Kirby made in the drawn Munster final 15 years ago.
With a minute to go Limerick were trailing Tipperary by two points when Kirby stood over the ball 65 metres out from the posts. In those days you had no fourth official, no clockboard, no way of knowing how much injury time would be added on, only instinct.
One option for Kirby was to lob the ball speculatively in around the square, praying that with a break here and a touch here and a deflection there it would somehow end up in the net.
Kirby though calculated that the odds of such a successful outcome were minimal. The referee would at least allow another puckout. Better to back himself to take his point, open up the play and then back his team-mates to win the puckout and manufacture another scoring chance.
That’s precisely what transpired. Kirby coolly slotted the ball over Brendan Cummins’ crossbar — yep, Brendan was playing even back then — then a colleague won the puckout before Frankie Carroll arched back to hit over the equaliser. It didn’t go unnoticed by the Clare footballers. The following year Martin Daly scored a wondrous injury-time goal to sensationally dump Cork out of the championship but only after Ger Keane had the sense to do a Kirby by taking his point when Odran O’Dwyer won an injury-time free with his side three points down.
Unfortunately Kirby’s inspired piece of decision making seems to have been forgotten by his own. One of the best hurling books of recent times was Henry Martin’s Unlimited Heartbreak: The Inside Story of Limerick hurling, yet for all its terrific insight and detail there was no mention of Kirby’s Solomon-like judgment. No doubt Martin himself would be able to recall it but very few other Limerick supporters would, in stark contrast to the way the mess-up on the goal-line for Johnny Dooley’s free in the 1994 six-minute final, or the questionable wisdom of the team breaking prematurely from the parade in 1996 is etched into the collective Limerick hurling consciousness.
The downside of such negative selective thinking is that the better plays and moments aren’t handed down for the benefit of later generations.
Last Saturday evening in Thurles, Limerick were again trailing by two points entering injury time when they had a free out the field. Instead of doing what Kirby did, however, young Shane Dowling elected for the impossible by keeping his 35-metre free low. Predictably, it was blocked down, just as it was predictable that Limerick would end up havinganother scoring chance after that passage of play.
You can hardly fault youngDowling for the play he made. He would have been three back in ‘96. But you can bet if he had been a Limerick defender last Saturday evening and Galway had been awarded a penalty, he would have been mindful to line up properly on the line and not make the same mistake Ciarán and Joe Quaid and the boys made in ‘94.
This Limerick U21 team, under the terrific guidance of Leo O’Connor, have done as much to lift the hurling mood of the county as the exploits of Donal O’Grady’s senior side or recent Ard Scoil Rís teams. They beat Clare in Clare, won probably the greatest Munster U21 final ever, and contributed handsomely to another epic in Thurles last Saturday. It’s vital now that the team — most of whom are still underage next year — and future Limerick teams remember that they won some big games to get to the big game they lost, and recall how they won their Munster as well as how they didn’t seal the All-Ireland.
In other words celebrate and learn from their Kirby moments.
*Contact: kieranshannon@eircom.net
