Plenty of bottle, all Cork
When his fellow county man, Mr Keane from Mayfield, looked back on Manchester United’s magical 1999 season, he’d claim that he personally only won the double that year, not the treble. It didn’t matter that no one did more to get United to that Champions League final in Barcelona; by virtue of not playing in that final through suspension Roy Keane disowns that medal. “No matter how many people tell me I deserve that Champions League medal,” he’d write in his autobiography, “I know I don’t.”
Eleven years later Anthony Lynch received the biggest medal going in his sport. Like Keane, he didn’t feature in the final. In fact he didn’t play a single minute in that 2010 championship campaign, due to recurring injuries. Yet ask him now that he’s finished up if he feels he genuinely won his All Ireland medal, and modesty isn’t going to have Lynch pretend that he didn’t. He won that medal alright. He earned it.
“Being a sub that year, it was never as good as playing but it was the next best thing. Of course I’d prefer to have made a much greater contribution. But it was just fantastic to be part of it and the fact that the team got over the line. My contribution that year was tiny but it was about trying to make any contribution you could to make it happen.
“I suppose the real gauge of it was when the final whistle went. That’s when you’d really know how you genuinely felt. I’ll never know what it would be like to win an All Ireland on the field but it felt just like as if I’d played myself. The elation was just unbelievable for those first 15 minutes afterwards and to see a friend and man like [Graham] Canty lift the cup. And a lot of that really came from the kind of team ethic that was there, from where we had come from as a team. We came from the gutter really. I think that’s the reason I got so much satisfaction out of it.”
By the gutter he means around the time of the strike, as in the second one that rocked Cork GAA. As the hurlers had been the pioneers of revolt down by Leeside, the likes of Donal Óg Cusack and Seán Óg Ó hAilpín were still the poster boys of that standoff but behind the scenes Lynch and Canty were just as active. When the footballers made it back to an All Ireland final 18 months later, Noel O’Leary spoke about how mindful the whole group was of the leadership the pair of them offered during those testing times.
Lynch himself is reluctant to retrace that exhausting winter. Even the thought of it can still drain one’s energy. What he will say is that it was tough for everyone “on both sides” but that it created “an incredible unity” among the players. In the past he had played on Cork teams where “you had fellas all going in their own direction”.
After that strike that team had only one vision — to climb out of the gutter and right up those steps some September.
There were, he admits, “a few places where the team were close to Armageddon”. If they’d lost a couple of more league games that spring they were looking at Division Three. In the Munster semi-final they trailed Limerick by a goal entering injury time. In the Munster final they trailed Kerry by eight points.
Looking back, that was one of the great days, the way they came roaring back to beat the old enemy by five points. Its significance might be downplayed in the public consciousness because Kerry came back to beat them in Croke Park later that year and again in 2009 but that’s a narrow way of looking at it. Each time Kerry merely stymied the Rebels’ resistance. That day in Páirc Uí Chaoimh they could have crushed it once and for all. Especially Lynch’s.
“I felt huge pressure coming into that game. I hadn’t played corner back in championship for three years, was coming off having under performed in 2007, and was 31, and I reckoned if the first 20 minutes went wrong and [Colm] Cooper got a run I was finished for good. Before the game Conor [Counihan] had said to us to throw off the shackles and just go for it and at half time he reminded us that was the deal we had made.
“Near the end there was this ball that I went for that I probably shouldn’t have. Cooper had stepped back like a [soccer] striker and if I’d missed it he was in. And at first it looked like as if I’d missed it but through luck or whatever I got it in the end. Afterwards Counihan asked me why did I go for that ball, that it was kamikaze stuff, but I reminded him he was the one who told us to go for it! Personally I felt a huge sense of relief after that game.
“That was the day the platform was established. I know we’d come back from bad defeats before but if we’d lost badly that day we could have gone over the cliff.”
HE’LL forever be pictured in that number four red jersey. He’ll self-deprecatingly joke that he started out his football as a corner forward and worked his way all the way back to corner back and then the bench, a retreat which reflected his true footballing ability, but in reality for almost a decade he was the primary left corner back in the country. He may have preferred the greater freedom that went with playing in the halfback line and probably his best game for Cork was at number six in the 2005 All Ireland quarter-final win over Galway, but as he says himself, there are few if any natural corner backs.
He won’t lie, fear was a dominant emotion at the start but that fear would become his friend.
“Out in the halfback line you could give away a couple of balls and nothing would come from it. In the fullback line you were in the danger zone. That kind of set me into high alert mode. After games you’d be shattered from focusing so much. But there was a thrill to that too. Over time the fear dissipated. I got comfortable with it. I loved it.”
The mind game for him was in anticipating things, preparing for them. From the time he broke onto the Cork team in 1999, he would studiously watch tape of likely opponents. These days with Cork you only have to ask the backroom if they can put a DVD together of your upcoming opponent and John Murphy and Eoin O’Neill will have it for you in days. In the early years he had to track down the video and trawl through it all himself.
“I’d tell any corner back or player, get as much information as you can on your opponent — and more. I suppose I was lucky that I had a bit of speed and fitness over a lot of fellas but my head got me out of a lot of situations too. At corner back you can play behind your man and be very safe but I’d play in line, stepping slightly out in front, because I had a good idea of where the ball was going to go and would take a chance on where I thought it was going to land.
“You’d watch out for everything [on video]. Who was kicking the ball to the corner forward? Where was that ball coming from? Where was he starting his run from? You’d find he’d run in patterns, maybe run across the square to pick up all the balls. A lot of stuff is obvious if you really look at it. You’ll find the same fellas are kicking balls into them and putting them into the same places, midfielders especially because most of them have only one leg.”
It was this constant battle of wits between him and his marker. In the early years in particular he was struck by how cocky most corner forwards appeared, but he found then a lot of that was for show. “You always found that a corner forward had to get his score quickly, so the first time he got it, you knew he was going to go for the score himself.” If you denied him that quick score, his head would invariably drop.
“Normally what I found was that corner forwards had a huge weakness — they hated having to defend. So I’d attack and the more times you attacked them the weaker they would get. You could see it in their body language. You could hear them thinking, ‘This b****x is supposed to be marking me! This isn’t what I signed up for!’”
If that forward did kick that early score though, Lynch then had to work to keep his own head up.
“I’d be big into the importance of body language. Inside you might have been raging they’d scored but feck it, don’t let it show; big deal, win the next ball. Early on it would affect me more. Towards the end of my career I accepted it more when people would get scores off me but I still hated it. Hated it.”
It was wise to accept conceding the odd score was just part of the gig, especially with someone like Colm Cooper on the scene. In the early part of his career Lynch’s most difficult opponent was Mike Frank Russell — “two good legs, turned quick, deadly accurate” — but it says something about the monumental talent that is Cooper that we almost forget about the threat and talent that MFR was.
It was a surprise to many earlier this month to see Jimmy Barry-Murphy launching Jimmy Deenihan’s book and learn that the two of them were and remain good friends for all the battles they shared in the 1970s. Cooper and Lynch’s tussles were a lot less physical in comparison but it’s unlikely you’ll see them laughing and slapping each other in the back years from now.
“I don’t know the man, to be honest,” says Lynch, “though he seems to be a grand fella. We never talked during a game and I never talked to him really after either. It’s just shake hands, play the game and then shake hands again.”
He refers to him as ‘Cooper’, never ‘Colm’, never ‘Gooch’. There is no affection but you can take it as fact that there is a real respect.
“He [Cooper] is more unpredictable than any other player I ever faced. Apart from being deceptively good in the air the biggest difference I found right away with him was that he was more willing to pass the ball and bring other players into the game. Most marquee forwards would just take it on themselves but he had such fantastic vision and two great feet and hands, he could just lay it off to someone just like that. I did think though that he got frees easy. Maybe that was more to do with the refs; sure the poor corner forward has to be right!”
Some of the frees Marty Duffy awarded Cooper in the first half of the 2009 All Ireland final were particularly contentious and completely changed the momentum in that game. That is one thing that rankles with Lynch.
“I wasn’t happy with the ref. I just couldn’t believe some of the frees he gave. I hold no animosity against the man but I wouldn’t exactly be sitting down for a pint with him either and I’d say he’d struggle to get a free bed anywhere in Cork. Even the way he handled the whole [Tadhg] Kennelly-Nicky [Nicholas Murphy] incident showed he was the wrong man at that time for that stage, but I suppose that’s an issue for the GAA really.”
One of the other outstanding corner backs of the past decade, Ryan McMenamin, specialised in dishing out digs and taunts but that wasn’t in Lynch’s make-up or game and engaging in such tactics would only have distracted him from playing his own game. In his whole career he was sent off only once — in the 2006 Munster drawn final. A few years ago the former Cork goalkeeper Kevin O’Dwyer remarked that he was struck by the number of players from opposing teams that would make their way over to Lynch after a league game up the country. “I think they appreciated that he wasn’t into serving false belts,” O’Dwyer would observe. “Any hit he gave out was manly and honest.”
In Kerry they would dispute that, pointing to Killarney 2006 but in Cork they would dispute that Lynch’s elbow actually made contact with Kieran Donaghy. Lynch himself is reluctant to talk about the incident, only to point out that all he wanted to do was take a quick free but over the following five seconds “I got hit about two or three times by two different fellas [Donaghy and Paul Galvin] and nothing was done about it”.
He didn’t feel guilty either about appealing his suspension and playing in the following week’s Munster final. Donaghy might have missed that Munster final but was back for Kerry’s last-12 game and All Ireland quarter-final. Lynch would have been unavailable for such games for Cork. He appealed not so much to help Cork win the Munster final as save his season and that probably the cleanest inside defender of the last 15 years is linked with one of the most high-profile disciplinary cases of the last five years, The Anthony Lynch Case, is one of the ironies of his career.
He didn’t get to play a competitive game for Cork after that 2009 All Ireland final and at 34 it was hardly surprising that he informed Conor Counihan in the past month that he was retiring.
“I just couldn’t get a run without being injured. I’d often have thought I’d got it sorted and would try to get right for the right time of year but every time I tried to go at full intensity in training I just kept breaking down. If you’re getting injured all the time, then its just not rewarding enough to be putting in that kind of sacrifice.”
It first acted up a few days after he’d helped the team overpower Monaghan in the 2009 Division Two league final. “I got this pain in my stomach, thinking it would just go away, but it didn’t.” Turned out it was linked to the groin and one of his tendons to the groin had been torn right off. He would play on for the next couple of months but after a Man of the Match display on Cooper in the Munster semi-final replay win in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Lynch was ordered to take the following two months off. He returned to start in the All Ireland semi-final win against Tyrone but that would turn out to be his last competitive win playing for Cork.
Whenever he’d break down again, he’d be straight onto Colin Lane and the medical team for an ice box to limit the damage in those vital first 48 hours. He’d accept it happened, knuckle down for the following few weeks and get back to a level where he could start training again. He took pride in never playing the victim within the group, that whatever about always being positive, he never transmitted any negativity.
He hopes to continue playing with the club, injuries permitted. He’s keeping healthy. Christmas might be here but he opts for the chicken salad on his lunch break away from working for Merrion Capital on the outskirts of Cork. He only took up swimming in September and plans to cycle next year. He’ll be fine without football alright — but he’ll miss it something too.
“I loved the intensity of A versus B games on summer evenings in Pairc Ui Chaoimh and the big championship days in Croke Park or Killarney were probably the nearest thing you’ll get to being in the Coliseum. Going into the heat of battle, as a team, going all out for it, winning it, there was nothing like it.”
