Hurling needs Cork and Waterford to be noisy neighbours
You’re not playing. You’re appearing on Up for the Match. “Des, I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
A lot of us old hurlers for whom the sun has set will be nostalgically watching Cork and Waterford this weekend. For a long time, the games between Cork and Waterford were the best games of the year, the best times of our lives. Cork v Waterford! We thought we were better than them, that our dedication, and our ‘Corkness’, would see them off, because they were duckers and divers, dodgers and dippers. And us? We were Cork! For me, Waterford were there at the beginning and there at the end. In 1995, we played them as minors in the Munster final. Won well. Job done.
We played Lismore in the Harty final in 1995. I was captain. Fermoy. They had mischief in them. Trick frees. Dave Bennett would place the ball to take a free. Then Big Dan would run in and take the free, as if Bennett was butler and had set things out for His Lordship. You can’t coach that sort of stuff. Big Dan scored three goals that day, one of them from the trick free. We won, but my father was more pleased about the free. He had seen them do the same thing in the semi-final against the Mon. He got about a month out of telling me that he had warned me about the free, he had warned me, had he not said... That should have been that. We should have gone on to rule Munster without dissent. Waterford didn’t get the memo. Waterford haunted us.
Four years on. June, 1999: Jimmy put out a team, to play Waterford in Semple Stadium, that had six of us in it who had never played championship hurling before. Flynn got a goal from a free, early in the second-half. I never experienced anything like it. The wall of noise. The Waterford supporters were in the far end of the ground. I remember three things happened, in order. Paul Flynn hit the free. He had so much confidence in himself that he could have played for Cork.
A second later, the free hit the net. Another second went past, and then this great wave of noise came at me like a tsunami from the other end of the field. This was it. Championship hurling. A sunny day. Semple Stadium. Ok. The goal, it went through me. Next thing, though, Flynn catches my eye. Hey, Cusack! And he gives me the Bruce Grobbelaar jelly legs routine, with a big grin on his face and his eyes screwed shut. Ha, ha.
It got near the end that day and, at last, we killed them off. Mickey O’Connell wasn’t walking on water. He was levitating slightly above it, so as not to get his boots wet. When I was sure we would win, I caught Flynn’s eye. Hey, Flynn. And pointed up at the scoreboard and gave him the thumbs-up. Wasn’t the greatest witticism of all time, but I couldn’t leave him away with that! It made no difference. Flynn!
Everybody talks about the goal he dipped in between myself and Sully, in what some say was the greatest Munster final of all time, in 2004. Generally, though, he haunted us. Of the first 12 shots he took in 2002, he scored each of them. I had repetitive strain injury from watching them go over. In 2003, his tapped free to Mullane, for their third goal, was a piece of brilliance. Still at it with the tricky frees, lads! Cocky bastards.
Then, that goal in 2004, just in case we didn’t get the point. That should have been enough, but, next thing, it’s 2005 and he tries to assassinate me. Sully goes out to take a long ball that drops trickily in front of him. It gets tipped past him. Flynn is in like whatshisname. He’s out to my left. He should lift it and let me come at him. That’s what a normal forward would do. I’ll settle for giving him the penalty. I charge. He doesn’t. He just pulls. Bang. I still remember the noise. I heard the sliotar whickering past my ear. A couple of inches to the right and these good looks would have been gone forever. Just a hole in the shape of a sliotar in the middle of my face. Lights out. Incredible.
They had their geniuses and they had their warriors. It put a pause in a lot of our steps, the last few months, to see Tony Browne retiring and to hear of Ken McGrath’s heart trouble.
They were indestructible, those fellas. We played against Mount Sion, one night when I was coaching Cloyne. A challenge game down in Ardmore. There was a county game coming up, so I was on the sidelines. Mount Sion put out a good team. One of our laochra, Maurice Cahill, caught Ken with a couple of belts and I knew Ken and what was likely to come.
I ran out onto the pitch and I could see by his face that Maurice expected me to say to him, ‘Maurice you need to settle down here boy and get onto the hurling blah blah blah’. So I put it differently… ‘If I was you, Maurice, I would seriously consider your next move… I’d say it would be better he goes before you go… It’s only a matter of minutes, now Mossy, before he does you and you’ll have to come off. That’s Ken McGrath, now Mossy’.
Mossy reminds me of that anytime he sees me pontificating on the holy grail. I was right, though. Ken had a warrior’s heart and a hurler’s genius. When the fat was in the fire for Waterford, in those days, the adrenalin running through the man seemed to make him bigger and faster. They were shootouts, those games, and Ken McGrath was at the heart of it every time. There were huge characters on both sides.
Will we ever go to a stadium again for a major hurling game, and listen to crowds that identify so strongly with the players that just one name is needed for most of them? Ken. Tony. Dan. Sully. Seán Óg. Joe, etc. Big characters. So many on the one field. We played them and fought with them and we grew to like them.
I remember Seán Óg coming home from an All Star trip to Argentina, and surprising me by saying that he’d really come to identify with the Waterford lads, they reminded him of the people he grew up with around north Cork. A year or two later, I got trapped in a sports goods shop in New York, with a few of them, and I still laugh at the memory. Freezing cold outside and the boys having the best of crack, as each of them tried on this hideous pair of white runners. You could see the bond between them. And there was something familiar about it.
They were there at the beginning and there at the end.
They had a huge following. I loved to annoy them by telling them they were the East Cork B team, but they gave as good as they got, always. One year, I was standing in goal and they were throwing lemon bon bons at me. I never figured that one out. Bon bons? Lemon? What could you do? It’s a bit Ya Ya Toure to complain that they are throwing bon bons at you. On the field, they were the same. Big Dan used to try to get in my head when Flynn would be taking frees. He’d turn and he’d block my view of Flynn and he’d be trying to catch my eye. Never bothered me a bit, till I realised that Big Dan actually thought that he WAS bothering me. Then, THAT bothered me. I was bothered to distraction trying to think of ways to show Big Dan that I wasn’t bothered.
We wanted to keep them down. We were committed. They were tearaways. Tattoos. Teeth missing. In the end, we realised they were more like us than we thought. And we liked them more than we ever imagined we could. Our faces turned out not to fit in the places we thought they would. They knew that all along and never cared. They were rogues and rebels. 2010. The Munster final replay. My last Munster final. Saturday night in Thurles. Bloody Big Dan still knocking around.
I have a confession. The two of us went for a high ball at the edge of the square, at one stage, and I won it. Beat Big Dan to a high ball! And I strutted up and down on my line for 10 minutes afterwards, thinking to myself: ‘There ya go, Big Dan, all the years with the trick shots and the getting in my head lark and I beat you to a high ball in a Munster final in Semple Stadium, in a Munster hurling final. Dan that’s because I’m from Cork and we have ye’re confidence, but we also have the commitment, as well. Eye of the tiger commitment. Game of inches commitment Dan. That’s the difference, boy’.
The game goes into extra-time. Rain and floodlights. Point in it late on. Dan gets onto a loose ball, 25 yards out to my left. I have my back to the same goal that has seen me suffer a few times at Waterford hands. I know what he’ll do. He’ll take his steps, pick his spot. He’ll try to put it past me on the far side as he crosses sides. There’s another one of them coming in at the goal from the left. I know what I need to do. I’ll turn it away fast as I save it. No ball coming off the stick into somebody’s path.
But Dan doesn’t take his steps. He shoots straight away, as I’m setting myself. Low and hard. Dan, ya bastard. I get the stick to it from a bad body position, but it skids off my hurley. I watch for what seems like an eternity, as the ball sneaks into the corner of the net behind me.
That noise again. All over. Last word to the lads.
I was so destroyed and bothered by that goal that I drove home that night via Dublin. Just had to stay on the road, away from people. That was the end and it was poetic in its own way.
They were more like us than we ever knew. Our faces never fitted as well as we thought. They knew that all along and didn’t care. A quieter generation shapes up to each other this Sunday. Hurling needs them both to be noisy neighbours to each other again...
= A match for the Ken McGrath Rehabilitation Fund will be held in Walsh Park on Friday, June 27. Donations to Permanent TSB a/c number 23053903, sort code 99 06 32), at 7.30pm. Ticket outlets to be announced.
