Football and music the perfect mix for Kerry’s Dineen
For years, this was Donal Dineen’s routine.
“When I was DJing in The Kitchen in Dublin, and I’d finish at 4am on a Sunday morning, drive down to Kerry — no motorways — and get there around 8am, sleep for a couple of hours and then get up to play a county league game for Rathmore.
“When you’re in your twenties you can do that — I wish I could do it now — but there’d be games when I wouldn’t be part of the battle at all, and there were times when it would be a battle.
“I drifted away, in the end, because of all of those things, but I still go to all the Kerry games that I can.”
Dineen, pictured, recently finished a stint as a DJ on 2XM, and penned an elegant piece for The Irish Times. “So I got to live the dream,” he wrote, “And now I just have to wake up and conjure another one.”
His eclectic musical choices attracted a devoted following and he’s enjoyed success as a photographer, but football was, as Crowded House used to say, a recurring dream.
“I played in five county finals, junior finals, with Rathmore, and the last . . . we were playing Finuge. Tough enough lads from north Kerry.
“I was 32, I’d missed the semi-final, and the coach’s nephew played, and played very well, and there was a case for playing him.
“But in fairness, the coach had trusted me, and he’d said to me that coming down from Dublin like that was a good example for a couple of the younger lads. He was a very good coach, and always saw the bigger picture.”
A couple of those younger lads were tasty, by the way. Tom O’Sullivan. Aidan O’Mahony. Decent. Back to Dineen’s county final, though.
“I did nothing in the first half, which would have been typical of me, but in the second I took off on a run and laid the ball off and we got a point.
“I did that again a few minutes later and we got another score, and my man then waited for me to get back to him before giving me a punch in the face.
“I couldn’t believe it. To make sure I wouldn’t retaliate I pulled up my socks, but the ref came over and asked for my name.
“I wouldn’t give him my name because I’d done nothing, but he said if I didn’t he’d send me off, and eventually he took my name, and my man’s.
“I got the ball after that, laid it off and my man was ahead of me, chasing our player, and I stuck out my leg and tripped him. I don’t understand why I did it, but I did, and I got sent off.
“Walking off the field was like walking into the grave or something, but Tom O’Sullivan, who was only 18 then, won the game for us.
“That was the only medal I won with Rathmore.”
It’s an incongruous mix at first glance: cutting-edge music on one hand, junior football on the other.
“In terms of DJiing and so on, the football kept me grounded, and I liked mixing in that circle as well as mixing in the bubble, if you like, of music and so on.
“It’s an interesting dynamic, because I kind of forced myself in many ways to keep it up. I was lucky, too, in that I seemed to meet good coaches along the way, guys who realised that you need all sorts to make a team.
“I’d take some credit for continuing with it, to be dedicated to it. In a rural area you may not have that many to pick from so having lads continue with it helps to drive the whole thing on.
“I enjoyed playing football but not training with the team, being up in Dublin, was probably a big disadvantage.”
So how did it end? “I went to a game against An Gaeltacht one time down in Gallarus, and though I’d done all the training and so on, but I just realised, ‘feck it, I’m just not able for this’.”
“There would have been more surprise on the music side than with the football side of things. I remember you’d get abuse, which happened maybe half a dozen times, lads who knew how to rise you — ‘who do you think you are’ — but the novelty factor was also interesting. And the new lads on the team would have been impressed that you were making the effort to get down from Dublin and so on.”
There were bright days – he remembers a county final with East Kerry, togging out with Seamus Moynihan, “one of the things I’m most proud of” — but the brightest was the county final win, surely.
“Afterwards, though — our first cup in 30 years — I didn’t want to celebrate, and in fairness Tom O’Sullivan said it to me, ‘come on, you have to celebrate’, so I went up on the back of the lorry, the whole thing.
“I would have thought probably too deeply about some of those things, and sometimes on the football field it’s more a matter of practical intervention.”
He’s been thinking of football more and more lately, given he’s working on a book about Kerry.
“I’m trying to gather my thoughts about the county, the mountains, a lot of that kind of stuff, and football is a part of that.
“The only thing is that I was always an underachiever in football . . . I was going to say ‘and proud of it’ but I’d like to have done a bit more in football.”
True. But what would that have cost his listeners?
