The Kieran Shannon Interview: Aaron Kernan, former Armagh footballer
AFTER bidding farewell to one form of inter-county career, tonight Aaron Kernan will be saying hello to another.
Setanta Sports are in Omagh for the start of the league, and part of their new-look punditry team and co-commentator for Tyrone-Monaghan is the eldest of the Kernan brothers.
Invariably it’s prompted some slagging in his circles about who will he be most like of the Neville brothers: the monotone Phil who seemed to try to put the English nation to sleep during the World Cup, or Gary who continuously enlightens that nation and beyond on Sky?
Fortunately for us as well as for Kernan he’s more likely to approximate the latter. Back in 2012, after Armagh had once again exited the championship too tamely and prematurely for his liking, Kernan was invited onto RTÉ as a guest analyst on the night edition of The Sunday Game.
One of the featured games was the Ulster final and in that one cameo Kernan would provide more insight than some resident pundits do in an entire season.
Everyone up to that point had been well aware of how defensive Jim McGuinness could set up his team. What was escaping everyone until Kernan pointed it out was just how attack-minded Donegal’s halfbacks could be.
In that Ulster final, they would steamroll Down, not least but not that obviously because of the ghost runs up field by Anthony Thompson. On one occasion, he’d received the ball inside the Down 20-metre line only to blaze it over the bar.
Another three times he could have been in for a goal only he didn’t receive the pass. Down had been getting sucked to the ball. They weren’t detecting his runs.
Hardly anyone was — until Kernan pointed it out for all to see with the kind of awareness only a player of recent vintage and with a high football IQ could offer.
Kernan would come to experience again up close and personal just how effective that Donegal team and system could be. His last inter-county game was against them. Even then he suspected it was his last game.
Coming off that field last August after Armagh had come within a long-distance last-minute free from his brother Tony to level that All-Ireland quarter-final, he was approached by Ryan McHugh to swap jerseys.
It was a practice Kernan had never engaged in before but he did this time to mark how special the occasion had been.
“I just felt that was sort of it. Our son James had just been born 12 days earlier and I sensed everything was changing for me. I thoroughly enjoyed that game even though we ended up losing it.
“The battle it was, how tactical it was, the intensity of it, being back playing in Croke Park, that’s the sort of football I wanted to be part of. But I knew with work and family, something would have to give.”
Contrary to some assumptions, Kernan is not Joe Brolly’s secret footballer or some former indentured slave.
The last time the 30-year-old spoke to Brolly was on the street before last year’s All-Ireland final. If Kernan was a single man, or even a married man who was not self-employed, he could maybe have played on for another few seasons.
But when he says with work and family something would have to give, he opted that this time it had to be football. For too long he had put it over everything else.
In 2010, the year before he and Marianne married, his head was melting. The family property management business that he had taken over was struggling with the recession and that September he and his parents and a brother were declared bankrupt.
Inevitably the story made headline news in the North’s media. It was all getting too much for him yet he wouldn’t confide that to anyone.
“I didn’t want to burden or annoy or bore anyone else with it, I felt they had enough going on, so I wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. I later realised that was the worst thing I could do.”
Eventually after a club game he called up to Oisín McConville, telling him his brain was too fried to play effective football. McConville had fought his demons through the power of counselling and pointed his clubmate towards similar help.
Kernan would go for six sessions of counselling. The load eased with each one. By the following March he had won another All-Ireland club medal but the benefits were apparent in every facet of life.
“After the first chat I found this huge weight off my shoulder and after three or four months, I’d got my head back together.
“Basically the options were crawl away under a rock and let it eat away at you and make nothing of yourself or come back and fight and learn from your mistakes. Now I look at it all as nearly a good thing.
“Maybe up to then we took everything for granted. Money was readily available (to loan) for us, maybe things were too easy and we weren’t paying as much attention to what we were doing in life. Since then I know everything there is to learn about my business, inside and out.
I’m much more professional about it, so that people trust me whether they’re selling, renting or buying a property. And I’m 10 times a more confident business person now because I know I’ve put the time and effort into it.
“A close friend of mine that I go to for advice said to me a good while back: ‘You know, if you put in even half the time into your work that you do into football, you’ll be a successful business man.’
I couldn’t keep going around with this assumption that just because I play football, everyone is going to go to Aaron Kernan’s and give him a bit of business.
“Yes, I have a great leg-up because of that football connection but if Aaron Kernan is not there to help sell or rent that property, what good am I to that customer?
“That I play for Armagh is irrelevant to them, and rightly so. I want to be respected as a business man, not just as some man who played county football.
“The rough times made me realise that I am passionate about the job that I do. I like being out meeting people, helping people. If I’m selling or buying a house, there’s not too many bigger moves people are going to make in life. You’re trying to help young parents to provide a house that they can live with a quality life with their kids, for the right price.”
All the more so now because he can relate to them. He has a son now himself. He wants this business to provide for him and the family through the years, and who knows, hand Joe Kernan & Sons Property Services down to James, just like his famous father bequeathed it to him.
But to give James that option, to give those customers that service, it meant finally finishing up with county football. The way he viewed it was that if he stayed on with Armagh for 2015, his business would be no further on from how it was in 2014.
“Look, I’m not the first inter-county player who ended up having a kid. And you can work and play inter-county football, no doubt about it. But if someone’s trying to rent a house and is working during the day, when else are they going to see it but in the evening? And how I’m supposed to expand the business if I’m not there to do the work?”
In other years he’d have got away with it, worked around it. Fitted in a gym session in the Carrickdale Hotel or in the homebuilt gym at the parents’ house.
But a key factor in Armagh’s revival in 2014 was that they did their strength and conditioning &together, supervised, in a new gym outside Armagh city.
Kernan didn’t even think to ask Kieran McGeeney for some leeway. It was just time. And the idea of having more time — like the four weekends this spring that Armagh are on the road in the league — and devote it to other things was more luring than another tilt at an All-Ireland.
As it is, he had plenty of time playing county football, and a whale of a time while he was at it. Of course it went by in a flash. 2005 still seems just like the other day. That breakthrough season, he’d win Young Player of the Year, a national league medal, an Ulster medal.
The football Armagh played that year, he reckons, was better than what they served up in 2002. In a way that’s what makes the anguish of losing to Tyrone in that All-Ireland semi-final all the worse. But better to have played in it than not at all. The intensity, the atmosphere, the stakes: that game and rivalry was beyond compare.
That day Tyrone shaded it. Earlier that summer Armagh edged the Ulster final. He can still see, feel, the closing minutes of that game and tingle at the thought: storming back from trailing by a few points, breaking out of defence with the ball.
McGeeney a rock beside him; McGrane in his pomp, Clarke, Stevie and Oisín up front winning the dirty ball, coming up with the big score. The defiance, the grit, the class: that side, that day, was special.
He was the young buck back then. Even if he made a mistake, there was always a sense that one of his more senior teammates would cover for him. Within four years though that assurance wasn’t there. He was now the senior player and maybe too often took on too much responsibility.
“When that great Armagh team died out, I nearly felt it was a reflection on me how Armagh teams performed and behaved themselves. I didn’t want anyone to feel isolated. But I think sometimes that’s not always a good thing.
“When Tony McEntee and Gareth O’Neill took over Cross, they told me just to go out and perform and everything else would take care of itself; I was to trust them with looking after the logistics and game plans for other boys. If I just played, that’s the way I would help and lead the team and the rest would then follow me.
"That struck a chord. You might be looking out for whether a young fella needs help or we’re struggling in such a position that it can dilute from your own job. I’d always trained hard and pushed myself to the limit but after that chat, I didn’t need to worry about or cajole anyone else. I just focused on myself.”
The formula would work with Crossmaglen. Under McEntee and O’Neill he would win a third club All-Ireland and a seventh Ulster title. It would be won with conviction and some style, their emphasis on foot-passing leaving pundits like Brolly putting them up as the exemplars of how the game should be played.
If anyone personified the achievement, it was Kernan himself. Back when Armagh were winning multiple Ulster titles, he was known as one of the best ball-carrying wingbacks in the country. In later years while his visits to Croke Park were mostly confined to March rather than extended to August, his profile would drop but his game would improve.
“I definitely became a better player under Tony and Gareth. I must have been the most frustrating player for them to coach. I might have looked great soloing up the field but inside our forwards could be making runs and I wasn’t even looking at them because I had my head down. But they told me I was a good foot-passer, I just needed to do it and work on it more.”
They all did. Constantly. “It wasn’t as if the best 15 foot-passers in the country were all born in Crossmaglen. We spent night after night on it. We weren’t as good at it in 2011 as we were in 2012.
"It wasn’t as if in 2012 we did anything different; it was just a second year of training like that night after night. We’d have all these different drills where you’d just be moving the ball with the foot, trying to get the ball down field with the least amount of passes needed.”
Kernan reckons football punditry can be too negative. On Setanta he’ll be trying to identify who is playing well and why rather than all that’s going wrong, a bit like hurling folk tend to. But he does have concerns about the direction football is taking.
“You have a situation now where nearly half the teams in the country with club or county are playing this short hand-passing, running game with men behind the ball. And yet most of these coaches in their late 30s, early 40s would never have played football like that themselves.
"It’s too easy for them to say they don’t have players who can kick the ball 30 or 40 yards like Crossmaglen or Kerry. They won’t be able to do that if you don’t coach them. That’s your job, coach them.”
He plans to play on with Cross for another few years. Just like his father Joe has taken on being club chairman, he feels this is a time to show some leadership.
Now is a good time to show the youngsters how hard they’re expected to train, how they’re expected to prepare, play, win — and lose. That’s part of the Cross way too.
“We had this motto under the boys (Tony McEntee and Gareth O’Neill) ‘Show pride but not arrogance’. We try to let our football reflect who we are as people. You respect every opponent.
"I’d still get as nervous for the first round of the county championship as I would those games against Tyrone in 2005. People would think with all the county titles we’ve won, it would be impossible to feel like that but as you get older, there is a fear of losing there and a respect for your opponent.
“Whenever you’re out there, you’re there to do a job, not taunt or get involved with anybody, let your football do the talking. I’d like to think we’ve handled ourselves well in victory and defeat.
“I can clearly remember when I was a young fella back in 2000 or so. The club had just won three of the last four All-Irelands but we’d lost this county league game and leaving the ground, I couldn’t understand how.
“A few of their boys who were in school with me were taunting me and I reacted back but then one of the senior players, Joe Fitzpatrick, caught me and said, ‘Hang on a minute. You can’t be a great big man when you win and then act like a spoilt child when you lose. Shut your mouth and take your beating.’
"I’ve always remembered that. How you handle yourself in defeat is an even better reflection of a team and a man.”
Kernan would be especially tested last year. For 10 years he was an automatic starter with the county team. Last summer he found himself off the starting 15 before he would return to adorn it.
“It was tough. It was something I’d never been used to before. And for a moment I probably did question myself. But the way I tried to look at it was that whenever I did get my chance, whether it was for five or 25 minutes, I was going to make it as difficult as possible for management to leave me off the next day.
"I wasn’t going to spit my dummy out. I had been lucky enough the previous 10 years to start and play when other people had to sit on the bench watching me.
"Unfortunately it took an injury to Kieran McKeever before the Meath (qualifier) game for me to get my chance but it wasn’t an opportunity I was going to let slip. I just wanted to prove to everyone even though you’re 30 years of age you still have football in you.”
That he would, to the point retirement would trigger more than Brolly to wonder and lament why he was giving up. Kernan didn’t burn out. He just didn’t want him — or his business — to fade away.
