The Fogarty Forum: Cork must respond to Croke Park pain
It also served as a reminder of Ger Loughnane’s rendition of the anti-war song on Clare’s fabled bonding session in Killarney at Easter 20 years ago and by singing it the message he succeeded in conveying to his players.
Loughnane recalls that night in the excellent RTE 2005 radio documentary “Clare Champions”: “There were two parts of it that I really emphasised. The first part ‘The real part came towards the very end of the song. By this time I was singing in such a way that everyone was really paying attention. The last part was ‘And when the ship pulled into Circular Quay/I looked at the place where my legs used to be/And thank Christ there was no-one there waiting for me to grieve, to mourn or to pity’.
“The crucial line after that was ‘And the band played Waltzing Matilda/As they carried us down the gangway/Nobody cheered, they just stood there and stared/Then they turned all their faces away”. I said (to the players) ‘That’s what has happened to you the last two years but I tell you this year and from now on it will never happen again’. There was absolute stunned silence and I stopped it right there.”
When Cork’s footballers, blood and bandaged, returned home from Dublin on Sunday night there was nobody there to greet them. They would have been glad of that small mercy. There were no dirges to salute their arrival either. But what lay in wait for them was disdain in some quarters - on one local radio station they were referred to as “that shower” - but in the main cold, cold indifference.
It’s the apathy that’s the killer. Defeat is a lonely station but when it’s suffered by Cork’s footballers it may as well be deserted. Kerry experienced a little of it themselves last year after Cork tanked them in the last round game in Tralee. It’s what motivated James O’Donoghue coming up to the Munster final in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, which Kerry supporters avoided in their droves. He recalled: “You ask if they’re going to the game and they’ll say, ‘Nah sure why would I go down to see them get bate?’ That does stir something inside you. It’s rare that it happens in Kerry but when it does, of course you get that bit of a kick up the backside.”
The difficulty for Cork is it isn’t rare. They are a quick turn-off particularly when the hurlers offer a much more reliable alternative. Should they reach a Munster final against Kerry, those of a red and white hue will travel to Fitzgerald Stadium more for the occasion than anything else.
Until they beat Kerry, Mayo, Donegal or Dublin, Cork can expect to be isolated. They will find no favours outside their camp. They don’t have Kerry’s “propaganda machine” which Joe Brolly speaks of nor the one he himself preaches when Ulster teams reach the latter stages of All-Ireland championships.
There are no former players turned pundits who will regularly bat for them when the chips are down.
They have nobody but themselves and nobody but they can lift them now. It should agitate them that their entire campaign has been crystalised into one game where they simply didn’t perform. It should rile them that it seems to matters not a jot now that they stood up to both in Monaghan and Tyrone when it mattered most or saw off Dublin and Kerry on home soil. But it was they who loaded the bullets into the guns that were turned on them.
Twenty years on and a dozen or so Colm O’Neill 45s from the Killarney pub where Loughnane gave his defiant delivery just a few months before Cork last beat Kerry in the town, they will now turn their attentions to living up to their part in setting a final date there on July 5. After the shellshock of Sunday, they may be crippled by sharp senses of fear and doubt. That would be natural but making a Clare-like vow never to be victims again mightn’t just start the recovery; it could be the very catalyst for it.
