Tommy Martin: It was for this moment that Kerry sent up the Jack signal
RETURN OF THE JACK: Kerry manager Jack O'Connor. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
To north Kerry, in the space between two All-Ireland finals.
Your correspondent finds himself on his annual pilgrimage to Ballybunion this week, the seaside resort town which remains oblivious to global meltdown. While Europe burns, Ballybunion warily slips off its kagoule, not liking the look of those clouds one bit. “Some heatwave!” is the sardonic comment of choice, as two days of hazy pleasantness gave way to temperatures soaring into the mid-teens.
Still, you don’t come to north Kerry for the weather. Not that this is Kerry, per se. No holiday place is quite itself, especially not in high season. It’s like how quantum physicists say that atoms behave differently when you look at them (how do they know?). Unlike, say, New York or Kuala Lumpur, where visitors are beguiled by their own invisibility to the swarming masses, holiday places react and osmose with those that visit them.
Being neither New York nor Kuala Lumpur, Ballybunion is a case in point. Its invasive species comes from the county immediately to the east. In summertime, Ballybunion could be mistaken for West Limerick-on-Sea. Not noted for its golden sands and chic resort destinations, the Treaty county must outsource its bucket-and-spade business to grateful neighbours. For those west of Adare, the long, straight, one-time railroad from Listowel to Ballybunion is like a hyperspace tunnel to sea air and childhood memory.
All of which means that this might be the perfect place to take the temperature of All-Ireland week (if temperature is not a touchy subject for the only people in Christendom wearing fleecey jumpers right now). As the visitors savoured another chapter in their glory years, the natives, who know a thing or two about glory years, looked warily ahead.
On Sunday the pubs of the town bounced and bustled to sweaty hurling final celebrations. Big screens and bar bands serenaded the happy campers, those that hadn’t taken leave to head for the Big Smoke. Limerick jerseys reigned supreme on the Ladies’ Beach even more so than usual, sliotars pucked and 99s licked and sandcastles dug in a high state of contentment.
Thoughts? Great match. Some team. Great to beat them. Will Cody stay? Special final. Everyone got tickets. Loads of kids at it. Nice. What about the timing? Not sure. Good for the club players I suppose. Hmmm. Just doesn’t seem right though, does it? One woman (settling into her two weeks in Bally with the kids and husband logging into the office on a Wifi dongle): “To be honest, the All-Ireland in July, it just doesn’t suit me.”
As the week turned, the green and gold pushed up through the cracks. On Tuesday two local lads chatted in the chemists beside the Super Valu in Listowel. In their twenties, no responsibilities. Free to attack post-All-Ireland festivities with gusto; not fussy on the county involved.
“Was some craic on Sunday in Ballybunion!”
“Some craic in Abbeyfeale on Monday!”
“There’ll be some craic this weekend too – we’ll go at it for three days I’d say!”
Such untrammelled confidence is a rarity. As the football final looms, the general tone is more reflected in the newspaper front page after the semi-final win over Dublin. “We’re back!” it screamed and a Kerry For Sam poster lay within. But Kerry legend Darran O’Sullivan, smiling and bedecked in green and gold, sounded a warning.
“Supporters should enjoy the build-up,” the four-time All-Ireland winner counselled, “enjoy putting up the colours and if you see the boys, wish them well – but leave it at that. The boys will try to be polite as much as they can, but it is quite draining as a player because you don’t want to talk about it.”
Careful now, in other words.
The sense is that to mess this up now, with the Dubs finally beaten, would be excruciating. The mind wanders back to a rainy September Monday in 2011, pulling into Bally with a three-month old baby in tow for a first family holiday. A day earlier, Stephen Cluxton had delivered Dublin from their own purgatory, a stroke of the left boot right into the Kerry heart.
Ballybunion gets many visitors but only one has a statue. Bill Clinton is commemorated in bronze outside the Garda station after he played a round of golf here in 1998. Sometime in the hours after Cluxton’s kick in 2011, someone had put a Dublin jersey on the 42nd president of the Unites States and there he stood, gazing down an imaginary fairway, looking to the future and all the blue ribboned glory to come.
You don’t need a PhD in symbolism from the University of Symbolism to see the symbolism in Dublin being beaten two weeks ago by a long range free at the death. For Sean O’Shea’s moment of square-jawed heroism NOT to be the prelude to Kerry’s ultimate deliverance just doesn’t seem to make any narrative sense. It would be stupidly anti-climactic. Saint George didn’t fall off his bicycle on his way home from slaying the dragon.
It was for this moment that Kerry sent for Jack O’Connor again. Jacko even looks a bit like Harvey Keitel, who played Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction, the man you call in to clean up the mess and make problems go away. This was Kerry realising the subtle difference between waiting for David Clifford and Sean O’Shea to win them the All-Ireland and getting those guys into the position where they could win them the All-Ireland.
Back in Bally, the visitors have moved on to moaning about the weather but the native mood is pregnant with hope and anxiety. By Sunday, this could be All-Irelandsville – two wins in a week. If you bring up the match, people will say that at least because it’s Galway, it might be a traditional game of football – the inference being that Kerry will always win those. Whether this hypothesis is correct doesn’t matter. It’s just something to say. Leave it at that, as Darran says.
But get Bill measured up for the jersey just in case.
