Kieran Shannon: Liam Kearns' lasting legacy
BOND FORGED: Former Limerick footballer Stephen Lavin has paid tribute to Liam Kearns. Pic: Pat Murphy/Sportsfile
They say the measure of a coach isn’t necessarily what you and the players won together but how those players feel about you 10 years after you’ve gone your separate ways. In that regard and many others Liam Kearns has been one of the outstanding football coaches and managers of this millennium.
Last summer when the Limerick footballers were winning promotion to Division Two and progressing to a Munster final I met Stephen Lavin, a member of the Limerick team that played in several provincial finals in the mid-noughties, and their reverence for their manager from those years was striking. On Monday I spoke to him again, under less jubilant circumstances, and though he was clearly shocked by the news, he still couldn’t help but raise the occasional smile when recalling the man he knew, the times they had, the bond they still shared.
“I’d have spoken to Liam every year,” says Lavin, “not just this year with me being involved with the Sigerson [as coach of UL] and [Offaly footballer] Jack O’Brien playing with us. You could talk away to him about anything. Often football. But also family. How everyone was keeping. Liam finished up with us in 2005 and yet 17 years on we still had that connection with someone who did so much for us when we were young fellas which I think is beautiful.
“We would have gone through the walls for him. We just loved playing for the man. He was the first person I would say apart from my parents who totally believed in me. Now he could bring you down to size with a bollicking if it was needed but he could also instil you with massive confidence, in how he prepared us and how he spoke to you.”
That was his secret formula: knowing when and how to have the craic and when to crack the whip. Being able to both see the big picture while also zone in on the most precise of details. That Limerick team trained ridiculously hard, because, as John Galvin once put it, they were “dementedly driven”.
But after they’d worked hard, they could party hard, with Kearns to the forefront, often tussling with Stephen Lucey to be the first man on the mic. In the years that followed other teams he’d coach and win with would hear him give a rendition of Spancil Hill. In the Limerick days his party piece was Johnny Jump Up, an old ditty Jimmy Crowley and Christy Moore used to cover.
O never O never O never again
If I live to a hundred or a hundred and ten
I fell to the floor and I couldn’t get up
After drinking a pint of old Johnny Jump Up
“Twenty years later I still remember the lyrics from that song,” smiles Lavin. “And Liam when he’d sing it going ‘Right, lads, the sad verse now.’ I suppose in those years Liam was late thirties, early forties whereas most of us were in our early twenties, but he could relate to us and have the craic with him. And the bond we had from nights and sing songs like that would stay with us and make us such a tight group.”
What amazed them though wasn’t just that he knew and connected with them so well; before there was any Dartfish or any widespread video analysis software, Kearns had a remarkable knowledge of each opponent, collectively and individually. Didn’t matter if it was a high-profile team like Cork and telling Conor Fitzgerald that Anthony Lynch might be vulnerable to him cutting backdoor or bringing him across the field, it would be Carlow, London, Wicklow: he had them all sussed.
In Laois Kearns didn’t maybe win as much as he or they would have expected or liked after he took the baton from Micko but he did achieve one thing there that almost no other Laois manager could have. Colm Parkinson by his own admission had a “chequered” inter-county career, not least because invariably there’d be “another manager argument, then [he’d be] gone off the panel”. One manager though bucked the trend and won both his respect and his affection.
“Liam Kearns was the one manager who’d be man enough to have a barney with you and the next day it would be ‘Howiya, Wooly’ and move on,” Parkinson once told me in an interview. “Just a mature-man-to-man approach. All the others were more student-teacher relationships and I didn’t really respond to them.”
In Limerick they all responded to Kearns.
“Just from talking to lads through the years and obviously today, we’ll all say what a huge influence he’s had on our lives. In how he got us to commit to something, believe in ourselves. Yeah, we might never have won anything but to this day there is a connection and bond among that group of players because of what we tried to achieve. And that would never have happened only I got involved with the Limerick footballers when Liam Kearns was their manager.”
