Timeline of league ‘win’ still a mystery
Some readers will, no doubt, be puzzled as to why such an apparently mundane sliver of information should appear in today’s sports pages. Others, maybe those with a few more years on the clock, will have read that with a wry smile.
When Cork and Dublin face off in the league at HQ this evening it will stir memories of a bizarre meeting 24 years ago, of a National League quarter-final when Barney Rock ‘scored’ the winner at a time when Cork were already in their civvies and on the way home.
Most people agree on the bones of the story. Having finished level, the game was due to go to extra-time. Instead, Cork protested their ignorance of any such arrangement and, after retiring to the dressing -rooms, refused to reappear.
Dig deeper than that and the details get blurred.
Dublin were, as we know now, a team already beyond their peak. Facing them was a Cork side on the rise, one fielding many of the U21 All-Ireland winners of ’85 and ’86 and which was a handful of years away from claiming the senior equivalent. It wasn’t the most exciting of games. Nor was it the prettiest of afternoons for the 10,255 looking on. Barney Rock described it as “an auld, dampish sort of a day” and it was his point that secured the stalemate after a Niall Cahalane penalty appeared to have won it for Cork.
That was when it all went wrong.
Cork disappeared down the tunnel, their coach (but not selector) Billy Morgan and players all supposedly oblivious to the fact that provisions had been made for 30 extra minutes. Dublin, seemingly better informed, stayed at their posts ready to go at it again.
“I can’t remember what happened after the final whistle,” says Rock, “or who went in or who stayed out on the pitch but I had finished the game at full-forward and I stayed up there for the restart. Declan Bolger took the throw-in for extra-time and sent it on to me and I just put it in. People always ask what would have happened had I missed and there was no Cork player to take the kick-out.”
No-one seems too sure where exactly Cork were by then. What’s certain is that they weren’t anywhere near the pitch.
So, what happened? “I don’t really know,” said Colman Corrigan, who played full-back for Cork that day and went on to serve as a selector under Morgan. “What I do know is that the players didn’t know anything about extra-time and Billy didn’t know anything about extra-time.
“The way Billy was looking at it was the more experience that team could get, the better. All he wanted was another game and it probably didn’t matter to him whether it was in Croke Park or Páirc Uí Chaoimh.”
One man who did want to continue was former GAA president and then Cork chairman Con Murphy who, it was revealed afterwards, threatened to resign over the failure to fulfil the fixture.
It rumbled onto the Monday evening when the GAC awarded the game to Dublin and fizzed to life when the Cork players released a statement criticising the board’s acceptance of that decision. At one stage, there were even calls for the selectors to resign. For the Dublin players looking on from the calm of the capital, it was all a bit surreal.
“It was weird, really,” goalkeeper John O’Leary said. “It was kind of like the situation with Meath in the Leinster final last year. There was all this going on but it had nothing to do with us. It actually worked out well for us that year. We went on to win the league.”
Cork, after all the madness subsided, didn’t suffer any long-term effects either. They won a first Munster title in four years a few months later, added three more, and, by 1990, were back-to-back All-Irelands winners.
Oh, and by the way, their counterparts return home tonight by coach.
