The lesser lights on Lewis Road
HARRY O’NEILL is using a freezing afternoon in Mallow last January to make his point. The Dr Crokes manager saw his side dangle on the precipice at half time in the Munster senior club final, trailing by 13 points to a Nemo Rangers team that produced an awesome display of football. A shellacking loomed but for the power of Eoin Brosnan and the poise of Kieran O’Leary, who shot 1-5. Time ran out at the death on Killarney’s finest but O’Neill gulped hard when he reflected on what it could have been.
“Everyone saw when our backs were to the wall that Eoin was the guy who dug us out of the hole when he went to midfield. He tore into the game. He’s like a good wine, he gets better with age. And it was Kieran who got the crucial scores up front. The two of them were brilliant and brought us back into it.”
Eight months on and that game is being used as the start of a remarkable renaissance. Dr Crokes’ headlines in 2011 are invariably hogged by Colm Cooper as he bids to captain the county to All-Ireland success on Sunday. But there is another aspect to this tale. The career revivals of Brosnan and O’Leary has been uplifting. They are the lesser lights of Lewis Road, quietly working away off Broadway as the megawatt star performs on the main stage.
When Kerry played Tipperary in the Munster quarter-final back in May, it was a historic day for Cooper as he lead his county out for the first time in senior championship action. But it marked a milestone in the careers of clubmates too. For Brosnan it was his first championship start in 32 months, a hiatus stretching back to the 2008 All-Ireland final. For the 24 year-old O’Leary it was a first championship start.
In Crokes, they cherish Cooper’s extravagant talent but the comeback of Brosnan and O’Leary is savoured too. O’Neill, who is also a physical therapist to the Kerry senior squad, had a sense that Jack O’Connor would try to tempt Brosnan back into the inter-county fold after watching that tour de force against Nemo Rangers.
“I wasn’t surprised that Jack came back to him. But Jack made his own decision then and made his own contact with Eoin. I know Eoin thought long and hard about coming back into it, but he felt if he could make a contribution then he would.”
Brosnan went back training with Kerry on February 11 and 10 days later he was playing centre-back against Mayo in the league in Castlebar. The gap in the Kingdom since Mike McCarthy called it a day last autumn was plugged.
“If he’d have been asked to come back in to contest for a place as a forward, I don’t think he would have done that,” believes O’Neill. “That was probably the carrot dangled in front of him and what he went in for. The position wasn’t new to him. We would have played him centre-back a lot in 2009. And when Pat O’Shea was in charge of the Crokes, he would have dropped Eoin a lot behind the midfield in games to cover certain roles.”
The rebirth of Brosnan a decade after he made his championship bow has been complemented by the breakthrough of O’Leary. It is five years since O’Leary first lined out in senior colours, a precocious talent thrust into the action against Mayo in a league game. When he walked off the Semple Stadium pitch in May 2008 with an All-Ireland U21 medal in his pocket and a man-of-the-match trophy in his hand, a solid senior career beckoned. Instead he met road blocks over the following three years and at the start of this season. O’Leary had sampled a total of 31 minutes of senior championship action from three substitute appearances. Loss of form hit him hard and injuries hit him harder — but he never gave up.
“I’d have huge admiration for Kieran,” says Crokes chairman Vince Casey. “He’s an example to everyone. When we put in a gym in the club, Kieran was up there five days a week to work on getting stronger. If you look at it, a couple of years ago there were a few guys who’d been down the Kerry panel and they dropped away. But Kieran persisted with it and he’s shown if you work hard enough you can get anywhere, even into the Kerry forward line.”
That perseverance was evident again last year. A freak collision in the county quarter-final against West Kerry in Tralee saw O’Leary break a bone in his leg, and he was still sidelined when Dr Crokes toasted their seventh senior title in October. But he rehabilitated and when their challenge was creaking in Cashel against Aherlow in the provincial semi-final last November, it was O’Leary who came off the bench to fire three rescue points. In the Kerry side he may not shine in the scoring stakes yet his lines of running and intelligent distribution make him an invaluable cog in the wheel.
“He makes the others look good,” believes Casey. “He makes some fantastic runs and has a great head on him. You saw against Cork in the Munster final, he’d two or three guys around him and then he slipped the ball to Darran [O’Sullivan] running through. Suddenly the whole pitch opened up for him and he got the goal.”
“Maybe a couple years ago Kieran didn’t have the confidence to express himself as much,” states O’Neill. “But this year coming in they’ve seen that while he’s not a Gooch, he has his own style of play and brings a lot to the Kerry set up. There’s an almost instinctive thing between Kieran and Colm, when either one of them gets the ball, they look for the other. They’ve built that up over the years.”
They’ve been stung from criticism over the years but ploughed on undeterred. In 2001 Brosnan was embroiled in the unsavoury farrago over the Kerry captaincy and in 2008 he was in the firing line after the Tyrone final defeat. Back in the club they knew his true worth though.
Casy admits: “2008 did hurt him. As did 2001. But Eoin has got a lot of unnecessary criticism over the years. People questioned this year why he was going back but I was delighted he did. You could see he was playing his best football in a few years and was enjoying it. He’s done a huge amount for us, be it his leadership on the pitch or the work he does in his professional role as a solicitor for us. I can see him become a future chairman of Crokes, the club means that much to him.”
Irrespective of the outcome on Sunday, they will return to base next week. Rathmore await in the club championship on October 1 and then there is Austin Stacks in the Kerry SFC on October 9.
“We’ll give them a few days next week to get their heads right and then it’s be back to it,” says O’Neill. “But right now it’s fantastic to see where they are.
“You’ve Colm as captain, then Johnny Buckley and Daithi Casey in their first year on the panel, and Eoin and Kieran back on the team. We couldn’t ask for better really.”
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