Absent friends from ’89 remembered

TOO OFTEN, the Cork team which won the 1989 All-Ireland has had to gather together in sorrow rather than joy.

Two of the side, goalkeeper John Kerins and corner-forward Mick McCarthy, have departed this life too soon, while masseur John ‘Kid’ Cronin and Denis Conroy, the county board chairman at the time, have also passed on.

Last Friday week at the Rochestown Park Hotel, the Sam Maguire winners of a quarter-century ago convened to remember those gone and also to reminisce. Included in the attendance was a sizeable contingent from Meath. Even though they didn’t play them in ’89 their battles in 1987, ’88 (twice) and ’90 gained nationwide notoriety.

For Barry Coffey, wing-forward in ’89 and wing-back as the All-Ireland was retained in ’90, easing the rift which had developed was at least on positive which came from the Cork team’s losses.

“There is now, but back then there was hostility beyond belief,” he said.

“You could argue that it was immature on both sides but it was just the way it went with the games we had. I think it was in 1988 that we were in the same hotel out in the Canaries and there was no interaction at all between the vast majority.

“It was silly stuff at the time, but games of that nature tend to do that. When John died, a good number from Meath came down for it and we had a good session up in the Lough. Hatchets were buried, to be fair, and fellas copped themselves on. I’ve done business with some of the Meath lads over the years and they’re all decent people, we’ve grown to like each other.”

Despite having lost the two previous All-Ireland finals, Coffey doesn’t recall Cork beginning 1989 with any kind of hangover. The opposite, in fact.

“We just kind of got on with it,” he said.

“We picked it up fairly quickly afterwards and, in fairness to Billy (Morgan), he was fairly good at picking guys up and getting them back into the groove.

“We went at it from the very start and we won the league. The final proper was played in New York, we had 13 days there, which was great for bonding and a bit of craic and all of that stuff helped, without a doubt.”

It says much about the transformation that Morgan had effected that winning three Munsters in-a-row for the first time ever wasn’t a cause for extra celebration. Not even the fact that it was Dublin, rather than Meath, in the All-Ireland semi-final, swayed the focus.

“Not at all, we were just focused on winning the All-Ireland,” Coffey said.

“It was a funny kind of game, conditions were appalling. We got two penalties, one I felt was always a bit on the dubious side but you take them as they come! “It’s kind of remembered as a bad-tempered affair but I don’t think it was really. There was one incident where Keith Barr was sent off for hitting Dinny but otherwise I can’t remember it being that physical a game, to be honest.”

Mayo awaited in the final, but captain Dinny Allen admits there was no hiding from the fact there was pressure there.

“We tried to blank it out and there is at least strength in numbers,” he said, “I wouldn’t have liked to have been in a situation like in an individual sport like tennis or golf and you had failed to win twice.

“We had taken the brunt of it together, but we were still under pressure. We tried to focus and Billy is an eternal optimist anyway, so he’d have kept us bouncing along. Deep down, we knew that we had to win.”

When Anthony Finnerty scored to put Mayo ahead, the belief could have swayed, but Allen believes Kerins’ immediate reaction helped to steady things.

“It’s certainly a shock when you’re standing at the other end of the pitch, you just have to blank it out,” he said.

“The great thing about Kerinsie was that, if a goal went past him, he just got up and got on with it, like when Mikey Sheehy got the goal for Kerry in 1987. You can lift or sink by a keeper’s response and certainly that day we responded well.”

Coffey concurs the Connacht champions could be deemed to have deserved more.

“Mayo played well on the day and went ahead with the goal so they could have rattled us,” he said. “We kept at it though and a couple of substitutions worked well too, Mick McCarthy came on and got three points.”

With the pressure eased and a 16-year drought ended, the focus turned to trying to win back-to-back All-Irelands for the first time, as well as completing the double.

“The real motivating factor in 1990 was the fact that we were playing Meath,” Coffey said, “you can’t reiterate it enough.

“Coming up to the final, I never felt we were going to lose that game. The spirit in the camp coming up to it was so phenomenal, we all believed that it was going to happen and it did. That was the one we really wanted.”