CORK DOUBLE 1990: ’The Canon’ never lost his faith in Cork hurling
The smiles say it all. Job done. Cork, All-Ireland senior hurling champions for 1990. The Canon wears the Cork tracksuit top over his priest’s vestments, shakes hands with Cunningham while O’Gorman reaches for the Canon’s hands. The Milford native, who lined out at left corner-back, had arguably played his best ever 70 minutes for the Rebels in what was described as a game for the ages.
For O’Gorman who had suffered many disappointments during the eighties – dropped, recalled, dropped again — his ascent as a 30-year-old up the famous steps proved equally symbolic for him as for his coach.
The Canon, standing on the steps of the Hogan, had realised his dream of one day being there as coach. As a player, injury curtailed his own progression up the ranks and, having forged his reputation as ‘O’Brien, the coach’ first at St Finbarr’s College, Farranferris and then with Cork minor and UCC Fitzgibbon Cup teams, this moment was special. Fr O’Brien was joint-coach for the Centenary Final played in Thurles, so walking up the famous Croker steps had to wait.
Nicky English wrote in his book Beyond the Tunnel how happy he was for Fr O’Brien, his mentor during their UCC days in the 1980s, to see The Silver Fox, a term English coined, on those steps as Cork lifted the McCarthy Cup for the 27th time. His journey was a long one, but the visit was worth the wait.
Ahead of every match in 1989/90, league and championship – apart from the games against Kerry and Antrim — Cork had worn the underdog tag, but each time they shook it off with a defiance, a determination and a doggedness that mirrored the character of their coach.
Despite disappointing campaigns in 1988 and 1989, O’Brien and his fellow selectors, handed a two-year term in October 1989, were optimistic about the future. However, a discerning Cork hurling public didn’t share such positivity.
“I believe it is a quite an exciting time to be involved,” O’Brien said in the autumn of 1989 having topped the poll in the election of selectors for the 89-90 season.
“We have the potential and the task now is to put a good team together. We have plenty of talent in the county. I’m a player’s man. Very often there is a great gap between the public and the players. You have to know what makes a player tick and, when he makes a mistake we, the selectors, are the people who should be there to pick him up.”
He shared the belief that one didn’t need a team of stars to win an All-Ireland. He was at his best when he fashioned a team in his own image to win. And brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand he built an All-Ireland winning team, one that included seven players playing in their first senior final.
If there is one thing O’Brien the coach liked, that was to be extensively written off. Then he could do what he used to do better than most coaches: apply the Midas touch to teams, often to teams that, on paper, weren’t given a prayer. But people forget that O’Brien was a priest; and he prayed a lot.
And, as a Cork minor coach and selector in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Canon was instrumental in six All-Ireland and 10 Munster title wins, and in 1983 he was handed the reins of the Cork juniors and guided them to All-Ireland success, too.
The Canon’s reputation for helping players to realise their full potential was legendary: often he’d take teams with apparently little hurling ability and turn, in a biblical sense, water in wine. Such powers of alchemy didn’t go unnoticed in Cork GAA circles. In 1984, the Cork County Board appointed O’Brien as joint-coach with Justin McCarthy, a coaching ticket that brought All-Ireland success back to Leeside for the first team since 1978.
Cork had fallen to Kilkenny at the final hurdles in 1982 and 1983 but, with O’Brien’s involvement, players testify to the fact that while there was little wrong with their hurling, the Canon got their minds right in GAA Centenary year, and, on All-Ireland final day he set the right tone for their triumphant win over Offaly.
However, that 1984 success rankled with O’Brien. In a conversation I had with the Canon 20 years after that win, he spoke of his disappointment that McCarthy had written in his book, Hooked, that Fr O’Brien played no part in Cork’s success in ‘84. That comment hurt the Canon to the core.
It was often said by hurling aficionados Leeside that O’Brien would get ‘the call’ from the County Board when Cork hurling was at a low ebb; when he was needed. Just as at the beginning of the 1984 campaign when he and McCarthy inherited a team low in self-belief following back-to-back All-Ireland losses to Kilkenny, for the 1990 campaign O’Brien was handed sole coaching responsibility to a team in a similar space.
As a demonstration of his unfettered belief in Cork hurling and its traditions, O’Brien purchased a new Ford Ascona. Licence plate 90 C 27. Cork’s title count at the beginning of 1990 stood at 26. Heads were turned by the sight of the car pulling up outside Páirc Uí Chaoimh, but the Canon was making an indirect statement of intent. And there was psychology in this touch.
To attain greater insight into the workings of O’Brien’s mind, I must defer to, arguably, the finest hurling writer of our times, Denis Walsh of The Sunday Times. As a student writer, Walsh captured perfectly the O’Brien zeitgeist in a brilliantly insightful profile piece on the Canon for the now defunct Sunday Tribune. It appeared on the morning of the 1990 Munster hurling final between Tipperary and Cork, the famous Thurles thriller in which Mark Foley scored 2-7, and the battle was given added colour by Babs Keating’s ill-judged remarks that “donkeys don’t win derbies”.
“His (Fr O’Brien’s) belief in the superiority of Cork hurling is implicit and intractable,” wrote Walsh. “Founded on no other logic than the existence and nature of tradition and memories of a childhood following Cork teams led by Ring, Barry, Daly and others. An abstract notion given a concrete validity in his mind.”
O’Brien’s philosophy was more than the mushroom theory or Ring’s cuckoo story about Cork hurlers. It was a conviction that winning is possible if one tries hard enough. In the previous 21 years as coach, the priest had won 20 All-Irelands, but the 1990 victory for The Silver Fox was the sweetest of them all. The Canon had inherited a team that had suffered confidence-shattering defeats to Tipperary and Waterford in 1988 and 89. But, as Cork great Gerald McCarthy points out, Fr O’Brien had an ability to instil conviction in his teams.
“He found it hard to believe that any team could be better than a Cork bunch,” says McCarthy, who was fitness trainer in 1990.
“He believed that Cork shouldn’t be down. You could see that after we lost to Wexford in the semi-final of the league in 1990 that it really hurt him personally. There were a few harsh words said.” Those he coached would testify later that if they were losing, he’d take things very personally. He was known to walk into dressing-rooms up and down the country at half-time sometimes with a limp, sometimes with apparent back or neck pain, insisting he was hurting physically because his team was letting him down. Sometimes he used to come into a room and say very little, his expression used to tell the story.
The dressing-room was his stage. And while these were acts, his acting used to work, players consequently lifting their games to new levels.
He often made unpopular decisions, but stuck by his beliefs and his principles. Often he’d select Cork hurlers who may have felt hard done by during previous campaigns or field Cork teams with a smattering of players from junior and intermediate clubs. He knew that for decades in Cork, it was perceived as quite unfashionable to select players from junior or intermediate clubs for the Cork senior hurling team. But the Canon – by action rather than by words – crushed this theory. For instance, he managed to get the very best out of Mark Foley in the year of the double, the gentle giant of Cork hurling who hailed from Timoleague in west Cork, then a junior club. And he gave Milford’s O’Gorman, the most underrated defender in the county, a proper run of it at senior level.
He stared down the so-called hurling snobs who believed Cork teams should only be fielding players from senior clubs, and defied observers of the theory that ‘if city hurling is weak, Cork hurling is weak’. He never bought into that mindset. All hurlers from all parts of the county were, he believed, created equally. “Give me the raw material, and I’ll create winners” was one of his creeds.
“He loved putting out the best players,” explains Cork county secretary, Frank Murphy, a hurling selector in 1990.
“There was no favouritism – it was always a case to do what was best for Cork or whatever team he was associated with.” For that 1990 campaign, 23 of the 26-strong panel of players had come under his wing in one way or another, including O’Gorman, arguably Cork’s player of the season in 1990, inspirational against Tipperary in the Munster final and pipped by Tomás Mulcahy for the RTÉ Man-of-the-match award in that year’s success over Galway in the All-Ireland final. O’Gorman came under the priest’s influence with the county at minor and U21 as well as at university level.
“The Canon was big into psychology,” says O’Gorman. “It was all about the power of the mind. He was very influenced by Christy Ring. One of his favourite lines was ‘get the mind right’. He was always big into motivation, and while he came across as a very strong person, at the back of it he was very human.”
After the 1990 win the Canon said: “Both Gerald and I concentrated on a lot of things. We worked on the team’s physical fitness and their hurling skills, but above all to give them self-confidence. There was criticism but we ignored it completely because we had full faith in the team. They stuck with us and did everything we asked them to do. I am very proud of them. They are a very honest and dedicated team and it’s a pleasure to be associated with every one of them. I wish them the best.”
One of the Canon’s proudest moments was being asked by Billy Morgan to speak to the footballers as they prepared to face Meath and aim to complete the double.
“I was honoured to do that,” he said.
As O’Gorman says, he always displayed great humanity. For example, if he knew a member of a player’s family was sick, he’d quietly say to a player at training that he should go home; “be with your family”.
He’d go out of his way to help a player who might be experiencing difficulties in his or her personal lives. He used to listen with a kind ear and offer any help, spiritual or otherwise, that was needed. He also had a wicked sense of humour and was not afraid to laugh at himself.
Sadly, over the last few years of his life, ill health took Archdeacon Michael O’Brien away from the game he loved. He had the Midas touch when it came to coaching teams, and it was amid great sadness that he passed away from this world and from his adoring family and the Cork hurling community last November.
He is not around as celebrations of Cork’s famous double take place, but we’ll feel his presence. As Tyrone senior football coach Mickey Harte once said, “Presence is the only thing”.
But, as the Canon might say mischievously in a deep, but strong monotone voice and with a wink under that peaked cap, “Go forth in peace, the game is over”! Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
