Seamus Kennedy: ‘We will never give up, we will never give in’
“I wonder how, I wonder why.
“Yesterday you told me ‘bout the blue, blue sky.
“And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon tree.’
The newly crowned Munster Club champions aren’t entirely au fait with the third verse of Fools Garden’s Lemon Tree and so the singing tails off into yet another rapturous round of applause, back-slaps and bear hugs.
The song was a particular favourite of past Clonmel county winning teams and would be repeatedly played in their then haunt of Brendan Power’s on the night of Tipperary football final wins.
“It’ll be ringing all week now,” quips a club official outside dressing-room 2 in Mallow GAA’s Carrigoon complex.
Showered and changed, Seamus Kennedy breaks from the celebrations and ambles out of the winner’s enclosure. It is now half an hour since his “Hail Mary” into the Nemo Rangers danger area was finished to the net by Michael Quinlivan and the Clonmel centre-forward still wears an expression of amazement.
“I don’t know what to make of that, how do you even begin to put all this into words,” ponders the 22-year old. When fouled on halfway with less than a minute of second-half stoppages remaining, Kennedy mistakenly believed time was up and wasn’t even sure if referee Rory Hickey would allow his free be taken. So he just booted the ball into the dark November sky and prayed for a miracle.
“I wasn’t even sure if the referee would allow the play develop when I kicked it in. It was a pure hit and hope, pure Hail Mary stuff. But boy was it some finish.”
Kennedy, like most of his team-mates, had readied himself for that awful pang in the pit of the stomach that comes with losing out on the biggest occasion.
“In fairness to Paul Kerrigan, he turned it on for a while and I thought we had lost our chance. Their men were grinding us down. Niblock, Ó Sé, Kerrigan, O’Driscoll and O’Donovan really stood up for them. You could see they had been around the block.
“It came back to our never-say-die attitude. We will never give up, we will never give in. To have that in a group of players and to never know when you are beaten is something really special.
“When you have the likes of Michael Quinlivan inside, all he needs is one ball. I have been playing with Mikey and Ian Fahey since I was four-years of age. Most of the lads on this team are around 22, 23. We have been playing hurling, football and soccer together for as long as I can remember.
“Today, to get that breakthrough is phenomenal. It is unbelievable.” An unbelievable end then to a pretty unbelievable season.
When Kilsheelan-Kilcash defeated Commercials 1-11 to 0-6 in the South Tipperary final on September 5, there weren’t too many predicting that Charlie McGeever’s men would still be operating inside the whitewash on the last weekend of November. They recovered from a six-point deficit to claim a 16th county title and kicked six points in the final five minutes of their Munster quarter-final against Newcastle West to turn a four-point deficit into a two-point win.
“Talk about a team riding their luck all year,” continues Kennedy. “
You know what, maybe we earned out luck. Since losing that South Tipp decider we have really worked hard and put our shoulders to the wheel. We got our just reward. This is probably the best feeling I have ever had with this group of players.”
Wing-back on the 2011 All-Ireland minor winning team, Kennedy sees this win as yet another giant step forward in the rise of Tipperary football.
“Things are really looking up for Tipperary. This is a big breakthrough.” Michael Quinlivan can’t but agree: “Success breeds success. If we can bring the same mentality to Tipperary that we have with Commercials then hopefully we can really go places.” Down the corridor a similar discussion is taking place between county football chairman Joe Hannigan and county U21 football boss Tommy Toomey, the latter having been adopted onto the Clonmel backroom team in the wake of their county final victory.
“This is massive for Clonmel, for Tipperary,” beams Hannigan.
“This win is absolutely massive for every individual in this club,” concludes Quinlivan.
“I don’t think it gets any better than this, does it?”
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