Kyle Hayes reflects on magical week: I am awake now. So liberated and alive
Last Monday, 7.39am.
As soon as my eyes opened, my system, my body, was fully alive. I didn’t need those few drowsy seconds before I remembered myself. My mind, my whole body, was silently screaming with elation, the absolute sense of satisfaction flushing through my bloodstream like a narcotic. Alive. Absolutely alive.
I’d only had about three hours’ sleep. My system would only shut down that long, still pumped with adrenaline and energy. Plying myself with isotonic drinks on matchday never makes it easy for me to sleep the night of games anyway but my whole body was still basically jumping and jerking with excitement.
I sat on the side of the bed for a couple of minutes, manically trying to absorb what had happened the previous day. You feel like you’re almost floating in a parallel universe, orbiting a different world. Did that really happen?
No, seriously, did that really happen?
Jeez, it did.
I’m only 20. There is so much about life that I don’t know about, or fully understand, but the feeling was so overpowering that it must have been similar to becoming a father for the first time.
You’re filled with love and happiness. Something special has happened. It’s an amazing feeling, a surreal but beautiful experience.
And you know your life will never be the same again.
Thursday, August 16
All summer, I’ve been working with Altec. We were in Cork for the week, Mallow and Carrigaline, installing fibre for broadband in those areas. Being in Cork suited me perfectly because I was insulated from the hype and madness enveloping Limerick.
Pulling cables can be hard manual work but I don’t mind. I feel it toughens me up.
I got chatting to a few Cork fellas at one stage. It was good craic. They were giving me grief about Limerick knocking them out in the semi-final but it was all good-natured stuff. Some fellas try to engage as little as possible with other people on the week of a game but I don’t mind who I talk to. I never get worked up over matches.
Maybe it’s the confidence or innocence of youth, but I’ve always taken the build-up to big matches in my stride.
On Friday I finished work early, around midday.
The lads had a work meeting but I headed off to pick up a couple of new hurleys at Daly’s in Pallaskenry. DJ Daly has been making hurleys for decades, a trade his late father, Paddy, first began practising in the 1940s. DJ knows exactly what type of stick I like, down to the exact weight and balance. They were a couple of peaches.
I met Cian Lynch later in the afternoon, around 4.30pm, for food. We chatted about the match, about how we were both so hungry and eager for it to come.
I was buzzing.
I could already picture that run on to the field, and how excited I would be. I wasn’t really nervous visualising it. Just excited. It was my first All-Ireland final but I had played in the minor final in 2016.
That game is completely different from the senior game but I still felt it had given me a great grounding, and that it would stand to me.
After picking up my gear, I went to training in the Gaelic Grounds. It was just touch-work. I felt good. Everyone seemed in great form. Energetic. Buzzing.
Management reinforced those positives. They reminded us to stick to the routine, about how this was just another game.
On the way home, I called into my brother Darragh’s house in Kildimo. His partner, Claire, had dinner cooked for me. Bacon and cabbage. Old-school but loaded with protein. It was gorgeous. I wolfed it down.
‘This felt a thousand times worse because I was living the moment’
Saturday, August 18
Aaron Gillane, Barry O’Connell, and I have this routine on the day before a match where we meet up for breakfast. We met in Verona in Raheen at 9.30am. Protein pancakes washed down with coffee.
We left there at 10.30am, keeping to our ritual where Gillane and I go to Patrickswell for a haircut. I always get the same cut in Uppercuts but I told Sheila McCormack before the All-Ireland semi-final that I wanted something different. Sheila suggested a blade zero to just above my ear, marked by a curved line before fading and brushing the hair on the top of my crown across to one side. Sheila got out her scissors and razor and hair gel and styled me up again.
The place was busy. We had to wait the guts of an hour to get chopped but I knew most of the lads waiting in line and we just shot the breeze.
We chatted about everything and anything, except hurling. By the time I got home, my parents were getting ready to leave. They were staying with my sister in Drogheda that night so I said goodbye to them. Mam had prepared me food for the day.
I had the place to myself so I just binged on Netflix for the afternoon — Last Chance U.
I also fitted in Chelsea-Arsenal before returning to the exploits at the football programme at East Mississippi Community College. When I’d had my fill of Last Chance U, I flicked onto the boxing on BT Sport to watch Paddy Barnes, Carl Frampton, and Tyson Fury go to war.
I went to bed at 11. I always sleep well. Most nights, I get nine-and-a-half hours shut-eye. Blackout sleep too, not fitful stuff. Saturday was no different. I had drifted off by about 11.15pm.
Sunday, August 19: Game day
When my alarm went off at 7am, the first thing I thought of was how happy I was with my night’s sleep. I don’t think I woke for a second. It was an indication of how relaxed I was.
I didn’t feel nervous. I appreciated that the biggest game of my life was only eight hours away but I didn’t think of it as an All-Ireland final. It was another game. Stick to the process. Because the process is always king.
As I was having my breakfast, I played my music. I’m a big fan of 50 Cent. ‘Window Shopper’ is my favourite track but we kinda adopted The Cranberries song ‘Zombie’ as our theme tune this season.
There was an obvious emotional connection there to the late Dolores O’Riordan, a proud Limerick woman, and I stuck that track on just to pump me up.
Before I leave the house for every game, I always sprinkle holy water on the base of my hurleys and on my hands. I say a little prayer, too.
I left the house at 8am, drove to meet Willie O’Meara, one of the extended panel, before hooking up with Barry O’Connell, another clubmate, in Mungret.
We all convened in the train station, driving up the back beyond the CIE buses to park before boarding the first carriage on the platform, the 9.45am direct to Dublin.
The collective mood by then was great, really relaxed. We had our usual compendium of games — Connect Four, Scrabble — to keep fellas’ minds occupied. Other fellas listen to music but conversation is my favourite means of siphoning the tension.
I always sit beside Pat Ryan on the bus. I jumped in beside him again but the sense of routine was already apparent everywhere else. We — Pat, Colin Ryan, Andrew La Touche Cosgrave, and I — perched ourselves in the same four seats we occupied for the All-Ireland semi-final. So did everyone else; Cian Lynch, Seán Finn, Barry Hennessy, and Oisin O’Reilly were all sitting directly across from us again.
Keeping so stringently to the routine — not in any forced way — definitely seemed to lighten the mood. We knew we were heading east to play in the biggest game of our lives but it felt like any other match.
When the train arrived in Heuston, we waited in our carriage for a couple of minutes for the crowd to disperse before walking about 50m to get the bus. We were aware of the crowds by then but still almost oblivious to the magnitude of the occasion. Relaxed. Chilled. Still pretty cool. Well, I was anyway.
When we arrived at our hotel in Santry, we got stuck into our pre-match meal — chicken, pasta, salad. I had a cup of coffee before moving on to the relaxation room. Seán Finn and Gearóid Hegarty took it a step further, heading off to two rooms to sleep.
Seán is unreal. He is usually asleep within two minutes of getting on the bus, waking up just before we arrive at our destination.
Lads were following their own rhythms and routines by then; listening to music, getting rubs, getting strapped, chatting, going for a walk around the hotel. There was a movie playing on the TV. I watched some of it but I didn’t even know what it was called. I can’t remember what it was really about — the final was already beginning to govern my thought process two hours out from throw-in.
2.10pm, Sunday
When we arrived in Croke Park, I did what I always do — roll a new grip onto the handle of my hurley. I like to feel that new comfort around my palms when I grab the stick but the routine always kills about five minutes. There was music playing in the dressing-room but I stuck on my headphones, pumped up the volume, and tried to lose myself in that noisy, blaring world.
By the time we had our gear on and our activation work done with Joe O’Connor in the warm-up area, it was nearly time to go. John Kiely had the last word before we left the dressing-room. I can’t really recall what he said but the general theme was to go out, embrace the occasion and enjoy ourselves.
3.03pm:
Emerging from the dressing-room into an orb of light and a wall of sound is a surreal experience.
BOOM!
Thankfully I can’t speak from experience but the best way to describe it is it must be somewhat similar to getting hit by a car at about 20 miles per hour; it knocks you onto your back, sending your system into brief shock before you slowly get to your feet and grasp what’s after happening.
BOOM!
Your head is scrambled. You immediately try and unscramble it. I fire a ball straight over the crossbar and head for the team photograph. Deep breaths. Focus. This is it. Breathe. This is happening. Big time.
Let’s go.
3.30pm:
As soon as any game starts, I look to get body contact as quickly as I can. It’s almost like a trigger point for me to mentally and physically adjust to the tempo of the game. I rattled into some Galway player, I can’t remember who, immediately jolting and tuning my senses into the correct frequency. It felt good. I felt good. I had felt good all week.
Fresh. Eager, Hungry. Sharp.
Even when I struck that sliotar over the bar as I ran to the team photograph, I felt the strike was crisp and strong. My touch was red-hot during the warm-up. Everything was bubbling nicely. I felt ready to make a splash.
I wanted to get the legs going, to be on the move, to go hunting for action. I didn’t take on Gearoid McInerney much but the way we play anyway, I’m going to be out the field, looking to make something happen from deep, to create as much space as possible for the inside forward line, to get tackles in, to hunt down Galway players in possession.
And to get on as much ball as I could.
Every game Galway had played this year, they had started like a train. We didn’t totally focus on stalling that train or holding it up in the station early on, but I think everyone had individually focused on getting a good start, on matching their intensity. It’s kinda weird but a tackle for us is nearly like a score.
Fellas enjoy tackling. I do anyway.
4.10pm:
We were four points up but no matter what the score is at half-time, we always wipe the slate clean. “It’s a totally new game now,” Cian Lynch said a couple of times. We knew it was, that it had to be. Limerick teams have been in that position plenty of times before on big days where the 35 minutes just gone became more of a focus than the crucial 35 still to come.
Our approach was firmly reinforced in black and white terms: Stick to the process, keep going, keep hurling.
We were on top in the third quarter. We knew we were going well but we also knew it was our purple patch in the game — and that Galway’s purple patch was going to come at some stage. And it came at the worst time of the match.
The last few minutes were horrendous. We couldn’t stall Galway’s momentum. We wanted to slow down the game but we couldn’t.
In a perverse way, every minute felt like ten minutes. As Galway hunted us down, I was getting flashbacks of previous All-Ireland final defeats for Limerick. I wasn’t born when Limerick lost the 1994 and 1996 finals but I had seen the footage and heard about the heartbreak.
This felt a thousand times worse because I was living it in the moment, almost watching the potential nightmare, the absolute apocalypse stuff play out in front of me.
I was thinking, ‘God, are we going to be remembered for throwing away a nine-point lead? Will that be this team’s legacy?’
Graeme Mulcahy’s superb point to push us back in front by two settled us all down but then Joe Canning reduced the deficit to one again with a ’65. When Galway won the free which gave Joe the chance to equalise. I knew it was a long way out, that it was a big ask.
But I also realised that if anyone was capable of nailing it, Joe was.
As he dried his hands and the grip of his hurley with a towel, I was praying hard to God that the ball wouldn’t go over. As the sliotar drifted in the air towards the goal, I began praying even harder.
In mid-flight, it was obvious that it wouldn’t have the distance but it was dropping outside the square and I could see Johnny Glynn stick up his big bear-paw to try and grab the ball. Hurleys were flying everywhere.
The ball could literally have gone anywhere. ‘Please, please, please God, just let us get it clear.’ I saw Tom Condon and his white helmet emerge with the sliotar.
James Owens blew the final whistle.
BOOM!
5.10pm:
I tried to jump up in the air but my legs cramped. I fell to the floor. Guys were jumping on top of me.
Hugging. Screaming. Roaring. Shrieking.
When the madness passed for a moment, I got Pat Ryan to hold my legs up in the air to try and stretch and loosen out the intensely painful muscle contractions.
When I got to my feet, everything was a blur of happy and green chaos. It’s like this massively concussive moment, where you’re almost staggering as you attempt to take it all in, to fully absorb what has just happened. Your head is scrambled with so many emotions that it really does feel like a dream.
But it’s the dream you’ve always wanted to experience. And now you’re living it. Actually living it.
After the presentation, I met my mother and my brother Cian. My other brother Darragh handed me my niece, Ella, who I took for a stroll around Croke Park, the biggest playground in the world.
Cradling her in my arms was a special feeling but everything was still such a blur that you’re almost looking for some familiar face in the crowd to bring you back into the moment, to reinforce that this is actually happening, that this isn’t all a dream.
The collage of images and golden moments gathered over the next few hours will remain tattooed on my mind forever: Hoisting up the Liam MacCarthy to Hill 16; singing ‘Sean South from Garryowen’ in the dressing-room; getting photographs taken with the cup and the lads; just basically going wild in the warm-up area; speaking to my grandad Mike Cross on the phone afterwards, which meant so much to both of us; getting man of the match.
I knew I had played well. I was happy with my performance but I didn’t think about man of the match for a second. It was an honour and a privilege to receive the award but I honestly didn’t care about it at that stage.
I handed the huge piece of Galway Crystal to my mother and told her to mind it.
I was just so happy to have my All-Ireland medal. And to feel so free. Happy. Liberated. And so alive.
Monday, 7.59am
I almost had the breakfast room to myself. There were a handful of people in the room but none of the lads had yet surfaced. When I was making my way back up to the room around 9am, I met Willie O’Meara, and we decided to go for a swim. Willie had his breakfast while I went back upstairs to get my towel and togs.
When I got to the pool, I jumped straight in. After a while I slunk into the jacuzzi. It was nice to soothe my aching muscles but I also wanted to take the sting out of my hangover and to sweat out some of the toxins from the previous night’s drinking.
After showering, I didn’t make it back up to room until just before it was time to leave. The lobby was bananas. Most of the lads were downstairs by that stage so we went into the bar and sunk a few pints.
Everyone was hopping on the train home. As we made our way into the west, getting ourselves ready to jump into the giant bosom of our own people, the realisation of what we had done gradually began to sink in.
One of the biggest highlights of the weekend for me was seeing the massive crowd, and the emotion attached to those people, at the train station in Limerick. The passion, fervour, pride, satisfaction, and huge sense of love in our hearts was reflected on every face before us.
It was pure. And magical.
After making our way through the city, the bus parked at the back of the Gaelic Grounds. As we made our way up the stairs through the terrace before entering the stage, we knew something special awaited us. As many people as had been in Croke Park a day earlier had packed into the place.
BOOM!
Magical.
Special.
Unbelievable, almost.
Tuesday, August 21, 7am
We spent the night in Amber on Howley’s Quay. We didn’t want the night to end. Mark McCabe was DJing and when he announced at 2.30am that the music would stay going for another hour, the place exploded. I danced even harder, higher even. I was above on tables. So were all the other lads. We were up on top of each other’s shoulders. The sweat was streaming out through my pores. My shirt was soaked. I didn’t care.
We got back to the hotel around 4am.
A group of us stayed chatting in the bar for the next three hours, rekindling the magic from Sunday, reliving the homecoming, just luxuriating in the purity of that moment.
Every single second was magical. The sun was up. Another new day was upon us. Another special day where our souls, and the souls of all our people everywhere, could continue to bask in the warm afterglow of what we had achieved, of what we had created.
I staggered into bed just after 7. I was awake again by 10. Still hyped.
My body and system still jumping from adrenaline and excitement. I felt I needed more sleep but I didn’t want to sleep. I have my whole life to sleep.
I am awake now. I have never felt so awake. So liberated. Happy. Content.
And alive.
Absolutely alive.
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