The Kieran Shannon Interview: Colm O’Neill is still keeping the bright side out

Serious knee injuries blighted Colm O’Neill’s inter-county career, but instead of focusing on the negatives or his misfortune, the recently retired All-Ireland winning attacker still prefers to concentrate on the positives and fond memories from his time as a Cork footballer.

The intention wasn’t to start or dwell on all the injuries that Colm O’Neill endured during his fine (if often interrupted) career, but to instead capture how grateful and positive he is now looking back on it. Yet if anything captures his sunny disposition it’s the extraordinary outlook he adopted each of the three times his cruciate gave way.

He won’t lie to you, the first three seconds the leg buckled was “sheer torture”; the second and third time it went, he was too afraid to look down in case his hunch and fear that something had been separated — broken — was true.

But every time that he learned it was “only” a cruciate, he could live with it. He could get on with it. He would move on from it.

“I always try to draw some positive out of every situation. And with the cruciates, I was able to find the same positive every time,” he says.

“It’s funny, they happened the exact same way — it was always running out to a ball and hopping onto it, landing, then the leg locking, buckling.

And it always happened around the same time of year — a few days after Paddy’s Day, around the fifth or sixth round of the league. I often wondered, actually, was there something in that — was it the pitch at that time of year, maybe the training I was doing?

“I don’t know, I couldn’t come to any conclusion.

“But anyway, I’d be thinking — right! April — have the operation. And say you rehab for nine months — that means you’d be coming into November, December, January, the preseason basically, with a preseason behind you already.

“So you were already going to be in a better position than someone just starting off in preseason. I’d know from all the hard slog I’d have done through the summer and the autumn that come the start of the new season, I had those days in the memory bank.

“And then I’d have a few McGrath Cup games and league games to ease me back. I wouldn’t have liked it if I were trying to rush back in the middle or the end of the championship, not having much work or any games behind me.

“Instead when I got injured, I could just say: ‘Right, just forget about the year, wipe it out, forget about it. Let’s just do the work now and we’ll be ready for next year.’”

It's not just quite a mindset to have, but it’s quite one to even comprehend. Another player would be cursing at their fate, a whole year down the drain. The way O’Neill came to look at it, he had almost a whole year to get ready for the next one. Those poor lads getting primed for a Munster final and All-Ireland quarter-final while he was still in rehab would be left in his wake come the following preseason.

It also helped that the likes of Conor Counihan had the sense and compassion to allow him to stay around his teammates preparing for those big games in Killarney and Croker. He’d still use the same physios as them, still go for food after training with them, even do the water for them on match day. “The only thing I was missing out was actually going out and playing.”

The best part was that they let him on the bus for games as well. A year like 2011 he felt it was too raw to go the Munster final as a spectator so instead watched it from an Irish bar in Dubrovnik, but by 2013 when he was on the way back from the third cruciate, he was on the Cork bus pulling into Fitzgerald Stadium.

There’d be times during the hard slog where you’d obviously be going: ‘Jesus Christ, is this getting better at all?’ but then you’d be on the bus going through the crowds in Killarney and it’d give you goosebumps. And a kick up the hole. ‘Hey, this is where you want to get back to. This time next year…’

In a way, it reminded him of what lit him up as a kid. His grandfather, Eddie O’Connor, wasn’t just a stalwart with Ballyclough GAA who’d later name their stand after him, but a steward in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, so Colm used to tag along with him, back in those innocent days when no pass was required. Instead he had access-all-areas and would fully avail of it, watching in awe as the teams came off the bus — there were fewer headphones back then, he notes — and then after they vacated the field, he’d get brave and slip onto the hallowed turf himself, with a hurley and sliotar if it was Joe Deane and the boys who had been playing, or a football if it had been his idol and fellow left-footer, Joe Kavanagh.

“You’d be commentating to yourself, kicking the ball over the bar. And then when you’d get home, you’d be straight out the back garden again, thinking: ‘God, some day I’d love to be out there myself.’ ”

The odds were stacked against him. When he first made the Ballyclough team at 16 they hadn’t won a north Cork junior final in 38 years. Nobody seemed to even know where it was. When he scored 2-3 in a primary schools hurling game before the 2001 Munster final, the programme had him listed as hailing from Ballinlough — Rockies, hurling, country. Ballyclough must have been some kind of typo. Whoever came from Ballyclough?

That thinking though would need to change. O’Neill would be called up to a Cork U14 development squad, and though he wouldn’t make the equivalent at U16, his performance in a north Cork football final against Charleville that same year both alerted and anguished a Paddy Sheehan, Charleville manager but also a Cork minor selector. After the match he made a beeline to the youngster to congratulate him on the 1-3 he had taken his team for and enquired if he was interested in going for a trial with the county minors the following year.

By 2009, O’Neill had won two U21 All-Irelands, the second as team captain, while his clubmate Paul O’Flynn had captained the Cork IT team that won that year’s Sigerson Cup, with O’Neill by his side. Where is Ballyclough? Heading into Mallow from Cork, take the first exit on the roundabout, past the racecourse, then take a right and in a couple of miles you’ll be there.

What made 2009 all the more impressive was that O’Neill was coming off his first cruciate injury, sustained in a club game against Fermoy in April of the previous year. It set in play a certain trend — after a standout season, he’d do his cruciate, only to bounce right back with another standout season.

• 2007: All Ireland U21 winner.
• 2008: Cruciate.
• 2009: U21 and Sigerson winner, All-Ireland senior finalist and goalscorer and Young Player of the Year nominee.
• 2010: League and All Ireland senior winner.
• 2011: Cruciate.
• 2012: All Star and National League winner.
• 2013: Cruciate.
• 2014: Represents Ireland in the International Rules down in Perth.

Every setback was just the launchpad for another comeback.

And that is why he looks back on his career with such fondness. It’s become something of its own genre, the story of a recently-retired Cork footballer — the great days under Billy and Conor even though there should probably have been another couple of great September days thrown in there; followed by the decline and where successive managements and the county board got it wrong.

But that’s not the mood music O’Neill wants played here while we’re sitting down over lunch in the Rochestown Park Hotel.

This is where the team would meet up before every home match. Time could have dragged there, with three hours to kill, but then a Dr Con might have a yarn to tell, invariably O’Neill had to get a rub from Colin Lane, and then a thing after the meeting, they’d all rise from their chairs to get onto the bus and you’d just know from the look of a Canty that there was no way you were going to lose that day.

Some people would say we could have won more while we were at it, but it’s only now I can look back and appreciate how fortunate I was to be part of such a great Cork team and the big games we played in.

He thinks of a year like 2009, his first with the seniors after being called up within weeks of lifting the Tim Clarke Cup with the U21s. In the championship in Killarney he had an injury-time ’45 to put Cork ahead. He’d later learn that Darragh Ó Sé shouted something to him while he approached the ball but at the time O’Neill was so cocooned in concentration, he was as indifferent to Ó Sé’s utterings as Maurice Fitzgerald was to Tom Carr’s in Thurles eight years earlier. He’d ping the ball over the bar and though Bryan Sheehan would do precisely the same a minute later to bring the game to a replay, Ó Sé would seek out the Old Firm debutant and extend his apologies and congrats.

“Sorry about that. And fair play. It took some balls to kick that.”

Cork would win that replay, but come September Kerry would again edge them in Croke Park in Ó Sé’s last-ever game for the Kingdom. Yet as crushing as that day was, O’Neill can now recall it with some fondness. As the team were getting on the bus to head to Croker, Dr Con Murphy saddled up to him.

“Hey, when you rattle the net today, don’t forget to turn around and give a little punch of the air with your fist!”

O’Neill laughed it off. “Go away, Con!” Headphones on. But then 10 minutes in when Tommy Griffin slipped and O’Neill unleashed a cross-goal rocket to the far top corner, he found himself doing punching the air and then thinking of an old friend, the laughing doctor on the sideline, knowing it was just a case of ‘when’.

The golden year was 2010, its golden memory being the semi-final. O’Neill didn’t start that day against the Dubs; in the quarter-final he’d been cleaned out by Roscommon’s Seanie McDermott, the

latest member of the retired players club, he noted, and was taken off at half-time. During the second half he found himself warming up by the corner of the Davin End, looking up and seeing Hill 16 awash in blue and the stands peppered in red.

The atmosphere that day was unbelievable. Even better than an All-Ireland. I remember us on the bus, getting some gestures going through parts of Dublin, but sure all you could was laugh at it, love it. And when I looked up at the Hill that time, I was just dying to get on the pitch. ‘Come on here and do something special.’

And so he would, winning the penalty that turned the game and then kicking a point that proved to be the difference between the teams.

That would be the only Sam Maguire O’Neill would win, but over the years he’d come to realise he’d win something just as precious — the respect of opponents.

When he returned to action in 2014 and kicked a couple of trademark late points to inflict a rare defeat on Dublin under the Croke Park Saturday night lights, Stephen Cluxton sought him out to welcome him back.

Then last June, after he came on for the last few minutes of the Munster final, he found himself lingering out on the field, knowing he might never play in a Munster final again, when he received a tap on the shoulder. It was David Clifford, who’d just played in his first Munster final, who wanted to express how much, as a fellow leftie corner forward, he had admired and even aped O’Neill’s game.

“I had never met the man before,” says O’Neill. “I thought it was a very nice thing to do.”

In truth, he can’t say a bad word about an opponent, because none of them had a bad word to say to him.

“People ask me who was the dirtiest player I marked. This is genuine — I can’t think of anyone who was dirty or underhand or was mouthy or tried to get into my head. They all marked me — [Ryan] McMenamin, the Ó Sés, the McGees, [Philly] McMahon. All tough, but all fair. And never any verbals. For what reason, I don’t know — because some of them do do it! I’ve seen it!

“Funny enough, in ’09 against Tyrone, we were well prepared for that sort of stuff. We hadn’t really come across it before but it was out there that they’d be mouthy, in your face, that you’d know your girlfriend’s name, your mother’s name. We had a lot of work done with Conor [Counihan] to be ready for that. But during the match — nothing, like. It was no harm to have that base covered, but it didn’t happen.”

In fact, a few years ago, O’Neill’s marker that day, PJ Quinn, would call him after he did his own cruciate, and asked for some advice from a man who knew all about it better — and bounced back from it better — than anyone else.

There was only so much though that even O’Neill could take. The Thursday after the Munster final he re-aggravated a knee injury that had caused him to limp off in the Munster semi-final against Tipperary, and even as he dropped out of that tackling drill and limped behind the goal towards the dressing room, he sensed it was over.

After a couple of consultations and conversations with some medics he knew well — probably too well — it confirmed his hunch. It was time to let it go. He might not yet have been 30, and his fellow 2009 Young Footballer of the Year nominees Aidan O’Shea and Michael Murphy were showing no signs of finishing any time soon, but as Colin Lane reminded him, he’d had a good run at it too. He’d won his All-Ireland, his All-Star, the respect of anyone who played with or against him.

“I could try and go on, but I’d only be going out to play a match, thinking: ‘This could go here. I can’t turn here.’ That’s not the mind frame you need to be in.

The worst part of it that pissed me was that I couldn’t play for the club either. After 10 years of only meeting up with them the week of a championship match, I was looking forward to giving a lot of years back to them.

But then he came round to the idea that he still could. He played a league game in goals for the hurlers after they were knocked out of the championship. And then he played a couple of games in goals for the footballers.

And then he played an inter-firm game in goals for the bank, AIB, with whom he works for in finance and leasing.

There’s a quick — trick — question he has for you: name the last Cork goalkeeper to score in Croke Park? No, not Anthony Nash, just down the road in Kanturk — the answer is a footballer. No, not John Kerins or Alan Quirke or Billy Morgan or Kevin O’Dwyer.

“It’s Colm O’Neill,” he smiles. He scored a couple of 45s in that inter-firm game against the Defence Forces, including one in the last minute to equalise it, only for an opponent to come down and do a Sheehan and win the game for the army.

And so, this year he will play football for the club after all. In goals, with the ball under his arm, tee in his hand, and ready to come up the field to nail any free or 45, the north Cork equivalent of Stephen Cluxton, the man who sought him out when he was nailing shots in the clutch under the Croker lights. And he’ll go in goals for the hurlers too, if they’ll let him — at junior, he should be able to get away with it in both codes.

He signed up the other day to play golf in Mallow Golf Club and tips over in the gym in the Montenotte Hotel near to the home in Glanmire himself and his wife Claire bought last year. But football still consumes him. He’ll be going to all Cork’s home games — he’s optimistic about this year, feeling the hard base and work they’ve put down over the winter will stand to them, and that as welcome as the 2024 document is, Cork don’t have to wait until then to be competitive once more.

And he’ll still be making the 40-minute drive to Ballyclough a few times a week to play and train in front of the stand named after his granddad who let him mix with the stars.

Maybe not still self-commentating. But still dreaming, still balling.