The Big Interview: Joe Kavanagh and Dara Ó Cinnéide recall a sizzling Sunday in Killarney
Anthony Lynch of Cork in action against Darragh Ó Sé of Kerry during the 2000 Bank of Ireland Munster SFC semi-final. Picture: Damien Eagers/Sportsfile
Dara Ó Cinnéide is far away from it all, up walking up the northern slopes of Mount Brandon and taking in the magnificence of both the bay below and Michael Foley’s The Bloodied Field podcast, when the call transports him back to 20 years ago and the sweltering, throbbing streets of Killarney.
Although he finds that all those old Cork-Kerry battles in Munster back in his time now tend to merge into one, what makes the last do-or-die Munster Championship game between the counties stand out in the memory from all the others isn’t either of his two goals that day which proved to be the difference between the teams but a river of melted tar.
In those days – or at least that day in 2000 – Kerry didn’t arrive at Fitzgerald Stadium by bus. Instead, they met up in a hotel in town and then walked up Lewis Road among the crowd. “You wouldn’t do it now,” says Ó Cinnéide for the first but not the last time over the course of a chat often contrasting how different things were back then to how they are now.
“And the tar on the road was melting from the heat. And this was only June, not July.”
The date raised the temperature further within the ground itself. It was Kerry’s first game of the summer, eight whole weeks since they’d narrowly lost a league semi-final in Thurles to reigning All-Ireland champions Meath, and were they to lose to the auld enemy, as they had below in Cork the previous year, it would be their only game of the summer.
All that waiting. All that training. For possibly one game.
Joe Kavanagh knew well that feeling and fear. Although by then he had already played into September twice and scored a stunning goal in each of those All-Ireland finals, he was also painfully familiar with the feeling of Cork’s championship being over before even June was over.
Like Ó Cinnéide now, his recall of that game in 2000 can be blurry; when you’ve three young boys just like Ó Cinnéide now has four girls, football, or at least old games of it, tends to fade in the memory, whatever about in importance.
But what he does remember is that at the time that game was everything. Everything.
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It’s only when you look back you see how crazy it all was. You had league games in October so you were back training when the All-Ireland was on if you weren’t playing in it yourself. A few weeks before Christmas you’d be playing a game on some old pitch in the muck and the shit which probably meant nothing afterwards by the time it came to play Kerry in June or July.
And then if you lost that game to Kerry, that was it, until you’d be called back in again in September and you did it all again for possibly one game.
One league game before Christmas that definitely mattered was the one against Cork in ’99. They had beaten us well earlier that summer in the Munster final down below in Cork in the rain.
Cork had injured players all over the field acting as waterboys, coming in roaring and shouting with their water bottles and I remember thinking, ‘God, this is new, they’re really up for this.’ So we were sickened after that, and then to add a bit more bite to things, Páidí in a newspaper column after they lost the All-Ireland final to Meath said that it was only the wire that kept in some of the Cork forwards.
Both team’s next game was below in Páirc Uí Rinn that Halloween. Myself and Darragh Sé were actually at the wedding of an old teammate, Seán Burke, the same day because Darragh was only over after the shingles which hampered him that season while I needed a break from too much football.
Next thing word filtered through the hotel that Kerry had hammered Cork [0-19 to 0-7]. That [Seamus] Moynihan had played midfield and scored four points from there and that there had been a couple of incidents, like one of the new lads Enda Galvin [Louise’s brother] getting stuck into Don Davis.
There was a freshness and edge about us going into 2000. That Christmas we headed off to the Canaries as a group to get to know the younger lads better. Plus Moynihan was the captain. That was huge. He was just loved. Respected. Revered.
He didn’t have to try to be a figurehead, he just was a figurehead. I still notice when I see pictures of him parading the cup, the awe the younger lads had for him, hanging off any move or word of his. Going into the Cork game, it couldn’t have been set up better for us. The hurt was still there from the previous year. Although they had a bit of hurt themselves.
A big thing going into the game in 2000 was that we had Colin [Corkery] and Steven [O’Brien] back. They hadn’t been there in ’99 when we’d nearly won the All-Ireland and a lot of us would feel we’d definitely have got over the line against Meath if they had been there. The atmosphere at those games, especially ones like that game in 2000 in Killarney, was electric. Going around in the parade, you’d be thinking, ‘This is it. This is what we’re after training our backsides off for.’
You knew that if you won you were likely in an All-Ireland semi-final. That was the carrot all the time.
I remember the two penalties all right. That one of them on Ronan [McCarthy] was very soft. With the other then, Seán Óg [Ó hAilpín] fouled me but he barely fouled me. You could say Michael Curley technically got both of them right but they felt soft.
In the second half, Cork came back at us after Philip Clifford took a free over by the terrace side and Colin Corkery got a great connection to it with his fist for a goal. And I remember looking at the ref, thinking, ‘Two years ago you disallowed the exact same goal for us in the All-Ireland semi-final against Kildare!’ Both goals are almost identical: for us, Maurice [Fitzgerald] kicked the ball in and Denis O’Dwyer got a fist to it. But then a part of me copped: He’s probably compensating to Cork for the soft penalties. He’d gotten an awful bollicking from Tompkins.
My one vivid memory of that day was when we were coming back at them I was going through about 30 yards from goal when Tomás [Ó Sé] pulled me back. These days it would be an automatic black card and I remember even then thinking, ‘A yellow card isn’t enough for a foul like that.’
I used to practise penalties with Diarmuid Murphy for years, always thinking it could come back to haunt me in a west Kerry final between the Gaeltacht and Dingle someday.
And sure enough in 1997 in injury-time Aodán [MacGearailt] was fouled. And I remember putting the ball down thinking, ‘You fecker, Murph, you know me inside out!’ But I tucked it away and we won.
The one thing I never told him until we were retired was that I had the Jan Molby approach to penalties. If he kicked a penalty to the left one day, he’d kick it to the right the next; performance analysis wouldn’t exactly have been big in those days so wouldn’t have picked it up.
My last training session before that game against Cork, I’d have put away penalty to the keeper’s left, so I had my mind made up that if we got a penalty, I was going to go to Kevin O’Dwyer’s right. But then when we got a second penalty, I broke my own rule and went to the right again. Kevin actually guessed right both times but they went low and hard.
The backdoor came in the next year. They beat us in the Páirc by three points and then the following week we were out again versus Galway in Croke Park. It was a little bit too soon of a turnaround but they tweaked it and got it down to a tee.
After a couple of the years of the backdoor, some of that edge in Cork-Kerry games in Munster was lost all right. I’d say for games down in the Páirc anyway it took at least 10,000 off the crowd. I remember in 2012 Ireland were playing Croatia later that evening and strolling down to the Páirc we were taken by how few people were around.
There was only something like 22,000 there. But I’d still take what they have now over what we had with the extra games and second chance.
I think inter-county players have it a lot better now. I know they train harder – or at least smarter – than us and they put their lives on hold, but the game is better. Conditions are better. Their programme of games is better, where they get seven league games, none before Christmas, a few games in the backdoor, and if you’re good enough, get to play in the Super 8s.
I remember when we lost in ’99 down below in Cork, I remember staying down on the booze with an old lad from Lispole, and the next day we went into the Western Star. And next thing Phillip Clifford walked in. And it never occurred to me to go over to talk to him.
Except maybe for the Galway lads, we kept ourselves to ourselves right through the end of my career. Why I don’t know. I’m sure there were lads who went on All-Star trips or were away with the International Rules go to know each other but I had no interest in it.
But afterwards you think, Why not? Like, what was it about the rivalry and the bullshit?
The only time I’d have socialised with the Kerry lads was down in Australia in ’99 with the International Rules. Darragh and Seamus and myself would have a few beers together.
But other than that, we didn’t meet them. Páidí probably had them reared that way, and Billy had us the same way. But now you have more lads in college together. It’s different.
: A few years ago a club in Australia brought a few of us out for the opening of their pavilion and on the flight over Brian McGuigan was on the aisle across from me, so we chatted away. And it was a great few days away meeting lads from other counties.
Seán Óg was on the same trip. We’d have had a great chat at the airport both ways; like me, he wouldn’t be a boozer. And that was nice. I always admired how he played his sport. To be honest, he was nearly too honourable to play full-back in football; he was too clean for it, he wouldn’t foul you.
: You actually wouldn’t see a lot of our own lads other than the fellas in Nemo. I’d be friendly still with Podsie [O’Mahony] and Pat Hegarty but it’s rare you’d see other lads. Maybe if we’d won more there’d be more reunions. I thought there might have been something for the U21 team that won the All-Ireland in ’94 but there wasn’t.
A couple of times alright I might pick up the phone randomly and give Barry O’Shea a call or Moynihan. But we wouldn’t socialise together. The team of ’97 got together alright for a night three years ago but only for Stephen Stack that wouldn’t have happened. We should be better at that. Of course this year is 20 years since 2000 but…
During the lockdown I remember thinking, God, all these playbacks are probably a bad thing for some people, showing how slow the game was or whatever! But you’d still take pride in it [his career].
That you competed at that level. That you donned the red jersey. I remember watching all those Cork-Kerry games in ’87, ’88, ’89, ’90 as a young fella and thinking, ‘Someday I’m going to do that.’ And I’m glad I did. I didn’t get that All-Ireland medal in the end but you’d still have lots of people coming up talking to you about the goals you got in the finals in ’93 and ’99.
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