Darker days when Kiely hurled as Limerick struggled to return to light

Tom Ryan started to go about picking up the pieces in an Oireachtas opener against Wicklow.

Limerick Hurling 1994. John Kiely. © Tom Honan\INPHO

Salubrious, John Kiely’s inter-county hurling career never was nor has he ever made it out to be.

“I was a fringe player,” he told the Irish Examiner in 2018. “I was an extended panelist in ‘94 and I was a sub in ‘96. I would have been called in and out of the panel, left go, brought back in, played intermediate.” 

Seven games, five starts, none in the championship. One league campaign and one in the now defunct Oireachtas Cup in which there was one very sorry day in Arklow. Tom Ryan remembers October 6, 1996. “I fucking do,” he chuckles. “Are you bringing this up to ridicule me or what?” 

Five weeks after heartbreak was visited on Limerick in a second All-Ireland final in three years when Wexford applied the pain and less than four following the infamous 20 questions he was asked by the county board executive, Ryan started to go about picking up the pieces in an Oireachtas opener against Wicklow.

Blending squad players like Kiely and youngsters like Clem Smith around regulars Mike Nash, Frankie Carroll, Davy Clarke and Pádraig Tobin, the hope was they would negotiate a no-win situation and move on. Instead, the home side won by five points, their greatest hurling day since a draw against Galway in the league in 1971.

Ryan was never one to entertain a fixture being fulfilled. “In my time in management, I never looked at any game as a chore. Playing after the disappointment of Wexford or Offaly (in 1994) never entered into my head. If we had to go to Beijing the following Sunday never mind up to Wicklow, we would have gone.

“It was a great win for Wicklow because it wasn’t like we weren’t trying. We had a couple of tight scrapes in my time – we beat Meath above in Trim on a controversial score that Gary Kirby put over. In my short time with Limerick, I never put out a team that wasn’t trying.” 

Lining out alongside older brother James, the game marked Ollie Moran’s senior bow for Limerick, the last the 29-point All-Ireland semi-final capitulation to Tipperary in 2009, the game which prompted Kiely into management. “That was a fair start and finish to a career,” he laughs.

Stuck to the ground and facing a wind, Limerick trailed 2-10 to 1-4 at half-time. Kiely held his man to a point but the damage elsewhere was permanent. Carroll scored his second in the second half and the deficit whittled down to four but Wicklow saw out the game with points from John Keogh, Don Hyland and Timmy Collins.

Moran recalls: “Don Hyland would have played a lot of Railway Cup with Leinster. He beat us on his own that day. I remember coming out of Arklow that day and the mood would have been fairly subdued anyway because it was the first game after the All-Ireland.

“(Former Limerick selector) ’Jap’ Ryan, who would have been a very close friend of John Kiely’s who died in a car accident the following year Lord have mercy on him, was there and Tom Ryan and it was the hangover from the night before. But us younger players were coming from it from a different point of view. We were getting to play for Limerick who had been in an All-Ireland final.

“There was a bit of a crowd there and they started getting louder and louder. They did a number on us. It would be like Kerry going to Leitrim and being beaten. We weren’t a weak team. We have five or six regulars but there might have been a few there in body but not in spirit. It was like we were on tour, using a rugby analogy, and then we had to play a team midweek having been beaten in the Test game.” Was there embarrassment? Yes. Even shame, admits Moran. 

“Ah there was, of course there was. A team who had been in an All-Ireland and then you’re beaten by a minnow. Wicklow couldn’t have been any better prepared than what we were. It’s one of the things that would never happen now like a Division 3 or 4 team beating a top Premier League team in the FA Cup.

“Fellas didn’t really have much of an appetite for the game, thought it would take care of itself. Before you know it, you’d after conceding a couple of soft scores and it gave them momentum and drained the energy for us. There was definitely a bit of shame – there’s no point in saying otherwise.” 

Then 24, Kiely only played one more time for Limerick’s seniors in the following month’s Oireachtas Cup win over Kilkenny in Bruff. Ryan claims Kiely would have played more games had he not been removed as manager after winning the following year’s Division 1 title.

“John Kiely was a fine hurler. He was involved with me for a couple of seasons. We had him as a stand-in for Davy Clarke or Declan Nash who were in the top bracket at the time and it was very hard to break through.

“John Kiely had a great tradition of hurling, both left and right. He was very solid. If I’d been left in a position, John Kiely would have been brought up to the level that we were at. I was curtailed in my numbers by the county board but all the players were very important, all of them were there on merit. That’s why John Kiely was there.”