Ambrose O'Donovan: My goal was to get on the Kerry team. Captaincy didn't come into it
Play It As It Lies.... Forty years after they captained their respective counties to All-Ireland senior titles in the GAA’s centenary year, Kerry and Cork greats Ambrose O’Donovan and John Fenton were pulling strokes once again on Lough Lough Leane. Picture: Don McMonagle
Ambrose O’Donovan is still prone to the goosebumps.
As a member of the Radio Kerry commentary team with Tim Moynihan, Croke Park’s Level 7 has become familiar to him but last year, one shy of this the 40th year anniversary of him lifting the Centenary Sam Maguire Cup, he took in a tour of the stadium.
The experience brought it all back. “Walking up the steps of the Hogan Stand, the hair stood on the back of the neck. I wasn't there before and I won't be there again. But I walked up to where the cup was, there was a game on, an All-Ireland club final and I actually walked up where the cup was, and I'm afraid to look back at how far it is. You are better off looking back and saying it is in the past and leave it at that!”
The memories of 1984, at least the late season ones, are only pleasant. After Tadhg Murphy landed a killer blow for Cork in the 1983 Munster final, Kerry efforts were doubled and then doubled again. As a 21-year-old captain, O’Donovan was let know in no uncertain terms that they had to strike back.
“I think it was PO (Páidí Ó Sé), God rest his soul, who said, 'This is a nice year, Centenary year, a year of note for the GAA'. Let's have a cut off it. And that was the first time it dawned on us that it was 1984.
“More importantly from a Kerry perspective, they’d lost two and taken two bad hits and they figured more in the tank and we had a meeting early on in January. We trained very hard, it was my first real sense of tough training because we said we were going to leave no stone unturned and it was the senior players that time, they were rowing in together 'this was it'.”
In December 1983, O’Donovan had “a heart-to-heart” with Mick O’Dwyer about what he had to do to make the team. Diarmuid O’Donoghue, James’ father, was the East Kerry nomination to lead the team but picked up an injury before the Munster final against Cork, the first piece of tin “Rosie” lifted.
“My goal was to get on the team. Captaincy didn't come into it. The big thing was to get on the team. Captaincy to our team, it wasn't a big deal, you had to speak before games, fair enough. If there was a problem with training, food or whatever, you'd have to make a delegation but it wasn't a big deal.
“I was lucky enough that I was good friends with the elder statesmen, they put me under their wing and I was looked after. So I was shielded from all the real pressure of captaincy. But to their credit, you were told what was expected of you as captain of the team and that made it easy for me.
“The way it fell to me, there's an old saying, ‘You are better to be born lucky than rich.’ It was Diarmuid O'Donoghue's misfortune and he was actually my wife's first cousin. When he got injured and when Gneeveguilla won the East Kerry championship, I was the only East Kerry rep, that's how I got the captaincy.”
The morning of the All-Ireland final against Dublin, the multiple All-Ireland winners set O’Donovan straight on the day ahead. “I always felt the older fellas, they put their hands around you and said, ‘Look, forget this now, captaincy, this is an All-Ireland final, we have to win it.' I found them brilliant. I was friends with all of them. They all gave advice without overdoing it.
“Under O'Dwyer you always had your game-plan, you knew exactly what was expected of you. Your defence, for me and Jacko (Shea), Jacko was given a free rein and I was the man who had to stay around. I held the middle, between the two 50s and that's where they wanted me to play."
“If you were doing something wrong they'd tap you on the shoulder, none better than PO and say 'hey lad, you need to cop on. That's the way it was.” The nervousness in Kerry about Derry on Sunday is shared by O’Donovan and he hopes extra-time in Castlebar and this a third game in as many weekends will tax them.
He wants to see Kerry’s backs focus on their primary duties in this quarter-final. “The one thing that bothers me with Kerry is defensively, our defence are too attack-minded, in particular our full-back line. I saw them, particularly in the Meath game, there was an occasion when Tom Sullivan and Jason Foley were literally inside David Clifford and Seánie O'Shea and there was nothing between them and the Meath goalkeeper.
“We're saying our forwards aren't playing that well. They need room and against Derry we need to be defensive-minded and our six defenders will have to be exactly that, defend first and foremost.”
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