2000 and beyond: Éamonn Fitzmaurice's inside story of Kerry’s All-Ireland success 25 years ago
Seamus Moynihan, right, and Peter O'Leary of Kerry celebrate with the Sam Maguire cup at the hill following the All-Ireland SFC Final Replay at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
MY late father, also Eamonn, kept a diary his whole life. As gaeilge. Sometimes detailed, occasionally brief. He passed away in January 2019, but I never had the heart to read back over them. Until this week, for this article.
I went through his recollections of the year 2000, specifically our All-Ireland win, my first, through his eyes. He was a quiet and humble man who would never burden you with excessive praise, but reading back on his thoughts the pride of a parent is clear, even if he rarely showed it.
As I have aged I have a much better appreciation of the fantastic journey I was personally on at the time, and by extension my family with me. Back then I was so obsessed with performing, winning and never overthinking or playing the occasion that I was unaware of what it meant to my family, and what they went through.
All of the little traditions they had, where they stayed, ate, where tickets were collected or distributed and the people they met before and after matches. The magic of being in the inner circle and being more invested than most.
While the years have flown by, it was a long time ago now. In 2000 nearly everyone had a Nokia phone, predominantly the famous Nokia 3310. If you don’t know what it is ask your parents. Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach, Tiger Woods was on the way to his Tiger Slam, a litre of milk cost 40p, with the Euro still a couple of years away and Mark McCabe enjoyed an extended run at number 1 with Maniac 2000.
Personally, it was an extremely special year. I had been knocking around the squad for a few years, made my championship debut in 1998 but the millennium year was the year I established myself on the team. For the next seven years I never missed a championship game. For the first five I started every one of them. As the Jubilee team, that special group is being presented to the crowd before Sunday's All-Ireland final. I’m still struggling to get my head around the fact that is the stage we are at now. The Peter Pan syndrome is real.
The 2000 championship was the final one of the straight knockout variety, with the qualifiers introduced the following year. Cork beat us in the Munster Final in 1999, in a sickening loss. We were back training early with three league matches played before Christmas back then. Our first game? Cork below there.
Páidí Ó Sé began to break up his successful 1997 team. He was giving opportunities to a whole host of the victorious under 21 players from 1998. We beat them by 12 points in a strong, vengeful performance that signalled our intent for the season.
For the rest of that winter I was double- and triple-jobbing. We won the county hurling championship with Lixnaw and the Cork county championship with UCC. We lost in Munster with Lixnaw but went on the win the Munster club championship with UCC. One weekend I played with UCC on Saturday in Dungarvan against Rathgormack and then with Kerry against Dublin in Parnell Park the following day. During that UCC campaign I was centre back for the college. I found my home.
For the previous few seasons with Kerry I had played in a host of different positions. From corner back, to wing back, to wing forward. I was at my most comfortable and best at six though. I played every minute of every game there for the rest of the season. While I was off playing with UCC the new squad members trained hard physically under John O’Keeffe’s tutelage and staked claims for the 2000 squad, among them my own club mate Enda Galvin.
Any year a team wins an All-Ireland a lot is done right. One of the key things we did was go to Gran Canaria for a week in January on a bonding trip. The 1997 crew had great stories from their trips to Hawaii, New York and elsewhere, which kept the dressing room entertained. The rest of us enjoyed listening to the yarns but there was a pecking order established via the storytelling. You could laugh along but you couldn’t relive the scéal. You were one of the boys, but you weren’t really.
In the Canaries we stayed in the Stil Marieta where there was mayhem every night when we got back to our lodgings after evenings spent together. Each morning we would wake up to new issues and a lecture from the resort manager, an English guy called Mark.
Eventually it came to a head and we were given our final warning. Any more problems and we were out, mid-week and without a flight to Ireland until the weekend. His punchline which he gleefully delivered, was “we want your money, but we don’t want you here.” He even confiscated our passports.
To his eternal credit, Eddie ‘Tatler’ O Sullivan, a selector, was the only one who wouldn’t surrender his. Even Páidí did. After Mark was finished with us Páidí gathered us in one of the small hotel rooms and gave us a right going over. He wasn’t too bothered about what went on elsewhere but he warned us not the crap on our own doorstep. At the end of the meeting he said “right lads we will finish this in Patrick’s Bar”.
We all went down the strip to the bar and there was no sign of Páidí so we thought he had abandoned us. Shortly after he landed on with an old fashioned patterned suitcase, which he opened in a corner of the bar revealing a wad of pesetas. He had fundraised himself so we would have a few bob on the trip. He held it back for a few days as he knew we would be short as the week went on. Was it any wonder we would have died for him?
When we returned we were a tightly knit group, with a good head start on our own anthology of stories and ready for the assault on Sam.
We continued with our good form in the League and reached a semi-final where the All-Ireland champions Meath beat us in a right battle in Thurles. It again exposed us to the necessary physicality levels required and battle hardened the group. We conceded four goals the same day and it led to us considerably tightening up at the back for down the line when we conceded on average less than a goal a game.
A major shift that was forced at the back was necessitated by a serious injury to our full back Barry O’Shea. Disastrously, Barry did his cruciate playing Roscommon in the league in March. For the rest of the league Mike McCarthy and Tom O’Sullivan deputised. Both were exceptional players but inexperienced.
Páidí and his management team of John O’Keeffe, Eddie ‘Tatler’, Jack O’Connor and Eamon Walsh made the monumental decision to try Séamus Moynihan, our inspirational captain and best player there. There was huge debate in Kerry at the time, centred around whether it was a waste of Seamo’s monumental talents by moving him away from his natural habitat in the half back line, and thus curbing his attacking game.
Personally speaking I was relieved, as I was floated as an option back there too. I didn’t like playing in the full back line and was happy where I was. Seamo went on to win Footballer of the Year from full back with a series of outstanding displays on formidable opponents. He revolutionised how the position was played and was willing to drive out of defence and up the field in possession. While this is typical nowadays it was far from normal at the time.
He had his first outing there in a pitch opening when Kilmoyley’s pitch in Lerrig was officially opened when we played Galway. The next time we would see them would be in Croke Park. Ja Fallon played that evening, but by the time we renewed hostilities in the final he was a significant absentee, another cruciate victim.
Our first game in championship was against Cork in Killarney on a roasting hot day in June. We had revenge on our minds. They had beaten Limerick in Kilmallock in the quarter final. I travelled with my Dad to see that game.
In those days, where every game wasn’t videoed, if you wanted to scout an opposition or an opponent that was the only way to do it. When I took my place on the bank Páidí wasn’t far down the line from me, keenly watching on. We didn’t chat at the game but we made eye contact as one stage and he nodded approvingly in my direction. I felt like the teacher's pet, but picked up some valuable insights on how Cork played and in particular my detail for the day, Joe Kavanagh.
The day of the game I can vividly recall going across the road from Dr Crokes pitch, to a packed Fitzgerald Stadium and the tar was melting on the road. I stuck to the extremely dangerous Kavanagh limpet like for the duration, by foul means as much as fair.
Dara Ó Cinnéide slotted two penalties and we won by five. Cork staged a second half come back but we held firm. Another score that stood out that day was a great point from Liam Hassett. Páidí loved it and showed it to us on video more than once afterwards.
Declan O’Keeffe had huge distance on his restarts and floated it over everyone down on top of Liam, who won it, spun and kicked it over. Two kicks and a point. Traditional Kerry football according to the boss.
Back then after a match we always went out for more than a few pints on the Sunday night, and usually on the Monday as well. It was great craic. After beating Clare in Limerick in the Munster Final, on a whim I jumped in a car and headed west with Tomás and Tommy Griffin. We weren’t playing Armagh for five weeks, who had defeated Derry by a point the same day in winning Ulster. We ended up back in Páidí’s that night.
After Páidí had wrapped up in the bar he invited us across the road with him to watch the Ulster final and our upcoming opponents. Whatever gibberish we were talking he had enough of us by half-time and sent us packing.
As part of our semi-final preparation Paidí took us on a ‘school tour ’as he called it himself, to see Croke Park a week after we won the Munster final. It was invaluable to get a feel for the place, particularly the new perspective of the Davin Stand behind the goals at the Canal End and the unusual scene of the cranes behind the skeleton of the Hogan Stand.
We travelled as far as Borris-in-Ossory the night before and stayed in the Leix County Hotel. There was no M7 in those days. There was a disco out the back and we gave a call in to have a look. Different times.
The following day Paidí told us we were under strict instructions. We could look around and walk the pitch but we couldn’t bring footballs out on the field with us. We were all disappointed and he felt it off us. Needless to say he had a bag of footballs in the boot of the car and he brought them out himself. His personality meant no one was going to argue with him. The eight All-Ireland medals probably did no harm either. We got to have our few kicks.
In the semi-final we had two epic battles with an excellent Armagh team. They had lost the previous years semi-final and would win the All-Ireland in 2002. Just like the modern team they brought incredible support and colour with them. Those games were among the most enjoyable I ever played.
At the end of the first game we needed a Maurice Fitz free to save us, and force a replay. During the first game Cathal O’Rourke was playing wing forward and was constantly disrupting Darragh O’Sé on the ground to prevent him fielding cleanly and controlling the game for us.
There must have been some kind of discussion in Ard ‘a Bhóthair prior to the replay. Less than five minutes in O’Rourke hit the deck under a kickout. Tomás was in the vicinity. Brian White the referee consulted with his umpires but only a yellow card resulted. A marker was laid down. It put an end to O’Rourke’s shenanigans and Darragh was able to play his game and was a huge influence.
Mike Frank Russell got two goals in that replay. His second came after a typically magnificent pass from Maurice. The other thing that still sticks out was the duel between Seamo and Oisín McConville. The Crossmaglen man scored 1-9, yet Seamo was still inspirational. I got my first point for Kerry in championship, and the accompanying adrenaline rush, into the Hill that day. We required extra time to get the job done but it was a special coming of age win.
We were now zeroing in on the All-Ireland final against an excellent Galway team that had won in 1998, and would again win in 2001. Michael Donnellan, Pádraig Joyce, Kevin Walsh et al.
My run in to the final was far from ideal. I had returned to UCC in early September to pursue my H Dip in Education. Advice on nutrition was thin on the ground and I decided to have chicken and rice from a Chinese at the bottom of Barrack Street, thinking I was being the ultimate pro. My reward? Serious food poisoning. I was laid low for over a week. In between hallucinations and trips to the bathroom I watched the All Ireland hurling final from the couch in Lixnaw.
My mother Celine (a nurse) and Hazel Fitzell a doctor living across the road from us, cared for me. Otherwise I would have been hospitalised, and probably would have been ruled out. My father's diary was a good measure of the stress levels in the house at the time. Páidí rang my Mom daily to keep tabs on me advising her that a good lamb stew would sort me out!
I made it back for the drawn final but was myself for the replay when I played better and kicked a point as well as doing my defensive duties. We won relatively comfortably in the end and added the historically significant Millennium All-Ireland to the Centenary one of 1984.
That replay was played in early October. As a young and energetic crew we had fantastic fun celebrating the win that short winter. We embraced the homecoming and were happy to follow Sam all over the county. One of the stand out occasions was the Millennium Celebration.
Kerry GAA invited every surviving All-Ireland winner to a black tie event in the Brandon Conference Centre. We got to rub shoulders with all of the greats, from the different generations, where they treated us as equals, even though we were far from that. We finished out a memorable year with a team holiday to the far east to China and Thailand.
There were posters of the Chinese leader Chairman Mao everywhere. Memorably our own chairman Seán Walsh, an incredible servant to Kerry football in a variety of roles, was christened Chairman Mao by Páidí. He is still affectionately known as Mao to this day.
Our compendium of stories was expanding rapidly, and so was the accompanying laughter. A formidable spirit was being developed, one which would drive Kerry to eight All-Ireland appearances in the noughties, winning five.
All those years ago we waved goodbye to 2000 in a bar in Beijing and we will reminisce this weekend with a different type of wave. We will miss Páidí but we will laugh once more at the yarns, many of which had him as the central character. Weren’t we so lucky to be managed by him?
The final word goes to another great Bainisteoir, Mick O’Dwyer, writing after the replay in his Monday Column in this paper when he said “To date Kerry have been charged with blowing leads (hung jury), lacking bottle (acquitted), not being able to play over 70 minutes (acquitted) and having a full back problem (no case to answer). There is another answer too - a huge piece of silverware somewhere in Killarney this morning.”
It is and always was the only answer.
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