Blues moon rising - Barrs’ dressing room was a glittering cast like Ocean’s Eleven
Goalkeeper Ger Cunningham (right) in action for St. Finbarr's in the Cork SHC clash with Midleton in 1983.
In late spring 1981, the most extraordinary club team of all time reached a bottleneck. Winning was at the root of it. They brought it on themselves. In those days, there was a hippy vibe about the GAA calendar.
Nobody was in a tizzy about dates. Burnout had yet to be invented. Sundays came at regular intervals.
So, by the end of April, St Finbarr’s were in the semi-final of both All-Irelands. They had a compass but no map. Barrs were the reigning football champions, and it was only a couple of years since they had won the hurling title, but they had never reached both finals in the same year. No club ever had. Who would dream of it?
Their moon mission was condensed into five weeks, concluding at the end of May. It would have been wrapped up sooner except Cork’s hurlers had reached the final of the National League, and half a dozen Barrs’ players were stuck in that too. Jimmy Barry Murphy sickened Offaly with two goals that day. Donal O’Grady was captain.
Done. Next.
Everything about it was a period piece. There were about a dozen players common to both Barrs’ panels, and at least half of them were regular starters in hurling and football. Dual players are extinct in many places now, and harassed elsewhere, but in Cork in the 1970s and 1980s, it was an admired vocation.
Your preference was immaterial.
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Denis Burns puts it beautifully, “It was a matter of being passionate about one game, and loving the other.” Their routine flowed according to their diary. “It worked hand in glove,” says John Cremin, who was part of that generation and was later club president. “Players just wanted to play. You played hurling one week, football the next. It wasn’t a case of one or the other, you just played away. The key thing was, the way the fixtures fell, you inevitably got a fortnight between games to prepare properly. Whereas now, fellas are alternating nearly every week when they’re playing as dual players, and that is a bigger challenge.”
The tone of everything was different. Full commitment was not a blood oath. Sacrifices could be made in moderation. John Allen remembers attending a dinner in Collins Army Barracks with his wife on the night before a Munster club football game against Austin Stacks. The ins and outs of how the invitation came about is a long story, but it was in gratitude for a kindness.
“We went up there and partook of everything that was going,” says Allen. “It was a very formal affair, with six or seven courses, and there was a different wine between each course. I went off and played the match the next day and didn’t think twice about it. The whole preparation now is so much different, and the standard is so much different, but the standard at the time was of its time. You were the standard bearers of that time.
“We went from match to match. It was even a bit of a blessing to go from hurling to football. You weren’t watching your diet. There wasn’t a big drinking culture within the group or anything, but we weren’t too careful about being out. There was no gym involved. I don’t remember the training being cruel or anything. It wasn’t a big imposition. It was train twice a week, and play a match at the weekend. Other than that, you lived your life normally. It was purely about playing the games and having enough good players.
“The fact that you were winning so regularly kept it sweet for a period from 1977 to 1987 when the Barrs won the last football All-Ireland. In that period, there were so many Munster Championships won and so many County Championships won –in both codes– and then you throw in the four All-Irelands (two in hurling, two in football). And because there was less emphasis on training and preparation, it didn’t take as much out of players as training does now in terms of buy-in. Buy-in is full-on now; it wasn’t then.”
The Barrs’ dressing room was an ensemble cast of glittering names, just like Ocean’s Eleven. George Clooney? Jimmy Barry Murphy (JBM). Brad Pitt? This is no place to start a row. In his autobiography, , John Meyler likened Barry Murphy to Lionel Messi. “He could score whenever the notion took him”, adds John Allen. That gift was a boon to them all.
There were other sources of brilliance in their ranks too, but that group wasn’t distinguished by brilliance alone. At its heart was a colony of leaders and resourceful men: JBM, O’Grady and Allen all coached Cork to win All-Irelands when they finished playing; Charlie McCarthy, Burns, Meyler and Ger Cunningham coached Cork teams too.
Dave Barry split his time between football and soccer, but in later life managed Cork City to win the FAI Cup. The late Christy Ryan captained the Cork footballers to beat Kerry in a League final, and played in a staggering 20 Senior County Finals. Tony Maher was Cork’s first All-Star and an imperious corner back. The late Eamon Fitzpatrick and the late Bertie O’Brien were warriors and blue bloods. O’Brien is still the only man to captain Barrs to a County title in football and hurling.
“Fitzer and Bertie were my inspirations”, says Cremin. “Ferocious men to drive the Barrs on. They had a huge presence in the dressing room. Bertie was an inspirational captain in 1980.”
That was the mix, art and labour.
“In both groups, you had leaders”, says Allen. “Christy Ryan was a very good county player. He was the rock of the team, if you like. Mick Carey, over a ten-year period, was a very sound, solid player [for the footballers]. Eugene Desmond was the same.
“You also had the likes of Tomas Maher, John Meyler, John Blake and myself, who were outsiders coming in, as was done at the time. Fellas who came to work in the city played with different clubs. It just so happened that the four of us fell in with the Barrs, not at the same time, but over a period of three or four years.”
“You got a hungry team that came together”, said Burns, “and they made an agreement with each other to do everything they could to win.”
Their record is a towering monument to the time they shared. Between 1974 and 1984, Barrs won ten Senior County Championships, six in hurling, four in football. In the same period, they contested five All-Ireland Finals and won four of them, two in football, two in hurling.
Fenians from Kilkenny were hot favourites in the first All-Ireland Final that Barrs contested in 1975.
Barrs drilled into their native intelligence. In those days, nobody had a puck-out strategy except to hit the ball as far as possible, but as Jim Power recalled years later, Barrs came up with something. Pat Henderson was the Fenians’ centre back and he was liable to break any team’s heart in the air. Barrs didn’t give him a chance.
They pulled their wing forwards close to the sideline and spread their midfielders. Jimmy Barry Murphy was picked at centre forward, and in front of him was a corridor of space where Power could land his puck-outs short, without engaging Henderson in an aerial duel. Barry Murphy finished the game with 1-4 and was named Man of the Match. Barrs won easily, 3-8 to 1-6.
That game was played in Croke Park on Sunday, 16 March, 1975. As was customary in those days, the Railway Cup Finals were staged on St Patrick’s Day, also in Croke Park. JBM lined out for Munster in the football final a day later and scored four goals. If it were anybody else, it would be astonishing.
In more than 50 years of the competition, only 13 players have All-Ireland Club medals in both codes. Eleven of them are from Barrs: Jimmy Barry Murphy, Christy Ryan, John Allen, Donal O’Grady, Bertie O’Brien, John Cremin, Denis Burns, Eamon Fitzpatrick, Christy Myers, Jerry McCarthy and Niall Kennefick. Cuala are the only other club to win All-Irelands in both codes, which is a staggering achievement in the modern era. But in 1981, Barrs nearly did it in the same year.
The hurling came first. Ballyhale Shamrocks torpedoed them. For the Kilkenny champions, it was the beginning of a dynasty. Barrs didn’t see them coming. Seven Fennelly brothers played that day, three of them accounted for all of Shamrocks’ scores.
“I remember the match was in Thurles,” says Allen, “and we travelled by train, which we rarely did.
We were hanging around for a good bit, I forget how long, but it felt like a long time. I felt it was a big distraction. We were hanging around. We didn’t know much about Ballyhale.”
After that, Barrs had seven days to steady themselves for a football semi-final against Scotstown, the Monaghan champions. A year earlier, in Clones, they had met in the semi-final too, in a game characterised by the Evening Echo as “tempestuous”. “The Barrs”, continued the report, “kept their composure under the most extreme provocation.”
“It was like going to Galatasaray,” says Allen. “I don’t remember much about the game, but I do remember the tension. They were a typical northern team, tough… teak-tough. Different brand of football. The second year we played them in the Páirc, and we were delighted to have them in Cork. That game was just as tense and as dour and as tight.”
“The game against Scotstown in Clones was phenomenal,” says Cremin. “It was a huge journey up the country. It was the time of The Troubles as well, and whatever way we travelled you crossed the border to get to it. It was a fierce tough game. It was a bit of a battle.”
In 1980, the final score was 0-7 to 0-4; in the rematch a year later, it was 0-8 to 0-4. Barrs couldn’t have been champions without being street smart too.
At the end of May, they beat the Meath champions, Walterstown, to retain the All-Ireland. Only UCD had won back-to-back football titles before then, and only Crossmaglen Rangers and Corofin have achieved it since.
Later that summer, the hurlers won the Cork title again, opening up the prospect of three-in-a-row for the first time in their history. Long campaigns had consumed their winters for years, and they didn’t believe they could go all-out in pursuit of another All-Ireland without damaging their prospects in Cork the following summer.
“At that stage, the County Championship was nearly more important than the All-Ireland club”, says Cremin. “It would take a lot out of you. We won the County in 1977, won the Club All-Ireland and then were beaten in the county championship in ’78. Previously, the Glen had won the All-Ireland Club and lost the County. Blackrock did likewise. Now, you never go out to lose a game, but you’re kind of saying, ‘Which is more important?’ When we won the County [hurling] in 1981 and ’82, it wasn’t as much of a priority to win the All-Ireland.”
They agreed on the three-in-a-row in Cork as their primary goal. They weren’t tired, they weren’t satisfied; they nailed it. Between 1980 and 1982, that extraordinary bunch of players won five County titles, three in hurling and two in football. Nobody will ever do it again.
“It was pure luck,” says Allen, “to be playing at that time, in that place, with that group of players.”
They shot for the moon.
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