When Declan Daly 'delivered' special cup joy for Cork City

GLORY DAYSl Cork City captain Declan Daly celebrates with the 1998 FAI Cup © INPHO/Patrick Bolger

How long is it since Cork City won their first FAI Cup? Well, how old is Sophie Daly now?

Declan Daly was team captain that year, just as he had been five years earlier when they brought the 1992-93 league title back to Leeside. On a team full of leaders, he was the leader, just like his namesake Anthony with the Clare hurlers in those days. But as the team bus headed up to Dublin for that Cup final against Damien Richardson’s all-dazzling Shelbourne, he wasn’t on it. He had stayed back with his wife Susan who was expecting to give birth to their first any hour.

“The lads went up on the Saturday. I couldn’t go. It was that close. So the club arranged for me to fly up on the Sunday morning. I played the match, we drew nil-all. As it happened I was awarded man of the match but I could barely stay around for the presentation. I had to get a taxi straight away from Dalymount [Park] to the airport.

“It was actually Susan who picked me up at [Cork] airport that evening. From there it was back into hospital. Sophie was born the next morning, came home on the Thursday.” 

A few days later she had the FAI Cup for a cradle. On the Saturday Daly had gone back up to Dublin, this time with his teammates, and with 20 minutes to go in the replay on that sunny evening, his centre-half colleague Derek Coughlan headed home a Kelvin Flanagan cross.

If it was heart-breaking for Shelbourne – just a fortnight earlier they had missed out on the league title by a point – it cued delirium in Cork. When the team returned on the Sunday evening with a trophy not seen on Leeside since Cork Hibs also denied Shels 1-0 in a replay 25 years earlier, the streets were packed. Earlier that day the Cork hurlers had won the national league final in Thurles, just as they had in 1993 the same weekend Daly and City had won their first League of Ireland title.

In those years sport in the city was at the peak of its ecumenism. An average punter over an average weekend might take in a match in the Park, Turner's Cross, Neptune Stadium and Temple Hill, or like that one in May 1998, games away in both Dalymount Park and Semple Stadium. 

“Cork was, and remains, a sport-mad town,” says Daly. “And people expected and demanded that Cork teams should be competing for honours at the highest level.” 

That City team reflected that sporting heritage. When Daly was going up the steps to get the Cup, goalscorer Coughlan spotted his father Séamus in the stand, a tear in his eye. Twenty-five years earlier Séamus had been on the Cork team that had brought Sam Maguire back to Cork. Jimmy Barry-Murphy had starred for that fabled football team. Now he too had a son, Brian, on the Cork City panel. Another teenager to break through in those years was Noel Hartigan; 18 months earlier he had won the National U19 Cup in basketball.

The team was managed by Dave Barry, who had won multiple All-Irelands for Cork and St Finbarr’s. He had inherited a team out of sorts after the short-lived and turbulent stint of Rob Hindmarch, a north-east Englishman who would tragically die in 2002 at just 41 from motor neurone disease. Barry immediately brought a sense of stability, common sense, and, says Daly, Corkness.

“Davy could have played for any team in the country. He was that good at a time when player movement was quite common. But he’d only play for Cork. He was just so proud of being from Cork and he instilled that same pride and passion into our dressing room.” 

Daly himself personified Cork sport and its people. He was from the northside, Farranree, played Harty for the Mon, minor hurling for Cork. When City was founded in 1984, they didn’t request the services of Daly, leaving him ripe for Limerick City to snap up, but he never forgot his roots. When Espana ’82 legend Billy Hamilton took over as manager, Daly had it written into his contract that he could play two further games of hurling that autumn of 1987: first in the county semi-final for Na Piarsaigh against old rivals Glen Rovers, then in the final against eventual winners Midleton. “I marked Pat Hartnett,” says Daly. “He was just brilliant, a winner.” 

Daly was too and was in keeping with other genial Leeside ambassadors like Ger Cunningham, Donal Lenihan, Tony Davis and Tom Wilkinson in those years. His re-signing for City in the summer of 1990 prompted an era of remarkable consistency and competitiveness; for the next 11 years they would finish outside the top three only three times.

“In my own head we should have won more. But I always say the best team wins the league because it’s over such a long period of time; you can’t be lucky 36 weeks of the year.

“The most devastating moment of the lot was definitely losing the league on the last day to Dundalk in Turner's Cross [in 1991]. You were in the real depths after that one. But the euphoria of winning the league in ’93 counterbalanced how low you felt back then. And it was similar with the Cup. We lost a bad final in ’92 to Bohs, but to go and win it then in ’98 made up for that. It was just brilliant.

He looks back now on his team with only fondness. A dressing room that was “both welcoming and demanding”. The European games against the likes of Bayern Munich, Galatsaray, Standard Liege. Even the away games (“There were years there where our nearest home game was in Inchicore – and that was before the motorway. You could draw a line from Inchicore to Derry and every away game of ours was inside that quadrant of the country.”) 

He’s not going to over-romanticise the past though, or downplay the present. He still loves his League of Ireland, still loves his City. He managed his homeclub St Mary’s for a season shortly after hanging up the boots in 2003 but found he preferred being a City supporter. For years he’d go to games with his father Joe, and often his mother Lena, sadly no longer with us, just as for years now he’s continued to go to games with his son, Conor, who might only be half-joking that it should have been him rather than Sophie pictured in the Cup.

“A night in Turners Cross is still a great night. I love going out there. There are people around me at games who are still there from 20 years ago, sitting where they were 20 years ago.” 

City have had highs and lows since Daly finished up in the early-noughties. Kevin Doyle & Co delivered a second league title 20 years ago this month, while there was a remarkable period in the mid-2010s where the club and Dundalk each contested four consecutive FAI Cup finals, splitting them two apiece. But there have also been relegations, including this season.

“The biggest challenge in this league is being a promoted team trying to stay up. The key game this season was the Waterford away game because we not only lost the match but lost Seánie Maguire for 10 games. But he’s back now and with him we have a chance.

“What Shamrock Rovers did during the week, going to Athens and getting a result, is phenomenal, and it’ll be a big thing for them to pull off the Double. But in almost every round this year we have been expected to go out and yet we’ve come through.

“It might just be our year.” 

Just like it was when Sophie Daly was born 27 years ago.