Loyal servant is determined to seize the day

Tom Humphriestalks to the inspirational Ollie Moran, who tomorrow plays in his first All-Ireland final having stoically survived the darkest of days in Limerick hurling since 1997

O brothers, let's go down,
Let's go down, come on down,
O brothers, let's go down,
Down in the river to pray

Monday morning. He wakes with the pains from Sunday afternoon busy like bailiffs in his bones. The sun isn't even threatening to pierce the grey, tupperware skies but it's Monday morning and strangely in this antic summer, every time he awakes to the rooster call on the day after a match, well, Limerick are still in the championship.

He is a Limerick hurler. He knows that popular perception doesn't employ fact checkers. He knows the picture you have of a Limerick hurler on the morning after a match is somewhat more derelict than the things he is about to tell you. He knows that you imagine Limerick hurlers waking up late and thick tongued and hung-over, reciting their comical, howling, repentance for the excesses of last night's fun, then wondering where the hell they are. Well . . .

They used to go early to the pool in the University of Limerick but this year and last year mainly what they do is get into the cars and drive west. They don't stop till they see the Atlantic at Lahinch. They have a spot that they like, a nearby cove where land meets water and nobody intrudes. It's quiet and the tide replenishes a generous rock pool there. They plunge their bodies into the cold, briny water again and again. Three or four times in the space of a few hours.

Just treading water far away from the maddening crowd . . .

They talk to each other about the game the day before. This being the Limerick hurling team, the slagging is as important as the icy salt water for their recovery. They have become a serious team without taking themselves seriously. They cut loose on each other without boundaries or limits. The tension is slowly erased from their muscles, their bones and their brains.

They wonder what Darcy will have in store for them on Wednesday night when they go back to training. Generally they don't let themselves wonder about much beyond that.

Like when they came back to training on the Wednesday after they had taken Waterford in that volcanic All-Ireland semi-final there was so little said. Darcy, or Dave Moriarty as the rest of the world calls him, just laid out the training agenda for the next two weeks like a president addressing the short-term goals of his administration. They listened and began the work.

For Ollie Moran, a Limerick hurler for just over a decade now, these are the times that persistence and loyalty always promised him. Sometimes in the rock pool listening to the crack and the chatter he looks at the pale, white torsos all around him and thinks of all the years he spend as an innocent victim of the other culture which was so much more prevalent in Limerick hurling than this grain of fervent, born-again professionalism.

When he awoke on the morning after the Waterford game his hurling life flashed briefly before him. All the summers that ended with the inevitable disappointment, the guilty prodigal feeling of underperformance and squandered potential.

HE CAME INTOthe panel back in early 1997, having chosen Limerick hurling over a promising career as a rugby player. And Limerick hurling went one way and Irish rugby went the other and there were times in recent years when he'd meet the stars he played with on Munster and Irish underage rugby teams and they'd chuckle politely at his pain and say that at least when they had a bad day in their jersey there was a cheque coming at the end of the week to pay the mortgage and the car. Ollie Moran got nothing but abuse and heartache.

In the week after they beat Waterford many of them remembered the league game they played against Dublin in the middle of the spring. Priorities were a mismatch. Dublin were going hard at the league. Richie Bennis had focused Limerick on June 10th and nothing else.

Dublin came to the Gaelic Grounds and blew Limerick away. When the game was over the Limerick squad went to the open-stand side of the ground for a warm-down. A knot of Limerick supporters made their way down the steps to abuse their players from the other side of the wire.

"Ye wouldn't f***ing sweat when ye were out there, why are ye sweating now?"

"Going nowhere again, ye wasters!"

Sometimes amid all the backslaps and the handshakes and the hysteria of the past few weeks he has wondered to himself if he isn't hearing a voice that he heard form behind the wire that night or shaking a hand that had been balled into a fist and waved at him. Then again . . .

The worst year? Aw, listen if he had to pick it would be 2003, a season which summarised his career to that date. They drew a freescoring epic with Waterford 4-13 apiece; Ollie watched most of it from the bench but for the replay was at full forward flanked by young guns Donnacha Sheehan and Patrick Kirby. Probably he was the only one of the three who knew his way around a razor.

Anyway they got a point between the three of them and Limerick lost. Dave Keane was in charge and the team was spotty with lads who had won under-21 All-Irelands with Keane. The manager was trying to teach young dogs new tricks. Things went downhill fast. Barry Foley skipped to America. Mike O'Brien just skipped. Ciarán Carey quit.

"A lot of the under-21s had come in and they thought they could continue the way they had been. That was true. Dave Keane, in fairness, wanted to stamp it out but he had overseen three years of that and part of their success was that they were so tight as young fellas and had no problem going out after matches and having a few drinks. That doesn't cut the mustard at senior and some of them failed to understand that.

"They were a bit out of control. It wasn't nipped in the bud early enough. Dave Keane was very loyal, naturally, to a lot of those under-21s because they brought him major success, unprecedented success. You couldn't go cracking the whip too hard. He couldn't discipline fellas the way he would have liked to.

"I remember going to training sessions that summer and I knew fellas had been drinking that day or prior to that day and they were in no fit state to train. To be fair, it wasn't just the young fellas either. There was a smell of drink off fellas at training. You'd be arriving in and you'd hit a ball to them and they'd react like there was three balls coming at them all at once. We struggled with Kerry and that led to the Offaly game. A culture had set in, a rot had set in."

They went to Tralee in the qualifiers and Kerry had their hands on Limerick's throats with 15 minutes left. They pulled away, slightly luckily; Conor Fitzgerald couldn't miss with frees that day. The qualifying draw had done its best for them. They got Offaly in the next round. Offaly were in a worse heap, it seemed, having being bumped out of Leinster by Wexford. Limerick saw Offaly's disarray and topped it.

"In the week of the Offaly game we had given up. We trained all right but that was it. We'd played Kerry and we were very poor. Lucky to come out of there. After that there was training, fellas arriving in 20 minutes late. We played Offaly on a Thursday evening in Thurles. We trained on the Monday previous to the game and there were fellas joining in 20 minutes late. That was the attitude. Nobody cared.

"That definitely was the lowest. Drink was more prevalent. In the years after that it was there but to a much smaller extent. In 2004, Pad Joe Whelahan came in and we were on the upward curve a little but 2003 had been such a bad year that things were all over the place. No system, no leaders, no major belief in management. No belief in the county board that they were going to take control of things.

"We were a million miles away from the Corks and Kilkennys of this world. Standards had dropped so much that we had fallen away. We rolled over and let Offaly beat us. If you'd said to me the night of that Offaly game that we would get to an All-Ireland final in the space of five years I would have fallen off the stool laughing at you."

THEY KNEW THEYwere going to be beaten that night. Morale was low in the camp.

"We were training and guys had lost interest. Things weren't good on and off the field. That was a black night. Dreary, dull night. We never performed. We rolled over and let Offaly beat us. There were mornings after matches when I woke up and said, 'What the hell?' The infighting was always disappointing.

"So much politics at play, on and off the field. It had a negative impact. We were never in the papers for the right reasons. Squabbling. Infighting. Personality clashes. Drinking. When everyone else was quiet we were in the papers in February and March hanging our dirty linen out. More than any other one performance or one match that was soul-destroying."

The year couldn't finish quick enough. He spent a good two months just wondering. He was 27 at the time and realised Limerick hurling was going absolutely nowhere. A lot of guys he hurled with were looking at alternative plans career-wise and hurling wasn't going to be part of those plans. He had a long think. He was friendly with Liam Kearns and they talked. Kearns wondered would Ollie Moran join the footballers.

He liked the idea. The footballers were tight, together, enjoyed good banter and serious work. They had everything he'd wanted in the hurling team and they had more chance of success than the hurlers. He put the idea out of his mind but a lot of Limerick's dual players made their minds up to play football at that time.

It didn't really strike him to go back to rugby. You couldn't allow yourself to think of what might have been. Could he have been in Cardiff and other glorious battlefields? He didn't know. That would be for somebody else to judge. He knew, though, that when he walked away from rugby he was going pretty well.

There were times, looking back, when he thought he should have given it a year or two more. But then again, when he first came into the Limerick panel in 1997, Limerick were top of the heap. If there had been a rating system for the previous three years' championships they'd have been way up in the pecking order. It seemed the correct choice. He was sold a pup.

"At the time I felt that I'd definitely picked the wrong option. You don't dwell on it, though. It was a motivation, though, that in hindsight I had sacrificed a lot and there was no point in bailing out of intercounty hurling at 26 or 27. You may as well keep on going until the wheel eventually turns.

"It turned but you don't think you'll have to wait 11 seasons.

"When you are young you have a far higher opinion of yourself than when you get older. I had played under-18 for Ireland, had played Munster under-21s. I was bordering on Irish underage teams. I had a fair sense of my own importance. An exaggerated sense, probably, but I wasn't fazed coming into a hurling set-up.

"I thought I had done well as a rugby player and could take my physical attributes and make it. My hurling back then was very basic but I wouldn't have thought twice about going for a ball.

"The older you get the more you think about it. I had a good club run that year in 1996 and came into a team that had been in two All-Irelands in three years. The team was full of big characters. I would have been a bit fazed about mingling with the Ciarán Careys and Mike Houlihans because they were such massive cult figures in Limerick. It was a great team I came into and it was a shame guys like that left so early.

"They had another two or three years after their time. They were dispensed with because they were championship animals not league animals. Because they weren't fit in the league they were cast aside.

"It left a major hole. A vacuum that has taken this long to fill."

HE STOOD INthe gap - his career a long joining of the dots that marked the low points. Being abused after the Dublin league game. Walking out of Ennis last summer after a 17-point hammering that introduced shame and embarrassment to the mix. He kept standing in the gap.

He knows now that you'd do 10 or 11 years if you knew you were going to make an All-Ireland final. This year - unless, as they say in American politics, he was found with a dead girl or a live boy in his bed - nothing could alter his status as one of the uplifting stories of the summer. When Waterford's last tilt at the windmill of an All-Ireland was done with, Ollie Moran was still standing. Something in his nature and his experience kept his feet on the ground

"When the final whistle went I recall I wasn't so much ecstatic about us winning as just gutted for them. There was just emptiness in their faces. Guys like Tony Browne have been an inspiration for me the way they have always kept going. I remember going up to Declan Prendergast and I don't think he even saw me going up to him. He was just blank. Same with Séamus (Prendergast). I'd know a lot of them personally. I felt almost like apologising for taking their dream away. They have been knocking on the door for so long and had so many ups and downs in the last 10 years.

"The first reaction is to commiserate but up until the final whistle you do what you have to to win the game. We've been on the receiving end so many times of gut-wrenching losses that you can empathise with them. We have to go on. We have a job to do."

On the Wednesday after that when they got together again Darcy laid out his agenda and they had a brief meeting. Richie Bennis brought along his All-Ireland winner's medal and his All-Ireland runners-up plaque. He fired the runners-up plaque at the players and told them they could keep it. He didn't want it. That's the trade-up, he told them. The attitude for the next two weeks would decide whether they got a piece of worthless wood or an All-Ireland medal.

Meetings. He'd been at a million of them and never imagined one as brief or dramatic as this. Never imagined one when he'd be facing this moon-faced man talking about All-Ireland medals. His first ever encounter with Richie Bennis came when he was on crutches after some cartilage work and Bennis spotted him and asked, 'Now which one of the Morans would you be?'"

"I just thought, here we go again. Why the f*** do I bother? Why do I do this to myself? I didn't know then Richie's sense of humour - that he knew quite well who everyone was. That's the way he has about him. He was having the craic."

MEETINGS.Over the years he noticed that some players got addicted to them. Like therapy or counselling or an open confessional. They'd meet. Everyone would make vows and stink the place up with the incense of good intentions. Then they would disperse and lads would go for pints.

"We had so many meetings over the years that you'd need a briefcase rather than a gear bag to be a Limerick player. So many meetings and so much politics. Meetings about meetings. After a while it made you cynical."

Still, last autumn when the county board were looking to make another managerial appointment, himself, Stephen Lucey and Brian Geary decided they had to do something. They called another meeting. Just players. They told the county board of their plans. They met out in the Woodlands and formed a consensus.

They had achieved nothing except a few moral victories, like running Cork close in last year's quarter-final. They were sick of the moral victories. Sick of waking up on Monday mornings sore and out of the championship.

"We had an agenda. We talked about the year just gone. We had to talk about where we were going for the year to come. The standard we expected them to be at as well. We articulated in as good a way as possible what we felt. We laid it on a sheet of paper.

"When the boys were appointed we were able to say, 'this is what we feel we lack, these are the mistakes we made, this is what we need to do.'"

They took on board all the mistakes of the last 10 years. Put them on the sheet of paper.

Lack of responsibility on the field. Lack of personal responsibility off the field. Lack of intensity on the field. Lack of self-belief. Lack of commitment in training. Lots of lack.

The county board took the sheet of paper and nodded gravely. Then they appointed Richie Bennis and Gary Kirby, two guys with no managerial experience. There was, ahem, some scepticism.

"Here is a guy with no real management experience and he is expected to drag a team up from below zero. Definitely a lot of guys were scratching the heads, saying here we go again. You couldn't but go with him, though. He is that kind of personality.

"We met in November in UL with the new management. They were very receptive. It was the first time players and management had met. Straight away they knew that these guys in front of them were taking more responsibility. If we were going to fail we were going to fail as a group. We would do everything in our power. That wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for management embracing that whole concept."

Richie Bennis told them he'd do what he could but it was their baby. They went and played challenges against UL, Garda College, East Limerick. The only league match they focused on was the opener against Tipp. They got out with a three-point win. Ollie was asked to play centre forward and the game was decided when he scored the goal of the year at the death. A big thing. A big win. Richie made all the right choices. They bought into it from then on.

When there was doubt, Bennis and Kirby threw it back at the players. During the Kilkenny game at Nowlan Park they came in beaten and shivering at half-time, 12 points already separating them from the Cats. Management had a go at players, told them that they'd said they wanted responsibility. They had a meeting afterwards. Another meeting.

"It was thrown back in our faces. Rightly so," says Ollie Moran, looking back. "From then on they made it quite clear that they would do everything but it was our team."

Their team. Their year. Their All-Ireland final. Losing to Dublin in the league and being abused by their own afterwards was a low point. They travelled to Dublin in May and played a challenge in Parnell Park in the torrential rain and won.

They stayed in the Red Cow for the weekend and felt good about themselves. They knew the summer held good things for them, just not how much.

THEY ARE IN ANAll-Ireland final. History, form and the papers tell them they will fill the role Limerick teams have filled in so many finals. Fall guys. Suits them. The hype hasn't taken them over.

"Even people in Limerick might say, 'go up and give a good account of yourselves.' Kilkenny know and we know that we are not going up there to make up numbers. In Limerick we have a history of being runners-up. Right now though, I'd rather be last than second. I'm not looking forward to post-match receptions and homecomings as a loser. Kilkenny have to perform. That's the bottom line. They are expected to win handy and their supporters demand no less from them. The pressure is on them.

"The bottom line is that it isn't enough for them just to win the All-Ireland. They have to win well to be recognised and respected. We like it that way. I don't want to wake up on that Monday morning as a loser in an All- Ireland final."

So many years, so many Monday mornings, so many days looking at the river but thinking of the sea.