Managing to remain relaxed about it all

Keith Duggan hears the Cork coach insist he is not caught up in the three-in a-row thing

The eve of another All-Ireland hurling championship finds John Allen not looking a day older. He stands in the yard of Togher primary school, a smiling teacher with spectacles and silver-flecked hair, casually dressed in a tracksuit, talking with the parents who are standing outside enjoying those glorious few moments of madness when the bell rings and classrooms are emptied of their children.

It is a heaven-sent day on the edge of this carefree, jazzy city and Allen chuckles at the old conceit that the sun always shines on Cork.

"Oh yeah, sure, different country down here," he agrees playfully.

Maybe it is, too. Cork's attempt at the three-in-a-row is being marketed as the chief intrigue of this hurling summer. Allen has always claimed his ascension to the position of management of the most collectivised and disciplined GAA team in the country was a happy coincidence of time and place. But in his maiden season, he did not put a foot wrong and now comes an opportunity to achieve a permanent place of distinction in a hurling culture defined by the loftiest of standards and by the most gifted of forbearers. "Immortality beckons", as the advertisement tagline has it.

Implacable calm and contemplative reason were the most notable attributes of Allen's management style last summer, so it was something of a shock to hear he had banned all talk of the three-in-a-row from the Cork changing room. Nothing Allen ever publicly said suggested he would be capable of such a totalitarian utterance. After solving the mystery of a missing coat for some troubled fourth class boys, Allen settles down behind his desk and smiles at the story.

"That's not true at all, I never said that," he says, smiling.

"I saw that in one of the newspapers and someone said it to me. Now Seán Óg [ Ó hAilpín], in fairness to him, the lad doesn't spoof or lie. The only time I made mention of three-in-row was in South Africa really, when at the end of our holiday I said it shouldn't become part of our days. I said that if I was asked about it, I was going to pass it off and would prefer if we all did the same so it doesn't become this albatross around our necks. And I would say that in fairness to Seán, he was trying to close the door on it."

IT IS CLEAR Allen is being truthful when he says he does not really care about the implied pressure of hurling on the brink of this momentous feat, reasoning that it does not even come into the equation unless Cork reach the All-Ireland final.

And in the tidy way of these things, Allen was on the Cork team that claimed the county's last three-in-a-row (1976-'78), coming on as substitute for Tom Cashman against Kilkenny in 1978, young and absolutely carefree.

"I was absolutely delighted to get on the field. But I don't remember any big hype about that All-Ireland over the others. I started on Ger Henderson, ended up on Pat Henderson and finished the day by getting Frank Cummins' jersey. And to me that was the highlight, not the three-in-a-row.

"It just wasn't that big a deal. And for us now, if it were to happen, it would be a nice statistic at the end of the year but it is not going to diminish winning those two All-Irelands back to back or the fact that we have had four fantastic years. Like, the way these players have carried themselves and represented Cork hurling over that period has been fantastic. And it is a little portion of my life that I am very proud of."

HE CANDIDLY ADMITS that this time last year, a feeling of absolute dread took hold of him one night. In the last game of a humdrum league Cork played terribly against a struggling Galway team and lost. It was just over a fortnight before the championship and it suddenly occurred to Allen he could not be certain if the team would respond to those demands. He called around to Ger Cunningham and agonised aloud, wondering if he was able for the job.

"In the end, we just got the war board out, as we call it, and started going through the positions. And I came away from there thinking, right, let's put a bit of structure on this and keep with what we are doing. So we won each game and the knives never came out. We operated as professionally as we could and the players never had to think beyond the 70 minutes. And I suppose, because we were winning, it got easier."

Although it has rarely been acknowledged, Allen's decision to accept the Cork management post was an act of extreme courage. It was not as if he had long harboured the ambition, spending years on the coaching fields and nights swatting up on coaching manuals. Although many GAA people have been happy to define themselves by their devotion to the games, Allen quietly rather than stubbornly declined to allow his life revolve entirely around Gaelic games.

He was a dedicated player, skilful and athletic enough to represent Cork at All-Ireland hurling and football levels, but he was equally keen to explore other interests. In the grainy photographs of those late 1970s Cork teams, Allen stands out as the youthful, counter cultural figure of the period, lean and long-haired, his head full of music as much as sport.

It is fascinating to think his time with Cork coincided with the last involvement of Christy Ring, the godlike Cloyne man whose golden years began in the late 1930s and whose importance to hurling is deathless. Ring was a selector of few words and deep influence in 1977. Allen was in awe of him as much as anyone else but they were men brought up in radically different generations.

"He didn't address us all that much but he managed it so we were never intimidated by him either. And I always remember him standing up before one game and he stood up and spoke for a minute and said, 'when you grab the ball and head for goal and see the raindrops in the net shaking, that is what it is all about'. It created an image for us. He was a quiet man but he had that something, that streak about him that great players have."

Although Allen is self-deprecating about his own career, he was good enough to win three consecutive Cork championships with St Finbarr's and kicked ball with the county until 1984, when he was one of the many discarded in a thorough changing of the guard, a decision he did not agree with then nor does now. Still, the end of his Cork duties liberated him to indulge another interest, travelling, and it was the following year that he got a break from teaching in Togher and headed with his wife Jo and two young children to San Francisco as yet another of the thousands of Irish emigrants fleeing the Ireland of Haughey and FitzGerald. The difference was that Allen had the steady, pensionable job.

"It was lunacy," he says now. "Jo and I had always said we would do it. And it was a wonderful experience but I suppose we came home because there was no real safety or security to the life out there."

HE MIGHT HAVE STAYED, though. Allen doesn't do things by halves. An acoustic guitar sits by his desk. He is teaching the class the ballad One by U2 at the moment.

"When I was 40 I took a fit," he says, by way of explanation. After 20 years of strumming away to Paul Simon, Springsteen, James Taylor and Billy Joel, Allen took classical guitar lessons through all the grades after hitting the big four-oh. Then he found a gig playing background tunes in a restaurant for couples out for dinner. He bought himself the best equipment, bought the books and went at it properly. Then came the massage courses and the involvement with Cork, and then came management.

He sighs when he thinks of how far back he has slipped as a guitarist. "There was a time when I could play John Williams' theme from The Deer Hunter. Now, I still have a guitar in my hands every day but it might only be for five minutes. It's like reading Chinese. You have to keep doing it."

When he took on the Cork job, he hit the books with equal passion and wasn't too proud to phone up and ask hurling men "if they had anything special they wanted toshare".

"Because I was not immersed in hurling theory and coaching, I found it hard in the beginning to come up with stuff to keep the lads interested," he confesses with a smile. What he had was a clear view of the conditions required to complement a talented and ambitious panel of players.

"I spoke with Páidí Butler about this recently and we agreed the core of it is creating the conditions, it is the most important thing. Beyond drills or tactics or coaching. People need to feel appreciated, they need to know they will get fairly treated and to know you are up front. So it is similar to a family that gets on together. So before all games I sit down with players and say: 'Okay, how are we going to play in three weeks?' You know, as a person, don't tell me what to do: ask me and I will bend over backwards. We are all a bit like that. I read Mickey Harte's views of his philosophy recently and there are similarities. The old way of My Way or No Way is not for me."

By the time of last year's All-Ireland final, he realised he was actually enjoying the challenge. There was one little snag, though. In 2004, on the Cork trip to New Zealand, there was an overnight stop in Kuala Lumpur. Allen visited a Chinese temple and selected a wish straw. His message was that he might have to settle for second best next year. He said nothing and although not particularly superstitious, the note stayed with him.

"So I had this idea that we would get to a final no matter what but that we might not win. Then I read that Conor Hayes could become the first man to captain and manage an All-Ireland team and I was thinking, right, things are stacked against me here."

As it transpired, the All-Ireland final was probably his most comfortable game as manager. Cork never really had to alter their game plan. And now it has come full circle. In the classroom, the kids are blissfully unimpressed by what Allen refers to as "my alter ego".

EVEN IF HE GUIDES Cork to a 10-in-a-row, he still has to come in and teach them Bono tunes on Monday morning. Managing Cork is what John Allen does now, and will do it to the best of his ability because that is all he knows. Then it will be something else. After our conversation, he will cycle home in the hot sunshine because he likes to cycle on Wednesdays. At least, he claims he cycles home: Allen is such a yogic figure and seems to have so many dimensions it is preferable to imagine his path home as lightly scaling the branches of coniferous trees like the acrobatic martial artists in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Will Cork win the three-in-a-row? John Allen doesn't know and does not even possess the benefit of an Oriental fortune cookie to indicate how things might pan out. What he is certain about is he is working with an unusually thoughtful and honest group of athletes with a clear understanding of what they want to achieve from their time together.

"They want it," he offers. "They know the feeling of winning an All-Ireland and they do want it again." And he knows that he feels enriched by being there with them.

"I used to pinch myself at times last year wondering if I was part of this," Allen marvels. "I sometimes have to remind myself that for some reason I was chosen to conduct the orchestra."

And he hasn't done too badly for a man who only ever wanted to hold a tune. Now the country awaits Cork's third symphony.