A ride on the Cork carousel yet everything comes back to Nemo Rangers

In the clubhouse bar there is a handsome picture of the late Jim Cremin, a radiant smile under his wavy hair. It was taken in his playing days, which is no help with a date. Jim gave Dinny Allen a hand with the Nemo Rangers junior hurlers a few years ago and one day they were a man short. Jim had been a brilliant goalkeeper in his youth, and in an emergency that option had immediate traction. But not so fast: in the twilight of his career, Jim wanted to explore other horizons.

“He always had his helmet and hurley and gear in the boot of the car,” says Allen, “and he didn’t want the wife to know about it either. ‘I’ll go in,’ he says. ‘You’ll want to play in goal,’ I said to him. ‘Nah, I’ll play corner back or corner forward.’ Jim was 66 or 67 that time.”

For decades Jim was the spiritual leader of the club, not by appointment but by his nature and his generous heart and his endless passion for their little universe. When the economy crashed in the 1980s he led a committee that helped club members find work, and over the years there were thousands of other every-day interventions where Jim was adding something to somebody, quietly and with compassion. He embodied the fierce togetherness of the tribe. Dinny adored him, and Billy Morgan did too.

“One of the best things Billy ever did was bring Jim Cremin in with him,” says Allen. “Billy would talk about the way we want to play and about the opposition – and he had a bit of fire in him too. But Jim Cremin was like the secret weapon then. Jim would have you crying, the way he’d talk to us. He’d drag your soul out.”

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They were all up to their necks in it. Whatever else they did, Nemo Rangers was a fixed point in their lives. In the middle of the city, they had created a village. They were clannish and resourceful, and for a long time they were underdogs. Morgan remembers a discarded railway carriage that the club repurposed as changing rooms, and a pitch with such a wicked slope that the crossbar in the bottom goal was invisible from the other end. Nobody imagined the glory that would come later.

“The Barr’s, Blackrock, the Glen, the big clubs – [looking at them] made us feel small,” says Allen. “In a way that kind of made us. I suppose it’s not a nice thing to say, but we had a siege mentality too.”

For Nemo it is a year of anniversaries: 100 years since they were founded, 50 years since they won their first senior football championship. On Sunday they will attempt to win their 23rd title since 1972, an astonishing continuum of excellence and insatiable want.

In their time Morgan and Allen won eight medals each. None was sweeter than the first. Morgan was only 27 years of age in 1972 when Nemo made him captain and coach. A few years after graduating from UCC he went to Strawberry Hill College in London to pursue a degree in physical education, at a time when the science of sport was not nearly as mainstream as it is now.

“I’ll be quite honest, I was looking forward to it,” says Morgan, “because of what I’d learned in Strawberry Hill. Frank Cogan [another Cork player] was only a year older than me but he had carried the can for Nemo for years, training and coaching the team. Frank was still the fella we all looked up to even though I was captain.

“In those days we used to meet before matches in front of Turners Cross church. When we won that first county every one of the starting 15 was from within a mile radius of the church, and 14 of the 15 had gone to school in Chriost Rí. The exception was Brother Fabien, who was teaching in Chriost Rí.”

For Allen and Morgan it was an extraordinary time in their young lives. Nemo won their first club All-Ireland the following June, and a couple of months later Morgan captained Cork to win their first All-Ireland since 1945, the year of his birth. When the All-Star nominations were announced, only one football goalkeeper appeared on the list. Peerless.

By then Allen had taken a detour. At the beginning of 1973 he signed for Cork Hibs, and when they won the FAI Cup that season he was man of the match in the replayed final. In those days English clubs regularly shopped for talent in the League of Ireland, and Allen attracted a glittering array of courting glances.

He still has a letter that Bobby Charlton wrote to him when he was manager of Preston; Dave Sexton got in touch from Chelsea, and there were overtures from Tommy Doherty at Manchester United too, but nothing that made him budge. When Brian Clough was Derby manager it was reported that they were going to swoop for two Cork players – £25,000 for Allen, and £15,000 for Christy Egan from Cork Celtic – but it never quite landed. “The Sunday Mirror had a story every week,” says Allen. “I thought I was going to a rake of teams.”

Through all of that Allen still lined out for Nemo. The Ban on the playing of foreign games had been lifted in 1971, but the Cork County Board had been opposed to the repeal of rule 27, and would have been prepared to man the barricades. Allen played football and hurling for Cork in 1975, but in the minds of the old Cork establishment he was forever branded as a soccer player.

When Morgan took over as Cork coach in 1987 there was a lingering whiff of all that. Morgan was already a veteran of bloody skirmishes with the county board, and that year he was denied the right to be a selector. Allen had been let go by the Cork footballers in 1984, and when Morgan made a daring bid to resurrect his intercounty career three years later Allen was 35.

“Dinny was playing as well as ever with Nemo. It was my first year with Cork [as coach] and even though I wasn’t a selector I did say to them that I wanted the power to suggest players. There was a bit of a clamour for Dinny to be brought back as well. There was a practice match played – Nemo versus Cork. And Dinny was playing.”

“The talk in the paper was that I could be brought back in,” says Allen. “There was about 3,000 people at the match.”

Did you have to persuade anybody, Billy?

“I did,” he says.

Dinny laughs from across the table, finishing the answer. “Frank Murphy.”

“Dinny was public enemy number one with Frank,” says Morgan.

Murphy was a Cork football selector in 1987, and Morgan couldn’t negotiate a safe passage for Allen. When Nemo won the county that year, though, it gave them the chairman of selectors for the following season. Morgan was nominated for the role, but he had been hit with a suspension after Cork lost the All-Ireland final to Meath, and that excluded him from team duties in the early rounds of the National League.

Murphy was back as a selector for the 1988 season, but the numbers were more fluid now. Nemo sent a wise old owl as Morgan’s proxy and, according to Billy, he controlled the first selection meeting like a chess grandmaster. Allen was picked on a split vote, 3-2.

Morgan’s other restoration project was Dave Barry, a brilliant footballer with St Finbarr’s and an accomplished soccer player with Cork City in the League of Ireland. Barry was willing to come back, but not without some compromise on both sides.

“They weren’t against Davy Barry coming back,” says Morgan, “but they had a code of conduct at the time, that if you played Gaelic [for Cork] you could not play soccer. I spoke to Davy and he said, ‘I want to play. If there’s a clash on a Sunday between soccer and Gaelic, I’ll play the Gaelic match. But I want to be able to play soccer on a Sunday when there’s no Gaelic.’

“‘That’s fair enough,” I said.

“We met the selectors – this was before the 1987 season. I said to Davy, ‘Don’t mention anything about playing soccer, just say you agree to put GAA before soccer.’ We sat inside in the stand in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and I was sitting opposite Davy. They were asking him questions and I was making facial gestures [prompting his answers]. And everything was fine. All over. Next thing Davy said, ‘One more point now. I want to be able to play soccer on my Sundays off.’ Bang. That was it. Gone. Dinny christened him George Washington because he couldn’t tell a lie.”

In 1988 they were both back. In Allen’s case, given his age, that carried an obvious risk. He felt it. “Billy knows this – I had spasms of insecurity about the whole thing. I was saying to myself, ‘Am I mad?’ I knew it could end in tears and I knew I was burning oil. I was 36 or 37 at that stage. I remember saying to myself [during the League of 1988/89] ‘I might get out.’ I remember saying it to Billy one time up the North [after a League match]. I wasn’t happy with the contribution I was making because I was expecting to play like I was 23. The lads kind of won me over and I stayed.”

In 1989 Allen captained Cork to win the All-Ireland, with Morgan as manager. To do it together, as lifelong friends, was the sweetest thing you could imagine.

Dinny retired in a blaze of glory; Billy carried on. Given all his conflicts with the county board over the years, his stamina and his passion for Cork football was extraordinary. In 1991, just a year after he guided Cork to back-to-back All-Irelands for the only time in their history, the county board executive drummed up 13 incidents of allegedly unbecoming behaviour or bad practice which they felt ought to preclude Morgan continuing as team manager. The Cork players were outraged and the pressure to reinstate Morgan was irresistible.

As far back as 1977, when Cork players were expected to buy their own socks and shorts, Morgan was suspended by the board for his involvement in what became known as the Three Stripe Affair. In a piece of commercial opportunism Adidas offered the players free boots and gear in return for Cork wearing a red Adidas jersey against Kerry in the Munster final. You can imagine the scatter.

“I was constantly fighting with the board over something,” he says. “They’d be cutting back on this and cutting back on that. When I see them now, as regards gear. My son was goalkeeping coach for the last two years with the Cork minor football team. And he said, ‘Dad, I remember you saying to me that ye had no gear.’ He got a bag, a tracksuit, boots and all that. Then the second year, he got the same thing.”

Everything, though, always came round to Nemo. Billy was 43 when he made his last appearance in the senior championship in 1988; Dinny was 39 in his final senior match, three years later. In Nemo, nobody retires early, and nobody disappears. Old players keep adding something, like minerals in the soil.

“When we finished at senior we both dropped down to intermediate and junior, and enjoyed it,” says Morgan.

“It was our lives, in a way,” says Allen. “But it was an enjoyable life. It wasn’t hard to do.”

The last time they played together was a hurling match. They were in the club, doing something, when the alarm went up that the junior team was short two. Billy was 60, Dinny was 53. They fell in: Billy on the edge of the square, Dinny on the wing.

Jim Cremin would have expected nothing less.