Halfway through the penalty shoot-out that decided last year’s Munster final, an RTÉ cameraman sidled up to the Cork penalty-takers, loitering like corner boys on the 65-metre line. From ground level, the camera panned their faces and through the grille of his helmet you could see a smile on Eoin Downey’s lips, as if the excruciating tension had been outsourced to a call centre, faraway.
Around him were four of the most prolific Cork attackers of the last decade, all of whom had been frontline free-takers for Cork at one time or another. The anchor penalty-taker, though, was Downey, the Cork full back.
Tony Wall from Glen Rovers was watching from the Ennis Road terrace with his son Diarmuid, a team-mate of Downey’s on the Glen senior team. It slowly dawned on them that Downey would be fifth in the sequence. Had he ever taken a penalty for the Glen? Patrick Horgan looked after that. Diarmuid told his dad not to worry.
“He said to me, ‘He’s going to put it in the top-right corner’. They’d be down the Glen field, and they’d be messing around with penalties. ‘Eoin always goes top right with penalties’ he said.”
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Three of Cork’s best penalty-takers were not on the field at the final whistle, so Pat Ryan and his management team were forced to play a card from the bottom of the deck. It boiled down to the Downey brothers.
“It was a toss-up whether we’d ask Robert or Eoin,” Ryan says, “but Eoin would be a bit more confident. Eoin wouldn’t be afraid to tell you that he should be taking it. Eoin would think he should be taking the frees all over the field. Which is a great thing.”
Eoin didn’t get his turn. Three Limerick players missed their shots. “He was disgusted,” says Wall.
In brothers, there is an instinct to look for similarities. Quick-fire stuff from a match programme Q&A. Eoin is 6’ 5″, Robert is two inches taller, both with the reach of a cherry-picker. All Stars? Yes and yes. Same year. Robert made his championship debut for Cork when he was 19; so did Eoin. How did it go? Robert held Gearóid Hegarty scoreless in 2019; Eoin was taken off against Tipperary in 2023. Next question.
Their stories are separate and their stories are inseparable. They got here by the same way. No other co-ordinates were punched into the sat nav. They both spent 14 years in Christians, the fee-paying, rugby-playing school in Cork’s city centre, and were part of its hurling reawakening. They both captained Christians in the Dr Harty Cup, they both captained the Glen minors. Those appointments were not light. Everything is of its time.
As players, there were differences between them, but that didn’t place an injunction on people reaching the same conclusions. Cork have had debilitating churn at full back since Oasis broke up. For a while, Cork thought that Robert might be the solution, and then they thought it was Eoin.
“They’re not full-backs, they’re ball players,” says Stephen McDonnell, the former captain of Cork and Glen Rovers, who played in the full-back line for all his intercounty career. “They’re more ball-minded, whereas in the full-back line you need to be more danger-minded. Play the man a little bit, not even go looking for the ball. There are all sorts of things you need to do to get rid of danger.
“What happens is that the boys would do well for 90 per cent of it, but there might be 10 per cent where they’d take their minds off minding the house and try to express themselves – then a goal goes in, or something happens. They’re 7/10 in the full-back line, the two of them, and they’re 10/10 in the half-back line.”
Both have suffered at full back in All-Ireland finals. When Cork lost to Limerick by 16 points in the 2021 final, Robert played in a full-back line that was exposed to all weathers. When Cork lost to Tipperary by 15 points in last year’s final, Eoin was sent off midway through the second half on a second yellow card, just before the ground opened up and swallowed Cork.
In that incident, he had been beaten by John McGrath’s cuteness, but he had also been defeated by his instincts. “I was out in front expecting a low ball,” Eoin said on Off The Ball in January. “I was caught on the wrong side, I was on a yellow card already and what happened, happened.” McGrath fouled him first, but his infringement was better disguised than Eoin’s.
Eoin had been booked in the first half which led to a blizzard of after-timing about whether he should have been taken off. They had done that once before with him, in the 2024 round-robin game against Limerick, when Cork’s season was hanging by a thread.
But when Eoin was booked in the first half of the All-Ireland semi-final against Limerick a few months later, they left him on the field; a different management made the same decision this year when he picked up a booking very early in the league final. It was his fourth first-half booking in a big game over the previous 20 months.
“There is a huge balancing act because you’re trying to be as aggressive as you can,” says Ryan. “From his point of view, you’re trying not to take that aggression out of him. You’re trying to play on the front foot. We were asking our lads all the time to push forward and be really aggressive inside in fellas’ faces. It probably suits him out in the half-back line now that, if you have a yellow card, you don’t have to over-commit yourself. With maturity and experience, you don’t put yourself in those scenarios. Eoin is learning as he develops.”
The aftershock of the earthquake lasted for weeks. Because there was no obvious explanation for Cork’s collapse in the second half of the All-Ireland final the vacuum was contaminated with all sorts. Unfounded rumours of a dressing-room row at half-time were pegged to the decision not to take off Eoin. None of it was true, but all of it lingered. It was a twist of lemon in a gaping wound.
“For a few months after I’d have thought about it [the All-Ireland] a good bit,” said Eoin. “I think a lot of us have. That’s something that you have to live with for the rest of your life.
“It was hard to get over and I’m not saying I’m fully over it [he said in January]. Those scars are still there and are there for the whole team. We’ll get there eventually and we’ll have our time. None of us will stay down from it. All of us want to get up and fight again.”
After the All-Ireland, Robert and Eoin went back to the Glen and St Nick’s, its sister football club. Within a couple of days, Robert turned up at a kids’ training camp, honouring a commitment he had made before the sky fell in. Normality came dropping slowly.
“You’d always worry about them, wouldn’t you [after what happened],” says Des Cullinane, a lifelong mentor in the Glen and St Nick’s. “It’s not easy. There was the added thing about the dressingroom, and all that s***e. It’s a sign of their character that they don’t leave those things get to them. They came back into the Glen fold very quickly. In fairness, the Glen are good at that. When you walk back into the Glen to start training again, the Glen fellas don’t care that you’re a Cork player.”
Since they were children, it has been their second home. Or maybe not second. The rankings are blurred. Robert grew up with one of Cullinane’s sons and they’d spend all day in the Glen on their summer holidays, he says, “playing All-Irelands, as they used to call it, and there’d be fierce skelping going on”.
“They’re absolutely mad Glen people,” says McDonnell, “but to be honest with you, we all are – that’s the way we are. We love the Glen. We value where we come from. When the boys come back to the Glen it’s a grounding for them. It’s a safe place, a secure base for them. It just helps them to reset.”
Brothers are not always alike, although it is natural to look for likeness. For those who know them best, it is not a strain to see it.
“They’re very stoic,” says Cullinane. “They have a deadpan humour. You could be talking away to them and they’d be looking at you, and you’d be saying to yourself, ‘What are they thinking?’ They’re very calm guys. They definitely don’t lack for confidence, either of them. And ultra-competitive. They’re incredibly competitive.”
“They’re so competitive,” says Wall, “that if there was a game just amongst themselves, they’d cut each other in two to win it.”
Wall says that Robert is “a prankster”. Ryan says that there is “great devilment in them”. Good company. Fun.
Hurling, though, is serious. “They’re obsessed with hurling,” says Ryan. “Obsessed with the skills of it. Robert would be even more obsessed with the traditional side of it and the history of it. The history of Cork hurling, the history of players. He’d know every player inside out. He’d watch old games, he’d know old players, that side of it.
“Maybe the gym work, you’d like to see them getting into that more. But they have that natural hardness and wiriness.”
Eoin might be a bit more explosive, but over 50 metres, Ryan says that Robert wins the race. When he ran through the heart of the Clare defence to score one of the great All-Ireland final goals two years ago, nobody laid a finger on him. Like a diesel engine, it just needs to climb through the gears.
McDonnell was hosting one of his leadership workshops with a local business in Páirc Uí Chaoimh earlier this year when he noticed Robert on the 4G pitch with Ian Jones, Cork’s S&C coach.
“I spoke to him after. He was out there doing speed work, one-to-one training,” says McDonnell. “He was doing it once a week with Jonesie. I think he’s more deliberate and intentional about his training now. He has just stepped it up another level.”
Cork have tried three different players at full back this year. Two of them got injured along the way and they still didn’t ask Robert or Eoin to move back. Under Ryan, Eoin held that position for two years; in the first of those seasons, he was the All-Star full back. They knew he was comfortable there. He told them.
But then Ryan asked Robert one day about his brother’s favourite position. “Whatever place he played best, last,” Robert said.
They have settled in Cork’s half-back line now, both of them. Two pillars of a house rebuilt.
