Evans delivers Tipperary to edge of kingdom

MUNSTER SFC TIPPERARY v LIMERICK: KEITH DUGGANlistens to John Evans talk about his family, his ambitions for Tipperary football and his love for the game

HE CANNOT pretend that it was the call he was waiting for. When John Evans was approached about managing the Tipperary footballers, he could have instantly returned a thousand polite excuses and forgotten all about it. But something drew him. It might have been the timing.

In some strange, oblique way, it might have been to do with Seán Evans, whom the family lost before his 16th birthday, 11 years ago now. Curiosity might have had some part too. John Evans had achieved enough in Kerry football to believe he might have been given a crack at the senior side. And he came close, but the planets never quite aligned.

It might have been no more than a feeling, an instinct that he has always trusted. So he thought about it and approached it with the peculiar blend of qualities that have made him such a compelling figurehead in football dressingrooms for three decades.

John Evans is a two-sided coin, childlike in his enthusiasm, but never less than the dogged, methodologist who has spent three decades working for An Garda Síochána. He is a detective these days and finishes up in June, but he knows the job has helped to shape the way he thinks about the world.

“I’m a problem solver,” he mused when we met on route to his Tuesday night training session. “I suppose that is what I do.”

And Tipperary football – what a headache. Even in a county where the footballers were used to living in the shadow of the hurlers, they had been in dire straits.

“Evans did his homework prior to meeting with the executive of the county board. Rather than listen to their plight, he presented them with the book of evidence. They had won four competitive football matches in the previous five years. The last championship win was on May 25th, 2003.

“I told them, ‘lads, ye had a sad story for me’,” Evans said now. “They were lowly. And I mean lowly. And in a way, I had to sell myself as to how I was going to go about it. I had been here before. The first team I ever trained was Knocknagoshel and they were in division five in Kerry and going nowhere. That was 27 years before I came to Tipperary.

“I am very confident and I believe in what I can do. I place a huge emphasis on skill and on team-work and on belief. When Laune Rangers were going well, the year we won the All-Ireland, our style of football was fabulous to look at.

“That is important to me. Do not give me drudgery and dour games – I believe that if you are a tough man, you are a tough man mentally, not with fist or elbow or boot. So in the first year with Tipperary, I went for a game that would get us out of Division Four. I started the job three weeks after I met the county board.

“And I found that there was a lot of apathy in the clubs. I found the confidence very low. But almost immediately, I also found something that was very unusual.

“I don’t want to compare and lessen other counties by association, but despite the difficulties the team had over the last few years, there was this winning attitude and psyche locked within these guys that must come from their mothers and fathers and aunts and grandfathers . . . something that I think is endemic in Tipperary.

“Very quickly, it felt like I had just peeled something back and this explosion of energy and attitude and wannabe footballers just came out of nowhere. They are quick on the pick up and they will fight for everything.

“Maybe it comes from the hurling. I don’t know. But it was there and it just needed tweaking a small bit and that was more important than working on skill or lack of scoring power.

“The senior lads carried the can – Kevin Mulryan, Eamon Hanrahan, Robbie Costigan, Paul and Niall Fitzgerald – wonderful guys. In the first year, we wanted to implement the kind of game that would get us promotion. And it was a journey.”

It was more than that.

Tipperary’s promotion from the lowest ranks of the league last year became a quest. Evans’ nature means he probably has no choice but to throw himself wholeheartedly into whatever project he commits to, but listening to him talk of Tipperary one suspects this team have captured his loyalty in a way that at least matches the famous Laune Rangers side he coached.

There was a deliberate decision behind the absolute commitment with which he plunged into what has turned out to be the rebirth of Tipperary football. He has an endearing and unselfconscious way of speaking about himself in the third person.

“The other side of John Evans is that he is a rogue,” he says. “He is a jovial character. He enjoys life, he really does. He loves a good yarn and banter, a late singsong and he would talk until the cows come home.”

One of his key tools is positive talk. He brings an old-fashioned barracks sensibility to the concept so that there is nothing new-age about it. His first task with Tipperary was to assemble an enviable backroom team. Johnny Cummins and Niall Kelly were his original selectors, men in whom he saw “that boundless energy” to match his own.

He recruited Seán Deegan, the physiotherapist who had returned from England after seven years with West Ham United. Jimmy Cunningham was masseur. Alan Ward, who had coached Shannon for several seasons in the AIL, was recruited as coach.

Straight away, he had surrounded himself with a team that many Division One teams would envy. “If you sat these five or six guys around, you would listen to what they had to say. And above all, this is the secret – when John Evans is not in the dressingroom, which is a lot of the time, he knows that a lot of rumbling and rumours about how this fella is going and what not is going on. That is true of any team. So it is vital that you have two experienced guys there. And they must listen to the player as well as treat him.

“The patient protocol exists there. Rehab is not just for the physical thing; it is not just a matter of treating the hamstring or whatever. You are working on their heads, talking to them, listening to them and building their confidence the whole time. That is crucial.”

For Evans, the logic of concentrating on what is possible is unarguable. It was the only way he coped when the family’s eldest boy got sick, out of the blue, in 1997. For 18 months, Seán battled cancer. He was a terrific lad and, as it happened, a promising ‘ball player too – he looked odds on to follow his father, who won an under-21 All-Ireland with Kerry, on to county teams.

“He had all the attributes,” John Evans smiles now, “as they say, a roaring certainty for the Kerry minors. But I was never worried about that either way.”

Seán died on October 14th, 1998.

“Certain things in life happen,” John Evans says. “And you can fall or lie down and maybe I should have. I could have drank a lot more pints and cried into the glass and maybe I should have. I still believe in the man above, even if I don’t go to Mass that often. But I dunno, I had to believe that there was a reason.

“And I just tried to stay positive and to keep going. And then we had a son, Cian, who was born in 2000. You know, in the throes of this massive grieving, we had a child on the way. So we had a son born on January 4th, which was the very same birth date as the boy that died. And I am not too dramatic or anything but when that happened to us, I felt that I had a break in life. The odds of that happening are unimaginably huge.

“Fantastical, as they say. It was something. And from then on, I decided that anything I was going to do in life, it was going to be with as much vitality as I could bring.”

He kept good with his promise. The garlands have been thrown Tipperary’s way this year, with their nerveless and unerring ascent through Division Three in the league. But perhaps it was the year before when the GAA nation at large paid only flickering attention to the power in the Tipperary story.

Perhaps, in a way, what John Evans was doing in the shadows of Division Four was as important as his native county going on to add to their fabulous All-Ireland winning heritage.

The bare bones of their promotion lay in a succession of victories against the other strugglers in football’s equivalent of the Maslow hierarchy – Kilkenny, Clare, Antrim, Waterford and Wicklow.

Between beating Antrim and that penultimate game against Waterford, they were stunned – stilled – by the news that Daryl Darcy had been killed in a car crash.

It happened on the Tuesday on a weekend when Tipp had played an under-21 final and then met Antrim. Darcy had featured in both matches.

His funeral took place on Friday and the team were – unbelievably, when you consider it – supposed to get their minds and bodies right to play a league match two days later.

But the cold chronology of events cannot explain what those few days were like. It was only when they gathered with Daryl Darcy’s family for his month’s mind that a few things fell into place for John Evans.

For those few days when a family had lost a son and they had lost a friend and a team-mate, the manager was in both places. He had stood where the Darcy family stood 10 years before.

But there was this team to think of too, these lads whom he had cobbled together and who believed in him without question and now they had the obligation of a fixture to fulfil.

John Kiely, the Waterford manager, was big-hearted about it. They met in Nenagh and after they ate a sombre meal, Evans spoke to the players. They did not want to play football.

“It felt a small bit sour and agitated,” he says of the feeling that they were being forced to play this match. Yet, what was the alternative? To grant a walkover? To mope? For the first half, they moped on the field. At some stage in the second half – fastidious as John Evans is, real time escaped his grip during this match – they trailed by six points.

He leans forward on the armchair now, pushes his coffee cup to one side and holds two burly arms aloft in describing the closing passage of that match.

“The last 15 minutes of football were great. Barry Grogan got a goal with two minutes to go and Waterford had a chance or two to win it, but we got there. This was April and the sun was beaming down on us and we were there together, after an unbelievable week of grieving and turmoil.”

A week later, they had beaten Wicklow and were going up to the next level and there was Mick O’Dwyer – John Evans’s old coach in the “21” days and his god in football – “my number one kid, my idol” – standing in the middle of the Tipperary dressingroom and praising these shattered players in that mellifluous voice of his.

And there it was for John Evans; his past and present forming before him. When he was starting out, a teenager with football brains to burn, he had sat in a dressingroom with youngsters whose skills would shape the future years of Gaelic games – Spillane, O’Shea, Moran, Sheehy.

Now here was ’Dwyer again, greyer, but not much slower and still talking with that slow-burning passion of his about the game.

So it was only a month later, when they went en masse to the church to remember Daryl Darcy that John Evans had time to pause and fully understand how strangely it all turns out and how maybe, after what had happened with Seán, he had somehow been guided to this place, to this day.

“There was a huge sense release of emotion in the church that day,” he says, his eyes creasing. “It is hard to describe. There was a thank you to be said. And I got a huge sense of belonging there that day, a sense of Daryl Darcy having had a hand in it. It felt like steering a ship through murky waters.”

After that league season, the baiting down at home in Kilorglin had stopped. Evans going to Tipperary was too good to resist in the early days and when he was out in the pub, he had to bite his tongue a few times.

He scouted with maniacal thoroughness. He heard of such-in-such in housing estates where sports loyalties began and ended with Premiership gossip and he followed guys, he called to their houses. Asked them if they wanted to give Tipperary football a shot.

“I just felt a phone call would be no good, that it wouldn’t register. If you want something from someone, you have to do something for them first.”

There is a football movement at work across the heartland.

How far can this thing go? John Evans doesn’t have a clue. An ideal world would bring about a Kerry-Tipperary Munster final and improbable goal-scoring pyrotechnics from the underdogs.

But there is no ideal world. He hasn’t entertained those fantasies. The truth is, they will do well to get past Limerick. He grimaces when he thinks about tomorrow’s opponents.

“Look. If Limerick had stayed in Division Three, I think we would take them. But . . . their pride has been hurt and I think we will be the subjects of a huge backlash from them. They are stung and they are good championship team.

“Then you have Seán Carey, Hugh Coughlan and Ciarán McDonald getting awards and that will infuriate Limerick. We are neighbours. The rivalry will go balubas.

“However, these guys have risen to a challenge. They are playing in Semple Stadium. And if you want to capture a sense of charisma about a team, you have to give them a sense of stage.

“And they have a huge sense of pride playing in Semple Stadium – one of the great GAA stadiums and their home ground – whether it is front of 50 people or 15,000.

“I just kept saying it to them, if we keep playing well enough, then in the field of dreams, they will come. A bit like the film. They will come. But ye will have to be consistent and give a sense of pride. Above in Roscommon, I counted 23 people. There might be a few more for this match.”

But it was never about the outside world, this Tipperary experiment and John Evans. By five o’clock tomorrow, it may well be that Tipperary are out of the Munster football championship after just one match and across the country, that result would not register great surprise.

But that won’t knock John Evans out of his stride and it won’t alter the truth that sometimes the splendour of the team has nothing to do with the final score.