‘A really emotional, really vulnerable time’ - How Offaly refused to write off their year after the death of Liam Kearns

When it ended, it ended old-style.

No holding back or putting on a stiff upper lip, no briskly moving along to the next day. No learnings, no work-ons. Nothing like that. Just bear hugs and fandangos, all around O’Connor Park.

Offaly had beaten Meath for the first time since 2000 and they’d done it in front of their home supporters in Tullamore.

Young and old, they were all now clambering over seats and scuttling down terraces to get onto the pitch. Mardi Gras in green, white and gold.

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For the Offaly players, lots of different flavours were swirling around in the soup. None of them had ever played on a team that had won two Leinster championship games in a row. None of them have ever made it as far as a provincial semi-final.

In truth, none of them have ever been taught to expect much out of an Offaly senior career, other than to do their business and get out of the way before the big teams take the stage. That will happen in the coming weeks, of course, because gravity always wins.

But this meant something more. A feeling only they could access.

“Some counties might throw their noses up at a Leinster quarter-final,” says Nigel Dunne, back in the panel this season after a four-year hiatus. “But there’s so many reasons that was a big win and they all definitely came out in the 30 seconds after the final whistle.

“I was on my knees, roaring. I saw a picture of myself and I was mortified. What am I doing? A man in my 30s acting like a 10-year-old. But that was pure, raw stuff.”

He was far from alone. Full-back and captain Declan Hogan sank to the turf, leaned back on his heels and screamed into the clouds. The McNamee brothers, Ruairí and Conor, melted into a puddle together. Bernard Allen, making his 100th senior appearance for the county, sprinted in a circle with aeroplane arms.

“It was a real outpouring of emotion,” Allen says. “Look, we have a huge togetherness there and obviously the last few months have had a good bit to do with that. We want to honour the project that Liam set out.”

As most will know, Liam is Liam Kearns, their manager for six months over the winter. On Sunday, March 12th, he took training ahead of their game against Tipperary the following weekend. By that evening, they all got phonecalls telling them he had died suddenly in the afternoon. They were only getting to know him when he left them.

On that chill spring Sunday, the death of Liam Kearns caught in the throat of so many people in so many corners of the GAA.

Not alone was he a familiar and popular character on the scene, someone who’d managed teams in intercounty football for the best part of two decades. There was also just the shock of loss, of a county losing its manager without warning, of a season upended and a team left bereft.

So when full-time came last Sunday in Tullamore, you didn’t need to be a mystic to see into the minds of those Offaly players as they hugged each other close.

Talking to them this week, there was no attempt by anyone to play down the significance. Kearns sent them out on the road in 2023 – wherever it ends, his name will be attached.

“Liam laid his cards out early doors,” Allen says. “He talked from the start about four games in particular. He wanted to target the Antrim game because it was the first game in the league. He wanted to target the Tipperary game because he was there for such a long time and had such a relationship with the county.

“And then he wanted to target Longford in championship so that we could get Meath into O’Connor Park and have a crack at them. That was the plan from the very start of the year.

“He said it over and over again – if we get Meath into Tullamore, we can get the Offaly public out and get them really involved and give them something to shout about.”

None of them knew Kearns to any great extent when he arrived. When Dunne got a call from him back in September to see would he be interested in reviving his Offaly career, he was initially wary about answering a strange number. It didn’t take long for him to find a fellow traveller.

“The thing with Liam is that he was a brilliant man, as well as a manager,” Dunne says. “I know that’s easy to say now but there was just no bullshit with him. He would give it to you straight, no sugar-coating. And because of that, he got instant respect from everybody.”

As you go down the divisions, selling an intercounty gig to a good candidate can feel like a desperado’s errand. When Michael Duignan first talked to Kearns back in September, he wanted to show him Offaly’s best face so he set the meeting for Faithful Fields, their centre of excellence in Kilcormac. He needn’t have fretted.

Duignan found Kearns good and wise company in the course of a three-hour chat. He had retired from the Garda and gone to Setanta College to do a Strength and Conditioning degree.

Even though he’d been in football forever, he was still curious and keen to know about all the changes that were constantly pulsing through the game. With a cast of All-Ireland-winning under-20s coming through, he could see the potential in Offaly and Duignan didn’t really have to do much courting.

Spin the tape on six months and the end came suddenly and brutally. Offaly trained in the morning and Kearns outlined the plan for the week to come, with Tipperary in Semple Stadium waiting at the end of it. That evening, Dunne was at home when he got a call from John Rouse, team selector.

“I honestly felt like I was going to vomit when I heard it,” he says. “It shook me to my core. It was the most unbearable, unbelievable bad feeling I’ve ever had in terms of someone dying.

“And I wouldn’t have been close to Liam – we only had him for such a short length of time and I probably only had five or six full conversations with him ever, you know that kind of a way? And yet I felt like I’d lost a right arm.

“That kind of freaked me out a bit – how fickle life is. In training that day, I got a dunt into the nose. It’s weird the things you remember. Liam would be hardy, now. But he said, ‘Nigel, are you alright?’ And I went, ‘Yeah, I’m grand.’ And for days afterwards I was thinking, ‘That’s the last conversation we ever had’.

“Like, there was nothing to it but that was the point. You never know what the last thing you say to somebody is going to be. It made me think about life differently. I was instantly more grateful for everything I have. I wanted to go home and hug my children. It shook me. And all the lads were the same.”

They met on the Monday in O’Connor Park. Not to train, not to do anything, just to be together. They sat and had tea and talked the whole thing out. They told stories and laughed and made a plan for the week. The wake. The funeral. The Tipperary game.

“Obviously there was a lot of emotion involved in that game,” says Allen. “Liam meant so much to Tipperary, he had such success with them. And we were determined to honour him and not just go down there and fold because it had been a long week. We wanted to use his memory in a positive way.

“I remember going into the dressing-room in Semple Stadium and someone had hung a Bainisteoir bib up on the wall. We didn’t make a big song and dance out of it, we all knew the significance of the game. But I thought that was a lovely touch. I took a picture of it. I still have it on my phone.”

Offaly ran in two late goals that day to grind out a victory. But the emotion of the week was bound to extract its price eventually and when they played Down in Tullamore the following week, they found their cards were all maxed out. They lost by 12. It could have been 20.

And that could easily have been that. It would have been entirely understandable if they’d pulled stumps for the year and gone through the motions from that point on.

It wasn’t like they had a month to go away and clear their heads – the Leinster opener against Longford was a fortnight away. Nobody expected anything from them.

“It was a really emotional, really vulnerable time,” Dunne says. “Martin Murphy and John Rouse were unbelievable through it. They know football, they know every Offaly player inside out. They were unreal through it all.

“Martin took over and was authentic and real. He said, ‘This is a situation I never thought I’d find myself in’. He handled it in a way that was so relatable to all of us because we were all going through the same thing.

“So we kept at it. We didn’t make it a big crusade for Liam but we didn’t minimise it either. I think we found a nice middle ground. We all know it’s there and we all know what he would have wanted from us. To keep going and keep doing the things he was doing with us.

“And I think that’s probably the most satisfying thing. We all know the excuse was there for us. If the season just petered out into a year of mediocrity or even into a shitshow, no one would have pointed the finger at us. We had the excuse to fall back on but no one took it. That’s the most pleasing thing.”

On they go, still feeling it, still not having fully processed everything. It’s all still so fresh in the memory – Duignan went down to the month’s mind Mass just the weekend before last. For the Kearns family, this is all still a bit of a daze. In the space of an afternoon, it was like a wall in the house was deleted without warning.

The loss felt by the Offaly footballers doesn’t compare, obviously. But when they take the pitch in Croke Park tomorrow, they’ll be doing all they can to continue the job Kearns started.

“It’s all small steps,” says Duignan. “He wanted to bring people through. He wanted to stabilise Offaly at a higher level. He wanted them to fight for each other. That was the best thing about the closing stages last week.

“They were out on their feet but they kept diving in for the ball and they wouldn’t be beaten. That’s the sort of thing people want, a team they can be proud of. They’re giving it everything, guided by Liam Kearns’s vision for them.”