Glamour returns to GAA after a grim era

TOM HUMPHRIESrecalls the meeting of Dublin and Kildare in the 1992 Leinster final, memorable for Keith Barr's goal and several bouts of fisticuffs

THE YEARS between the World Cups of 1990 and 1994 should have been a dark time for the GAA. The colour, the novelty and the excitement of those first two Irish World Cup expeditions should have made the native games look grey and stodgy.

Croke Park was a conglomeration of dark and angular stands punctuated by two vast concrete terraces, the country was beginning to smell itself and loving the little boosts to the national ego that approval from the rest of the world might bring.

Part of the process of becoming the great little country we believed ourselves to be was stepping up and volunteering for every piece of globalisation and homogenisation that would erase what made us different.

And the GAA itself was coming off a grim time. Various bans still lingered and in 1992 the RDS crisis had further painted the association into a bad light. And the games weren’t great either. The Meath-Cork era which had closed off the 1980s and opened the 90s was one of those times you had to be a native of either Meath or Cork to appreciate. Hurling’s revolution years were still coming down the line.

AND THEN GOOD fortune provided. In 1991 Mick O’Dwyer took over Kildare whose championship the previous summer had ended in defeat to Wicklow. O’Dwyer transfused the Kildare GAA scene and brought the short-grass people to a National League final against Dublin. Kildare lost but Croke Park heaved with excitement.

That summer Dublin and Meath took the national imagination by the lapels with their epic four-game series and the season ended with the novelty of an Ulster team, Down, coming from virtually nowhere to win an All-Ireland title playing attractive and confident football.

By 1992 Gaelic football was sexy again and when Kildare came through Leinster unscathed to reach the final the queues for tickets, which were to go on sale at 11am, began at 5.30 in the morning. The GAA world was agog with stories about O’Dwyer. He could hardly go to the bathroom without taking a helicopter to get there. And not his own helicopter, usually that of an Arab sheikh. If a pub or a hotel in the general Kildare area was sold somebody would let you in on the secret with a loud and confident whisper, “O’Dwyer”.

His team performed such feats in training that nobody quite knew what to make of them. They could do 40 laps of the Curragh as warm-up or train for 70 nights in a row but still kick 17 or 18 wides out of all the possession they gobbled up. And yet they were new and exciting to watch and the O’Dwyer factor meant that nobody could ever dismiss them lightly. Least of all Dublin who were managed and mentored by a conglomerate of 1970s survivors for whom O’Dwyer had been the bete noir.

No game against an O’Dwyer side was ever an ordinary match for Dublin and that summer, with Meath safely sandbagged by a young Laois team and the hunger in Dublin starting to have an edge, Dublin were readying themselves for the long haul. Saving themselves, they got through three games to reach the Leinster final in lacklustre fashion.

“We have got so far without being very good,” said Dr Pat O’Neill, then one of Paddy Cullen’s mentors. “Indeed without being good at all.”

When Dublin played Louth in an early championship match the veteran midfielder Davy Foran returned to the centre for the game replacing a gangly young tyro from St Vincent’s. “Young Gilroy is a fine player and he has plenty of time,” said Foran generously.

Dublin’s preparations for the Leinster final were hampered by an odd sort of epidemic. Tommy Carr, Eamon Heery, Mick Galvin and Foran himself all broke their noses early that summer. Dublin, whose play in those days so cavalierly mixed the good and the bad, could now add the ugly to the mix.

Kildare on the other hand often seemed like a side struggling to live with the reputation of their manager. O’Dwyer’s reign had begun with a National League defeat to Leitrim and Kildare’s championship interest in 1991 had been ended disappointingly by Louth. O’Dwyer patched together a tremendously athletic team with bits of the necessary grey-beard experience scattered throughout.

John Crofton at full back had done a fine job stifling Vinny Murphy in the 1991 league final but had been left out of O’Dwyer’s panel for his first game against Leitrim at the start of the league. Having played a Leinster final in 1978 as centre back against Dublin and having still been playing when Wicklow took Kildare down in 1990, Crofton wouldn’t have been too distraught to have to end his service. But everything he saw and heard about the set-up he liked.

O’Dwyer corralled young minors from recent teams, players like Anthony Rainbow, Ger Gannon, Niall Buckley, Brian Fahy, Ronan Quinn, Glenn Ryan, Jarlath Gilroy and Martin Lynch. He put them into Kildare sides and they traded their pace and energy for a football education.

O’Dwyer had also restructured his half-back line for the 1992 campaign. In 1991 some signs of wear and tear seemed evident in the line of Ryan, Pat O’Donoghue and Bill Sex so O’Dwyer restructured with Ryan moving to centre back, flanked by Peter McConnon and Rainbow who seemed unfeasibly light but who would transpire to be indestructible.

BY THE TIME the two sides met in the Leinster final of that year it seemed as if the cards had been cut perfectly for the winners. The other three provincial finals had already been settled and in the final four either Dublin or Kildare would be joined by Clare, Donegal and Mayo. Without disrespecting any of those sides, Dublin and Kildare would have felt like heavyweights being asked to take care of a bantamweights in order to win the championship belt.

That impression would harden later in the summer when Donegal and Mayo played out perhaps the most dire All-Ireland football semi-final in living memory.

For the Leinster final then the stakes were as high as the interest. Dublin, without a provincial title since 1989, felt a win could vault them to an All-Ireland. O’Dwyer knew that the momentum of a first Kildare provincial title since the mid-50s would make his team almost unstoppable.

First Dublin and Kildare had to try to stop each other. On the afternoon of the final Lynch won the toss for Kildare but elected to play against the wind which was strong. Dublin surged. First, though, some truths and facts had to be sorted. The game’s first fight broke out just before the quarter of an hour mark and held the game up for three minutes and left Dublin’s Jack Sheedy unconscious on the ground.

Kildare had served notice that they wouldn’t be daunted by Dublin’s muscular physicality. Like a lot of teams who enter a field determined to prove that point, they forgot for long periods to just do what they were good at, preferring instead to show the world what they were capable of.

By half-time Dublin led by nine points and the shemozzling had produced one memorable result. At one stage Keith Barr had emerged from somewhere near the epicentre of a row pushing back veteran centre forward Tom Harris with a rain of blows, a sight which set the stands alight with excitement.

Minutes later Dublin worked a ball quickly out of their defence; Jack Sheedy, newly revived, did the simple common-sense thing and broke it into the path of Charlie Redmond. Now it was an all Erin’s Isle affair. As Redmond looked for options Barr came steaming up the middle of the pitch. Redmond popped the ball to his clubmate and Barr went thundering on, granite shouldered and unstoppable. He was within range for a point, glanced ahead and saw the goals gaping and in that way they do sometimes he drove the ball from about the 21-yard line into the corner of the Kildare net. One of the great Croke Park goals and a reinforcement of the influence which Kevin Moran had on Dublin centre-back play down the years.

THE IMAGE OF Barr’s goal driven to the Kildare net was as indelible as that of Moran’s solo run and near miss at the start of the 1976 All-Ireland. It became part of Dublin football culture.

In the shorter term it shook Kildare badly. Having scored their fourth point of the day in the 18th minute they didn’t score again until after the break. Dublin added another four points without reply.

Kildare had the wind after the half-time refreshments and they set about Dublin with the determination of men who had just received an O’Dwyer homily to the effect that there was nothing to be afraid of out there in the blue jerseys.

The second half brought more punches and bad tackles but no more goals. Toward the end Kildare contrived to create a string of chances which they missed with ever more outrageous profligacy. They might have snatched a win. Yet it never felt as though they would.

In his gracious speech at the end of the game Dublin captain Tommy Carr assured Kildare that their time was soon. It was easy to believe that he was right and nobody suspected it would be six years and O’Dwyer’s second coming before the Kildare revolution would bear fruit.

Dublin, meanwhile, rolled on to a semi-final with Clare and a final with Donegal. Nothing could go wrong they thought. Nothing.