Tipperary Hurling Tipperary GAA Premierview

Brood that is Leahy legacy

8-6-01 Sunday Times Denis Walsh



WITH 10 minutes to go they brought him on. Blue helmet, tight black shorts. Mullinahone were coasting into the South Tipperary junior hurling final, John Leahy was 15. They wanted to see what this young fella could do and, as they remember it, he showed them. One-handed flicks, a strut underwritten with class. The first frame of an epic.

Mullinahone was not a fertile place for hurlers, neither the climate nor the soil allowed it. As a club they stretched back to the 1880s but in all that time they had never produced a senior hurler for Tipperary. The county didn't expect it and Mullinahone were not persecuted with guilt. In Tipperary the south was the only area where football existed without the dread of harassment and Mullinahone held the big ball close to its bosom.

Then came Leahy. To grasp the story you must first know how it ends. In 1987 Leahy was Mullinahone's first Tipperary minor in 40 years; since Leahy, there have been 11. After the first explosion came the secondary blasts and this afternoon in Páirc Uí Chaoimh five Mullinahone players will don the senior jersey: Brian O'Meara, Paul and Eoin Kelly on the first 15, Leahy and Paul Curran in reserve.

From such an unlikely place, a village in the shadow of Slievenaman, tradition was shot through: "They still raise an eyebrow up the north of the county," says Albert Curran, chairman of the club and father of Paul, "when they see five from the south on the Tipperary panel - not to mind five from Mullinahone."

In Mullinahone they have got over the sensation but not the wonder.

The structures and the coaching came in time but that wasn't the genesis of it. When Leahy was a boy in the village, hurling was an orphan. He remembers playing two or three under-12 games but no more.

"Even going to school," he says, "we weren't allowed to bring our hurleys. We'd bring them in for a couple of days and then we'd be told 'no, it's too dangerous'. So we'd hurl on our own."

In Jim O'Neill, Liam O'Connor and the Moore brothers Leahy found kindred souls. They played in each other's back gardens or down in the GAA field.

"We used to wait until the teachers were gone home at half three," says O'Connor,"and then we'd go out playing."

There weren't enough players to make an under-14 hurling team in the club and for under-16 the lads travelled to Killenaule, six miles away, and hurled for them. Two years later Mullinahone mustered a minor team. O'Connor has the team picture still. He takes it into his hand and scans it for hurlers; from a panel of 22 he reckons six. "The rest of them were just putting in hands and legs."

Yet they reached the South Tipp minor B final, losing by a point after a replay. The plot was tilled and the seed was down. A year later Mullinahone won the under-21 B hurling county title; a year later the under-21 A hurling county title. The first under-21 hurling teams the club ever fielded. "You were thinking," says Leahy, "'Is this really happening to us'?"

With Leahy they believed anything was possible. The first of those under-21 finals was level deep into injury time. Leahy shaped up to a sideline cut 50 yards out and the referee told him it was the last puck of the game. Leahy made it the winner.

"There are lads in Mullinahone," says Jackie Bolger, the club secretary, "who haven't hurled since then because they never had the ability. They hurled because Leahy was playing and he brought out the best in them. I remember we had a wing back who carried the hurley half way up for the whole championship and never used it. He met the ball coming in and kicked it. You had lads lying over the ball and saying,'Come on Leahy, come and pick it up'."

Those years were the first flush of Leahy's pomp and Mullinahone was swept along with him. For his 21st birthday they paraded him through the village, perched on a trailer with an accordion player providing the score. He had won his first All-Ireland with Tipperary, his first All Star was on the way, comparisons with Jimmy Doyle were appearing in print and with the strength and daring of youth he had taken the club on his shoulders. The adulation of his neighbours flirted with idolatory.

Leahy filled his lungs with the sweet vapours. In Mullinahone when you found Leahy you knew the craic was nearby: "You had to be spontaneous with John in his early days," says Bolger. "You couldn't always plan with him and that's what you loved about him. He was liable to go around with a cup we were after winning tied to the front grille of his Isuzu Gemini. That was what you were dealing with. Ninety nine per cent of the stories you heard about him from those days are probably true."

"He got so much so soon," says Deirdre O'Sullivan, assistant club secretary and a contemporary of Leahy's. "You'd have wanted to be very level-headed to be a sensible boy the whole time."

There was an exuberance to Leahy which on the field sometimes fermented into petulance. At home they accepted it as part of him and whatever they said among themselves they bristled at the pointing fingers of outsiders. With his uniqueness came many things and they took him as a whole.

"I often compared him in likeness to Cantona," says Bolger. "The madness of talent - the sheer madness. It's the thoroughbred up in Coolmore - you take him out of the stable he goes haywire. Roy Keane has it. If you take out that streak it dents the talent."

To the young lads in Mullinahone Leahy was luminous. A television star and a sorceror. Brian O'Meara was only 14 when he togged out as a sub on Leahy's minor team, too young to be a peer, young enough to be in awe. The first Tipperary hurling match O'Meara was taken to was the 1987 Munster final; they went because Leahy was playing for the minors in the curtain raiser.

"We just all wanted to emulate Johnny Leahy," says O'Meara."We had a bad junior hurling team and suddenly this fella had come along and was doing everything himself. He practically lived in the hurling field around that time and we'd be watching him practising putting balls over the bar from the corner flag."

Three years later, in 1990, Mullinahone produced three Tipperary minors at once: O'Meara and the Skehan twins. The conveyor belt was moving. "John breaking through," says Curran,"put it into lads' heads that they could do it as well. It puts a little seed into a guy's brain. It showed us what talent was out there. A lot of the guys we have are so talented that if they were in Kerry they'd be playing county football now instead of county hurling."

In 1990 Paul Kelly would have been 11-years-old, Paul Curran nine, Eoin Kelly would have been eight, his outrageous gifts already visible to anybody with eyes in their head. "I'd say that chap never improved skill-wise," says Leahy, "from the time I saw him first in the field as a six or seven-year-old. He was unbelievable."

The Kellys' father Jimsy played for Mullinahone over four decades, from the 1950s to the 80s. His fondness for football didn't match his passion for hurling but he fell in with his neighbours and played what was going. For his young lads it was different. Growing up in Mullinahone, hurling was the example they were shown and the bright star they followed.

"At the very start," says Jimsy,"I didn't throw my two a football, I bought them hurleys. They hurled on the lawn, the two of them flogging away good-oh with the control. All ball-work. There wasn't much room but they made the best of what room was there."

By the time the Kellys were old enough to join the men, Mullinahone was a senior hurling club. Progress began with a leap and continued in bounds.

Four years after they won the junior county title in 1989 they won the South Tipperary senior championship; four years later, in 1997, they contested their first Tipperary senior hurling final.

Two weeks before the game Leahy broke a bone in his wrist. Two days before the match the specialist examined the injury to see how well it was healing and told Leahy he couldn't hurl. Leahy thanked the specialist for his opinion and on Sunday he took the field, his wrist housed in a protective coating, the pain strangled with an injection. For the hour he couldn't feel his hand. Every other feeling had never been more vivid.

"I'd sat in the stand in Thurles at a lot of county finals," he says, "looking down at the likes of Kilruane, Clonoulty, Roscrea, Toomevara, never thinking that one day we'd walk around behind the Moycarkey Pipe Band as a club. The result didn't go our way, but it was a phenomenal achievement for us.

"One thing stands out in my mind from that day. We were walking around behind the band and we turned to face the Old Stand and to see the green and red of Mullinahone all over the stand. I thought to myself, 'whatever happens this is a great day'."

By then the cloudbursts in Leahy's life had passed. The assault case in Manchester was behind him, his drinking days over. Leahy had reached an accommodation with himself. In Mullinahone they had lived the bad days too. Leahy was a limb of their identity.

"With the Manchester thing we were in shock," says Bolger. "The thought crossed our minds that we were going to be without John Leahy. It was the day we dreaded. Thankfully he came through it but I suppose the day when we'll be without him will have to come and for John that's going to be a big day too.

"I remember after the county final in 1997 neutrals coming out and saying to me, 'Ah look, you'd have won it only for Leahy - ye let Leahy do everything, you'd want to be talking to him.' What they didn't realise was that this was everything he had lived for. This was his life. Hurling was his life. Only for John Leahy there wouldn't have been senior hurling in Mullinahone."

Leahy remains the heartbeat of the team, but he is no longer every vital organ. The young guys have come into their own. Paul Curran went to Waterford IT and won a Fitzgibbon Cup medal; Eoin Kelly went to St Kieran's and won an All-Ireland Colleges medal; Paul Kelly emerged in this National League as the best young defender in the country. And in Páirc Uí Chaoimh a year ago O'Meara came out of himself.

As a teenager he played in the 1989 junior county final for Mullinahone and ever since he was the sorceror's apprentice. He didn't have Leahy's class and he didn't have Leahy's confidence and his big games for the club never enchanted the headline writers the way Leahy's did. With Tipperary he was never sure of his place but last June he skinned Liam Doyle and by the end of the championship he had a good case for an All-Star.

"Brian is a very unassuming fella," says Bolger, "but the confidence that has come into his hurling in the last 18 months is unreal. He's no longer going around people - he's going through the gaps."

Eoin Kelly, though, is the one who lights up their eyes. They'll tell you about an under-14 county final where he scored 4-12 and a senior league match this year where he scored 15 points and every new scoring feat draws him closer to the young Leahy in their minds. In Kelly's demeanour they see it too. This afternoon, on his championship debut, he will hit the frees and, says Jimsy, "it won't knock a feather out of him."

They know it won't. "He's strong," says Bolger, "and he has great poise. He has all the skill there is and he's cocky. He's cocky. Leahy had that in abundance too." Last year they won an intermediate county football title, returning them to senior ranks for the first time since the mid-1970s. None of the club's ancient urges were awakened; a football hasn't been kicked in Mullinahone since the county final last December and there are no plans to start. The chance to win a senior hurling title is so precious they daren't leave it out of their sight.

"All of a sudden this diamond has landed in the parish in the form of senior hurlers," says Bolger, "and we have to learn how to cut it. We feel a duty as officers of the club, as people of the parish, to leave no stone unturned for these players because this time will pass."

Days like today, though, are eternal. They wondered how many they would have on from the start, telling themselves that it might only be two. They knew that Nicky English had a decision to make about Leahy and they couldn't say for sure what should be done for the best. This is Leahy's 13th season as a Tipperary senior and his year has been interrupted by injury. They sense that he might not last 70 minutes and they can see the wisdom of keeping him in reserve. And if he were starting, they could see the wisdom of that more easily.

"Whatever happens," says Bolger, "they're in the fabric of the parish. Underneath those Tipperary jerseys will be green and red."

Still the wonder grows.
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Sunday Tribune 16th September 2001


HONOURS ENGLISH


THE DAY it began? Nicky English remembers it well.He travelled down to Holycross three years ago as a freshly-minted inter-county manager to watch David Kennedy in action for Loughmore-Castleiney against Thurles Sarsfields, saw his future centre-back get sent off inside 10 minutes for two pretty harmless bookable offences and silently swore at the waste of an afternoon all the way back to Dublin on the train. The day it finished? Last Sunday evening, when Tommy Dunne hoisted the McCarthy Cup and the current group of Tipperary players achieved their manifest destiny. Journey's end for them and their manager.

Their victory.His victory.His victory because it was their victory. As English revealed in a profile of him in West Tipperary , a book published last May, his job was one of creating the environment to enable the players to reach their full potential."I've no doubts whatsoever that the quality of the players at the moment is such that they will definitely win an All Ireland, " he declared."The only question is when."The question has been answered.

English's victory too because it was English's team. A side built, not inherited. A bunch of youngsters with what he terms "the values of the old stand in Thurles" double-stitched into their psyche.Values, and hurling and class and speed as well.The county's 1996 full-back line of George Frend, Paul Shelly and Michael Ryan didn't hurl on a different planet, but from this vantage point they might as well have.

From the beginning, English insisted he wanted men of character, the kind of guys who would stick out a hand and haul you back in if you were hanging over the edge of a cliff. Kennedy, the object of that first field trip, was one who passed the test with honours. For years English had listened to tales of the legend of Mick Roche. Roche the ultimate Tipperary hurling centre-back, Roche and his other-county facsimiles such as Ger Henderson and Seanie McMahon. English wasn't worried about discovering another Mick Roche. All he wanted was a centre-back to stand his ground and block off the middle. He found him in Kennedy - and if Kennedy couldn't hit the sliotar with any great fluency, that didn't matter. It wasn't what he was there for.

"What David does now, Bobby Ryan did in my day when he played centre-back, " English says.

"People slagged Bobby off, said he wasn't hitting enough ball. But the two years Bobby was centre-back for us, we won the two All Irelands."

Put Lar Corbett, the boy selling programmes outside Semple Stadium on millennium Munster final day, down as another notch on the manager 's sporting bedpost. One didn't require Nelson's eye for talent to realise that Eoin Kelly had the look of eagles about him, but Corbett's inter-county potential was doubted by most people, from the Tipperary minor selectors to his own clubmates in Thurles. One man, however, detected a gleam."He's the thing, he's going to make it, " a genuinely excited English told a friend after Corbett's first week in the fold. Having recently observed Corbett do things with a sliotar in training he's never seen anyone - not even Pat Fox - do, English had no difficulty in keeping faith with the youngster during his midsummer dip in form.

Elsewhere, Paul Kelly, a neat but often headless wing-forward categorically not regarded as the type who wins you matches, was transformed into a wing-back of poise, purpose and artistry, while John Carroll's stinker in the Munster final was a small blessing to the management, affording them the leeway to switch him to centre-forward - the position they'd envisaged him occupying from the beginning of the year - without incurring hassle about the arrant waste of an All Star wing-back.

"The people who were criticising Corbett were doing so on the evidence of his under 21 form in the middle of the summer, not his senior form, " reflects English, "And very few seem to have noticed that Eddie Enright has been magnificent at midfield since the move. The balance of the team immediately improved."

Taking the league seriously has stood to Tipperary. Treating it otherwise, the manager argues, propels players into the quicksand of bad habits."Why lose when you can win?"Their big outing in the competition this year was April's visit to Nowlan Park. Tipp had targeted the fixture from a long way back and showed "massive resolve" to earn the draw they wouldn't have dug out in the past. And as their young charges learned from the mistakes of 2000, so the selectors arrived at a happy medium on the training field.

"Coming in, we were unsure about the physical side of things. At the time, all the publicity was about the training methods used in Clare and other places. And those methods worked, Clare had the medals to prove it, and we thought that this must be the right way. But now you look at John McDermott. He's in an All Ireland final with Meath after only starting training a couple of months ago. Ultimately a hurler has to have the skill."

Last Sunday was about skill, about carrying out the simple tasks. Galway failed to do so and lost, despite the patterns woven by Kevin Broderick and Fergal Healy. Tipperary did so and won, despite injuries to two of their defenders, the bare adequacy of their half-back line, and the absence of both their household god from Mullinahone and their ballwinner in the half-forward line.

But it wasn't the Munster champions who proved incapable of defending bread-and-butter balls from out the field.Two long-range frees from Brendan Cummins yielded two goals: what that says about the supposed spinal implant job Mike Mac had done on Galway is a topic better left for another day.The first goal, with Declan Ryan's lay-off to the inrushing Mark O'Leary, can be classed as Tipperary's signature score of the summer. The second left them with little more to do than serve out for the championship.

If anything, it got worse for Galway after the second goal. Reflect on the ball Ollie Canning brought out over his own endline for a 65 converted by Dunne, the point David Tierney's flabby first touch gifted to Corbett, Cathal Moore taking his eye off the ball and O'Leary nipping in to filch a point. So, so avoidable.

Three points away there.Two more points squandered with Healy's two uprights.Bad luck? No, bad shooting.

Nor was there any misfortune attached to Broderick's goal-that-never-was.After Pat O'Connor sounded his whistle and Broderick ran on, Philip Maher stood up and Cummins only half-attempted a save.This was, or ought to have been, a non-sequitur, not the stuff of contrived phone-in rancour.

In essence, Tipperary last Sunday extended the graph of their championship run over the past three seasons and brought their journey to its natural conclusion.The competence and composure with which they did so is neatly illustrated by their tally of 1-9 in each half. Perfect symmetry.

There wasn't a team in the land who would have stopped them, Kilkenny most certainly included.

Thus the old order completed its self-restoration. That the last three All Irelands have been claimed by Cork, Kilkenny and Tipperary following absences from the podium of nine, seven and 10 years respectively underlines the modern reality that the McCarthy Cup race is usually won by the hungriest.That just might be good news for Limerick next year.

The sweets of life are not sweet for long, English knows. The 2001 season ended the moment the cup was lifted seven days ago. All that remains are the spinning-out of the celebrations, the functions, the school visitations, All Stars night in December."Maybe now is the time to be belting into the stamina work. Next year is already here for everybody else."

For Tipperary it can wait. Few All Irelands in history have been so hard won, so richly deserved or, oddly for the county in question maybe, but a worthy tribute to the popularity of the winning captain, so modestly accepted.

This is one to savour.