Micko, you were a god

A reader sent me his thoughts on Micko, and I couldn’t sum up that whole time and his impact on this county any better. 

He writes: “My dad left us too soon - the year Micko came back. The sadness I felt every day was lifted for those few hours every Sunday when the Lilies ran onto the pitch. I don’t remember a huge amount of the time between games. To me there seemed to be a match every weekend. And in my mind’s eye, it was sunny for every game. I know it wasn’t.

“Those days seem like a dream to me. Meath ’98, the canal end with the Meath men! Christy to Dermot, Dermot to Martin. Martin to Bryan. A jink, the Meath man stumbles to the ground and the ball hits the net. An explosion of joy. I felt myself lifting into the air, weightlessness. A huge burden lifted off my shoulders as I screamed and roared with joy, along with every other Kildare person. In those moments I felt my dad with me.

“I close my eyes and I’m still there. Part of me never left. I still feel the excitement and happiness I felt going to those games. Thank you Micko and the whole Kildare team. It was more than football to me then. They gave me hope. Better days would come for me. They did. Better days will come for Kildare.

“I’ll be there. My kids will be too. If I give them nothing else, they’ll have that. And me, hopefully, growing ungratefully old, boring them with stories of Micko, Glenn, Nuxer Buckley, Davy Dalton, Dermot Earley and Johnny. Ah those were the days…they really were. I think we’ll win one yet. I still have that hope.” 

In a way I envy that reader, not just for his eloquence, but that he didn’t have to go through the previous decade and more, as I did.

To understand the impact of Mick O’Dwyer on Kildare football you have to understand the state he found us in. By god, Gus Fitzpatrick, Michael Osborne, Mick Leavy and those boys surely proved themselves the greatest salespeople in the country that day in Adare to have convinced him to throw in his lot with the rabble that we were back then.

If younger readers think we are in a slump now, everything is relative I assure you. Three Leinster finals in eight years is a modest return you’ll say, but before Micko arrived in 1990 we were in our longest stretch, twelve years, without a provincial decider since the turn of the century. The eighties remain the only decade since 1900 without a Leinster final appearance.

A bit like the supporter above my first taste of the excitement this game and this county can bring was when I was lifted onto a Lilywhite bandwagon in 1978. I’d been to a few games here and there in the couple of years beforehand but that year the father took to bringing me to every game.

First round of the championship, Páirc Tailteann, Navan. Scorcher. Sunburn and Loops the Loops on the terraced corner at the town end. Louth quashed. Tommy Carew 1-6. Gerry Power, the Dan Flynn of his day with two goals.

We reached the final with eleven goals in three games having added the scalps of Meath and Wicklow. Mickser Condon with three of those.

Me in my innocence convinced Dublin were next for the chop. Heffo’s boys, All Ireland champions for the previous two years and in the thick of the greatest rivalry of all time with Kerry. And Mick O’Dwyer.

Final day. The rain cutting through us in the Hogan. Dublin tearing through our defence too. Dreams obliterated. Tears were shed. Kildare’s place in the scheme of things duly calibrated as the likes of Kevin Moran, Tony Hanahoe and Anton O’Toole cut a swathe through us.

We miss the late consolation goal from Denis Dalton, the father having already turned the Datsun Bluebird for home. 1-17 to 1-6 and a sixth successive final defeat since the All-Ireland Under-21 of 1965.

The barren eighties that followed not only saw us fail to reach a final, but we only made four semis, losing out to Offaly twice, Meath and the Dubs. Laois and Wexford beat us that decade too, despite the best efforts of managers Eamonn O’Donoghue, Bobby Burns, John Courtney and Pat Fitzgerald. One year the County Board concluded they were getting such poor return from their team they wouldn’t bother with training for the League. Imagine.

Some horrendous reversals. Scoring just two points and conceding 4-6 to Monaghan in a League Quarter Final in Croke Park in ‘85, the last year of Larry Tompkins in white. Or green on that particular day.

Fitzgerald’s reign ran aground in 1990 with a humiliating 1-7 to 0-6 defeat to Wicklow in Aughrim on a day when two of our finest defenders of that or any other era, Paddy O’Donoghue and Johnny Crofton, were asked to lead the attack, such was the county’s apparent dearth of forwards.

Two years earlier, famously, Kilkenny beat us in the O’Byrne Cup in Nowlan Park. And didn’t even need to bring their hurls.

Maybe Micko felt the only way was up? But if he was in the market for a new job after finishing up with Kerry the year before, surely there were better options than us?

Micko had his own logic:

“Funnily enough, I saw the fallout (at a series of angst-ridden County Board meetings) from the defeat to Wicklow as a good sign. It showed how seriously Kildare people took their football. Getting beaten year after year in Leinster was obviously hurting and that was a good starting point. I had no part in any previous history, had no hidden agenda and knew nobody in the county. All of this helped. We turned the page on the past and started with a clean sheet.” 

While excitement was high when Micko was introduced to the huge Conleth’s crowd on County Final day in 1990, I’m not sure our expectations were. Losing to Leitrim dampened them further still but soon the bandwagon began to crank. His term was open-ended. He would stay for as long as the players committed themselves. No formal deal.

After Christmas, Antrim, Cavan, Mayo and Leitrim were dispensed with but it was over three Sundays in Croke Park where our horizons expanded. We edged out Micko’s Kerry and then Donegal, All Ireland champions 18 months later, to reach a League Final. First since ’68.

And so began the pattern of Micko’s first coming. Dublin dashing our dreams. Those Dubs were battle-scarred, tough men. Intimidating. We were a young, physically lightweight team. Ryan, Nuxer and Rainbow only pups really, Johnny McDonald, the standout player in that county final, unbridled but uncontrollable. Lynch majestic but mercurial.

Despite it being so early in his reign, O’Dwyer felt that league final defeat in ’91 was a severe blow that set the tone for his first four-year term.

“I’m convinced that had we beaten Dublin that day it would have changed the whole football landscape. Kildare needed to win something on a national stage to banish all the ghosts of the past and a win over Dublin would have done that.” 

Tellingly, he felt his own involvement worked against his new charges in that one and in the subsequent Leinster Finals of ’92 and ’93.

“It inspired other teams, notably Dublin, while it brought additional pressure on the Kildare players which they were not able to handle,” he said. The freak goal that deceived Niall Connolly in goal didn’t help the cause in ’91 of course.

Louth saw us coming six weeks later in Drogheda, 10,000 there. A rare misstep from Micko, putting Seán Ryan at full-back for the first time in his life with Crofton injured. Echoes of that in ’98 with Dowling on Donnellan. We were jam-packed onto the far bank having crawled through traffic to get there just about on throw-in.

The name Stefan White still haunts Kildare fans of a certain age, though his second goal should never have stood, Micko argued. With referee Paddy Collins about to throw a ball up at midfield, Seamus O’Hanlon grabbed it from him and kick-started the move from which White scored.

It was a stinging blow for Kildare supporters and O’Dwyer regarded it as one of the worst defeats of his illustrious career.

“I have had a lot of ups and downs in football but that defeat really hurt,” he later said. “It ruined everything we had achieved in the League and now we were back to square one again. Next year is a long way off when you lose in the first round of the championship.” But he wasn’t for stepping away, despite some stringent criticism from some delegates.

Jim Clarke, manager of the 1965 team, from Ballymore, I recall as being particularly down on the Kerryman. Hadn’t supported his appointment from the start, believing a local should manage Kildare. Argued there was “no improvement whatsoever made from last year.” By all accounts, efforts were redoubled over the following winter. O’Dwyer perhaps wasn’t the most tactical manager around, nor was he renowned for flowery speeches. In Kerry, with the talent available to him, it seems he let them figure things out for themselves to some degree.

With Kildare, though, a county lacking confidence in itself, the manager went all out to make us the fittest team around. The training sessions in Hawkfield and St Conleth’s Park are brutal, fellas hiding in the trees on Braveheart Hill.

As Glenn Ryan said “If you’re not prepared to make the effort you might as well pack it in. When you see what Mick O’Dwyer does to get to and from training and compare that with the distance we have to travel, it’s not much to ask.” 

Westmeath gave us a fright early on in Tullamore in the ’92 semi-final, 1-3 to no score before we awoke, 18,000 in Tullamore be god. Dublin still too manly for us in the final, though.

Then Wicklow in ’93, one of the greatest Kildare fightbacks, from nine points down at the interval. O’Dwyer telling them if that was the best they could do not to bother coming out for the second half, not to allow themselves to become an embarrassment to him personally or their supporters.

Cue Lynch in his pomp. Two wonderful goals at the Hill 16 end and we squeeze out of jail by two points. But ultimately no cigar. The Dubs see to that. Again. And again, the following year in a Quarter Final replay.

Back down the road went Micko after that and not too many roadblocks put in his way. Back we came, cap in hand, two years later after Dermot Earley couldn’t pick up the pieces.

Micko still with an itch to scratch, felt there was something in these boys. And from 1997 to 2000 we live out the days of our lives.

You’d need more pages to do justice to it all. Snatches of memories will have to suffice.

The day the worm turned against Laois. Johnny Mc and Martin losing the heads. Thirteen men defiantly led by Glenn (his finest hour?) and Davy Dalton to one of the most un-Kildare like victories. Though shalt not pass. Oh, this seems different.

The saga with Meath that captivated the nation, the second match the greatest game of football I have seen. Jody Devine rescuing Meath. The Royals so knackered by it all they flake out at Offaly’s feet in the final.

Back again in ’98 and finally, once and for all, the win over Dublin. Glenn doing a jog on the pitch. Me too. Now this really was different.

The Leinster Final. The old Hogan, wooden seats. The father had booked a holiday and missed the damned thing after how many decades waiting for this moment?

The goosebumps as Lynch crosses and Murphy draws it into his arms like a father snatching a wobbling toddler to his belly, turns and buries the thing past Conor Martin. Released from purgatory, points from Eddie and Big Willie adding the embellishment. Clane’s day. Kildare’s day.

The gallop onto the pitch. White sea. Bear hugs with strangers. Players backslapped within an inch of their lives. Aldridge presenting the cup to club mate Glenn. That speech:

“People of Kildare, the long wait is over! Forty-two years since a Kildare man has had the honour to stand up here so I’m going to take me time and go through everybody.” 

Indeed, he did, from Michael Osborne to Pauline McDonald who provided the food in Hawkfield and Newbridge. Jack Wall and Seamus Aldridge. Charlie McCreevy “from the top of the Dáil”.

But special words for Micko.

“I don’t know what sort of reception the next man’s going to get, but the man is unbelievable, the man who started this whole thing off. He gave us the energy and the will and the determination and to see that man with the enthusiasm he still has after forty or fifty years in this game and to see him travel that road up and down to Waterville, five, six, seven times a week… Mick O’Dwyer you’re a god! Micko!” 

Micko’s grin on the steps. Glenn and Martin Lynch and the Curragh of Kildare.

Onto the semi-final with Kerry. Micko’s people, Páidí’s team. The father back, nice tan, but hearts sink when a Nuxer-less team is announced. Nerves on edge in the Cusack for seventy minutes but at the end of it the blessed release. Now seventy minutes from Sam himself.

Up until Friday there was no ticket for yours truly. The father had wangled one in a box for himself, one of the banks he did business with. Gift of the gab. Eventually one landed for me as well. In the Hill. An uncle who had soldiered with us through all the years didn’t get one. Refused to come to another Kildare game.

Dreams shattered. It was a great final we’re told, but that matters not a jot. The long walk down Clonliffe Road, fingers in the ears blocking out Silke’s speech. Absolute despair, indescribable nothingness. Cruel, cruel sport.

The early defeat to Offaly the next year, perhaps the gods felt we all needed a break for our sanity before more drama and silverware in 2000. Spoiling us now. The comeback to beat all comebacks against shell-shocked Dubs. Dermot Earley and Tiger Fennin with the goals in that mad minute after the break. What words of magic had Dwyer dispensed at all? Or did they just watch Pat Spillane on TV?

Galway break our hearts again in the semi-final. The father missed that one too, another holiday I think. He never did get to see welcome Sam home, God rest him. Will I? I’m not getting any younger.

Other memories: the Saharan furnace that was Portlaoise’s terrace for the Offaly semi-final in ’93. Kildare playing ducks and drakes with former masters. A jam-packed Conleth’s for Donegal in 2001, the comeback to beat all comebacks.

I could go on. Truly glory days. Lived by thousands because of one man. He gave us a reason to dream and brought those dreams to life. Simply the greatest football manager of all time.

Micko, you were a god.