The Trib

by David Kenny

  Then suddenly you’re on your knees, Francie is shaking your hand, a clubman, John Brennan, has you in a headlock and Cookstown shoulders you to the foot of the Hogan Stand. You look down and Croke Park is a mass of white and red. Next evening, so is Aughnacloy, then Omagh. You pick out an old boy from Cookstown, one of the Glackin twins, and with tears streaming down his face, he’s looking up, saying, ‘Thanks, young Mulligan. Thanks.’ And it hits you.

  ‘What the f**k have we just done here? What the f**k have we just done?’

  2004. You’re drinking 7-Up in a bar, watching a rugby international on the big screen, not knowing another customer is phoning his manager. ‘I have money on Tyrone to win Ulster again this year yet I’m here watching Owen Mulligan drinking.’ You later tell Mickey the truth and he understands; while the world’s become yours, you’ve become the world’s. You know, though, that there have been many other times when you’ve been drinking more than 7-Up. You’ve been living it up.

  Women want to say they shared a moment with you. Fellas want to say they had a pint with you. But other fellas want a pop at you. You know you should walk away but before you know it, you’re in another bout of fisticuffs. But hey, you’ve got your All Ireland and sometimes you’ve got to fight for your right to party.

  Then at quarter to seven on a Tuesday morning, just as you’re heading off to work as a joiner, your mobile rings. Ger Cavlan tells you to sit down. Cormac McAnallen is dead. You start laughing.

  ‘Cavo, were you out again last night?’ He tells you he’s dead serious. ‘Cavo,’ you say, ‘if you’re telling me lies, I’ll bloody break you.’ But he’s not; you call Canavan and he’s already up with the McAnallens. You feel distraught. You feel guilty. Why him? McAnallen was easily the fittest man on the panel. He didn’t drink. All you’ve done since the All Ireland is drink.

  Thank God for Kevin Hughes. When the coffin comes out, Hub is there beside you, for you. After the funeral meal in Paudge Quinn’s, he stands up and says, ‘Boys, I lost my brother in a car crash. I lost my sister in another. But I moved on. You’re going to think I’m mad here but you’ve just got to move on.’

  At first you can’t. You keep going out. Maybe Cormac’s the reason, maybe he’s just an excuse. The week before the championship, you’re injured when a car bumps into the back of yours but the simple reason you’re dropped is because you’re playing crap.

  You realise Hub is right. You have to move on. You’re Tyrone’s best forward against Fermanagh, Galway and Laois. The next day out against Mayo, it doesn’t happen. It’s almost a relief. 2005 will be a new start. You’ll be fresh. Or so you think.

  2005. It’s late February again when you phone Mickey Harte to tell him you’re going to miss training ... again. ‘Sorry, Mickey, but work here’s mad busy.’ You’re lying, of course. You’re not at work. You’re at home, on your couch, exhausted.

  You started the year, the day, with the best of intentions, getting up at six o’clock to take Bob, the boxer you got as a present, for a run.

  And you genuinely are flat out from work where nearly every customer wants to know when you’ll have the job finished. You’ve settled down; yourself and Tina are going to share a house. Still, you’re just after scoring a goal against Dublin in the league and you’re down to start in the McKenna Cup final.

  Then in that game against Derry, you get a hit below your knee. The physio tells you not to play against Offaly the following week but you do. Twenty minutes into that game and your league is effectively over. Yet come the first round of the championship, you’re starting against Down. You can’t believe it. You also get the nod against Cavan.

  You stink Clones out. The Wednesday before the replay, you leave your phone in the van. When you head off for training, you see three missed calls from Mickey Harte. You know why he’s phoning. You pull into the car park and Mickey is there waiting for you. You’ve been dropped.

  You’re furious with yourself. You just know it’s going to be a complete stuffing match after the treatment Sean Cavanagh got in the drawn game and know you’re not going to get back in for the Ulster final. But you think, ‘Maybe this is the kick in the ass you need.’

  You keep getting up at six to run with Bob. You start going to train early, working hard on the left foot Mickey told you to develop. You start leading the way in the sprints. You train with the club on the nights the county aren’t out. You’re constantly in the gym in the Glenavon. The desire, the fitness, is back. But the form isn’t.

  You’re brought on in the Ulster final. You nearly feel like an impostor. Whereas in 2003, everything used go through you and Canavan, now everything goes through Stevie O’Neill. Hours before the replay, Mickey tells you Peter won’t be starting. Neither will you; instead he’s going with Ryan Mellon. You nod. But inside, you’re reeling.

  With twenty minutes to go, yourself and Canavan are brought on. Then Canavan is sent off, then Stevie too. You think, ‘This is a chance is to grab the headlines, to grab the winning point.’ But you don’t. Oisin McConville does. That day it seriously crosses your mind to pull the pin.

  You’ve always said that if you’re not good enough to be starting, you won’t be sticking around taking the panel spot of some young fella and having the crowd shout, ‘Get that stupid prick back off!’ For the last few weeks you’ve had friends say, ‘Pull the pin, Mugsy. You should be on that team. Look at the forwards today. Bloody crap.’ And you’re thinking, ‘Maybe they’re right. This is getting too frustrating. Maybe I will hang them up.’

  For some reason, though, you go to the next training session. And for some even stranger reason, Mickey Harte tells you you’re starting against Monaghan. Again you struggle; setting up a goal for Stephen O’Neill is all you do.

  Your mother hears the ‘supporters’. You can too. Last year apparently you were a drug dealer and riding men’s wives; this year, the discussion boards say you’re good mates with Wayne Rooney. Yourself and Tina laugh that one off but you can’t laugh off what your mother and father are having to put up with. Right now they’re both prayed out.

  Their last hope is Frank McGuigan. They ask him to call up to the house. Frank asks how everything outside football is. ‘One hundred per cent,’ you assure him. He assures you your football will come good too. You’re trying too hard. ‘Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. There’s less chance you’ll make one that way. You can’t become a bad footballer overnight, Mugsy.’

  You can become a brilliant one again though.

  A few Tyrone subs are warming up. You know it’s fight or f**kin’ flight. So you fight for a ball played in by Stephen O’Neill. And after that, it all just happens. The ball seems to stick to you when before it was bouncing off you. You sell a dummy. You think, ‘Why are you boys falling for that dummy?’ But you throw another, and again they buy it.

  Then you let fly. You intend for it to go to Stephen Cluxton’s right, but it flies past his left. Croke Park explodes. And with it, so does the tension within. Afterwards, you phone the parents and you can sense the relief in their voices. The next day, the replay, you’re sure your first shot is sailing wide and shout out ‘S**t’ but it turns inside the post.

  You can now do no wrong. You score a goal with the left foot Mickey had you working on and stare out the Hill. That’s 1-5 now from play. After the game, you applaud that Hill. It applauds you. You’re no longer a ‘poof’ to them. You’re a player.

  The next day out, Francie again makes life tough for you. Again you do your bit. And again, poor Francie ends up having to congratulate you. It’s a big scalp. Before the game, you wanted to beat Armagh more than you wanted to beat them in 2003. But now it’s not enough. You want what you experienced on 28 September 2003.

  ‘People talk about it being like a drug, about getting that same trip over and over again. You want to get that feeling again, that feeling of winning and being carried off the field and going up the steps.

  ‘But the whole thing is a drug. You’ll have p
eople begrudging you but at the end of the day, travelling down on the bus, listening to Mickey give a team talk, running out in front of 80,000.’ You are Owen Mulligan. Or at least today you’d like to be.

  MALACHY CLERKIN

  Dedicating followers to his fashion

  Australia, Lebanon, France and Italy all feature strongly in the nomadic life story of Leinster coach Michael Cheika, but it is his dalliance with the world of haute couture that may raise eyebrows.

  16 April 2006

  It starts with a note he’s not supposed to see in an office he’s probably not supposed to be in and a phone number he’s definitely not supposed to ring. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it starts further back than that, with a twenty-year-old Lebanese woman visiting her sister in Sydney in the 1950s and just deciding not to go home. Or then again, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it starts – really starts – a fortnight ago in Toulouse with his team deep in their own 22, with his out-half doing what no Irish coach would dream of telling him he’s supposed to do, with his team running the length of the pitch for the kind of try no Irish team is supposed to score. Wherever it starts, wherever it ends, Michael Cheika’s story isn’t exactly the most linear one you’ll ever hear. The best ones never are.

  Just for kicks, we’ll start with the note. Cheika joined Randwick Rugby Club in the Sydney suburb of Coogee when he left school, although even an apparently straight-forward sentence like that needs a little qualification. He’d never played the game. He’d liked it, watched it, regularly went down to the Randwick Oval on a Saturday to shout at those involved in it. But never played it. The reason was simple: A working class kid, he went to a working class school and working class schools in Sydney played league. So he played league.

  Within two years of joining up, though, he was in the Australian under-21 squad. Just like that. These were the dying days of amateurism, though, and systems and structures weren’t what they would become. In a different era, given different circumstances, maybe he’d have gone on and made a name for himself as a player. As it was, he found himself a crack and slipped through it. Which is where the note comes in.

  ‘One day, I was in the coach’s office and I found a little note on his desk,’ he says. ‘There was this guy from a club in France who’d written to him looking for players. He was just looking for any random players our coach could send him. Now, I knew the kind of guy our coach was and there’s no way he would have told anyone about that note in a million years. So I lifted it off his desk and stuck it in my pocket and rang the guy myself. I ended up going to France and playing there for a few years and in Italy for a few more.’

  In all, he did Europe for seven years. Well, sort of. He got into a routine of playing through the calendar – winter in Europe followed by one at home and then back again in time for the start of the next one. They say Richie Benaud hasn’t felt a winter chill on his face for over forty years; Cheika barely saw a summer throughout the 1990s. It’s not a gripe, though. Not remotely.

  With amateurism on life support, clubs had no shortage of backers prepared to throw the switch. Cheika trousered what was on offer and happily staved off the day when he’d have to get a proper job. When he wasn’t playing rugby, he was travelling goggle-eyed throughout Europe, taking in everything from Portuguese sunsets to Russian trains journeys, from Dublin bars to Tuscan villas.

  ‘There’s so much culture and history on this continent to immerse yourself in. Maybe Europeans don’t appreciate it as much because they’ve been here all their lives but for someone coming from a pretty rough-edged part of Sydney or wherever, you’re talking absolute worlds apart. I really got to love the European lifestyle, the fact that everywhere has a proper history. The fact that there’s a historical relevance to two tribes facing off against each other or to two countries that are next door to each other. I suppose as well, I was lucky to get to learn a few languages. It made up a bit for not pursuing a tertiary education at home.’

  There comes a time, though. It’s all very well being a multilingual gadabout thousands of miles from home winking at the haughty girl behind the counter at the boulangerie. But one day you wake up and all of a sudden you’re twenty-eight. Shit.

  So he went home and decided to get a job. He just hadn’t a clue as what. Some cousins of his were involved in fashion, ran retail stores. To pick up a few bucks here and there, he went in and helped out. ‘I used to do the occasional shift for them. It was good way to meet girls, if nothing else. I mean, where else can you go and get paid to tell girls they look beautiful? So I used to go there and hang out more than anything. But I picked up a few things about the business along the way.’

  Now, to most people, ‘picking up a few things about the business’ would mean learning to spot when one of the delivery men is trying to scam you out of a few hundred quid and the like. Not Cheika. He saw an ad in the paper one day that said that Collette Dinnigan was looking for a business manager.

  These being the sports pages, the Tribune is going to take a punt here and guess that you, dear reader, haven’t a rashers who Collette Dinnigan is. Turns out she’s far and away the biggest fashion designer in Australia. She dresses people for the Oscars. When Halle Berry attended the world premiere of Die Another Day in 2002, she wore a Dinnigan creation. Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Kylie Minogue? Clothes-horses for this woman.

  And having done not an awful lot more than a few shifts winkling phone numbers out of surfer chicks by telling them their bums didn’t look big in this skirt or those jeans, Cheika reckoned he would have a go at running this mutli-millionaire’s worldwide fashion empire for her. Told you his story wasn’t exactly linear.

  ‘Collette wanted someone who could speak French and Italian, which I could do, and I sort of made up most of the rest. I didn’t think for a second I’d get the job and I basically went there with a hand-written foolscap page in an envelope which I slipped under the door. And I don’t know, she must have been really desperate or something because she called me back and I met with her three times in three days and ended up working for her. So that’s what properly kicked off my interest in the fashion side of things.

  ‘Working for her was such an amazing experience, the complexity involved in bringing her creativity to production really appealed to me. It was taking the ideas and creations she had and converting them into the reality of pieces in stores. Being part of that was great and it gave me a lot of international experience from a fashion point of view that helped me when it came to setting up my own business later on.’

  (Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, a quiet Cork school teacher called Declan Kidney was instilling in two of his pupils – an out-half called Ronan O’Gara and a scrum-half called Peter Stringer – the basics of the skills that will attempt to ruin the afternoon of Collette Dinnigan’s former business manager next Sunday. Mad world.)

  He was still playing with Randwick and by this stage, not only was he the sharpest dresser at the club, he was also the captain. The complete separation between the two segments of his life suited him down to the ground. Nobody at work talked rugby, nobody at Randwick talked sequins. Not to his face, anyway.

  Still, he was restless. He set up a business of his own, dealing in all sorts – fashion, property, a restaurant even. And, even then, it wasn’t enough. When the call came from David Campese (a Randwick alunus) saying that there was this club in Italy looking for a coach, the idea intrigued him more than anything. He’d never dreamt of being a coach and even now he isn’t all that certain why he decided to go.

  ‘I left a few unhappy people behind me, not to mention my business partners. Collette was very good about it, even though it was clear that the few months I was taking off from her was going to turn into for ever. I think my reasoning was that if I go there and make a balls of it, then at least I’ve had a go and at least I’ve done it in an area that’s as testing as possible. Because I didn’t have any comforts to fall back on, you know what I mean? I was there by myself, just me and a load of p
eople I didn’t know. So I suppose it was as much to see if I could do it as anything.’

  He did okay. Some things he found difficult, others not so much. Not having friends or family to come home to helped in a perverse way because it left him with nothing to concentrate on but this new way of life he’d gotten himself into. And preserving distance between himself and players didn’t pose any problems either since he’d never really been one for the piss-up and the sing-song anyway. Padova came sixth at the end of his season in charge.

  ‘I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t have kept at it if I hadn’t liked it. The challenge really got me going. But there was so much I had to learn. As a coach you’ve got to have a totally different set of personal skills with regard to players. You’ve got to be nice to them, for a start. You have to think about the collective in everything you do. It was a good experience.’

  He couldn’t stay, though. Life got in the way.

  When World War II ended, whole countries emerged blinking into the sunlight with no immediate idea about what to do with themselves. Australia had more going for it than most places – a land abounding in nature’s gifts of beauty rich and fair, like the song said. What it didn’t have was people. Or to be more clinical about it, workers. All these natural resources but nowhere near enough hands to cultivate them.

  So the government went trawling. Out went the nets and up went the call. Australia is open for business. Come one, come all. Cheika remembers his father telling him stories about the advertisements that were posted all over Lebanon. A new life, a new hope.

  ‘There was very little going on in Lebanon. It’s a poor country, no real resources, no big industry. It was colonised by the French after World War I and became a more intellectual place than it might otherwise have. There are a lot of universities there and it’s a bit more European than a lot of countries in that region.’