Only Matt didn’t feel too good. The first half had passed him by. Little of the play was running through him, and he reckoned John O’Keeffe had him in his pocket. He had gathered the first ball that landed between him and O’Keeffe. He tried to sell a dummy, but O’Keeffe wasn’t buying. Connor bounced the ball but O’Keeffe slapped it away in mid-air and collected the ball as it hit the ground. In frustration Connor fouled him, and the crowd cheered. O’Keeffe had drawn first blood. By half-time, the wound still hadn’t been staunched. Connor was being hard on himself. He had gathered three points, including one from play where he sold two dummies, left O’Keeffe on the ground and rifled a shot from 25 metres that skimmed the top of the crossbar.
Outside the rain was falling in sheets. Where the first half had been an epic game of perpetual motion and fluidity, the second promised a war.
When he hit the field, Spillane flexed his knee and shook hands with Pat Fitzgerald. Offaly returned unchanged. For six years, Kerry had learned to absorb pressure early on and blitz teams in the second half. Inside five minutes, Offaly were sent sprawling.
Mikey Sheehy pointed a free. Minutes later, Liam O’Connor spilled the greasy ball and Eoin Liston fed Pat Spillane. Spillane took a quick look and kicked with his right foot. Point. He punched the air and gritted his teeth. Kerry led by one. Spillane looked fit and ready. The pitch was getting heavier. Kerry were beginning to rumble.
Another Kerry attack. Eoin Liston stands alone at the front of the square as Tom Spillane bursts through the centre. His pass finds Liston, who lets the ball drop to the ground and shoots on the half-volley. It seems bound for the net, but bounces off Jack O’Shea. Offaly survive, but a loose pass allows Tim Kennelly pin Offaly back again. Offaly break out, but Matt Connor misses a free in front of the Kerry goals.
As the game headed towards the forty-five minutes, fifteen minutes had passed since Offaly’s last score. Offaly’s resilience would be tested at other times during the game, but never as fiercely as this. They had pounded Kerry, yet Kerry were still there. Still untouchable. Offaly had already proven themselves as a team capable of matching Kerry. Now, with the rain slaking down and the game turning against them, they had to find a way to beat them.
A high ball into the front of the Kerry square bounced over John Guinan’s head. Even in the muddle of players, Ger O’Keeffe saw a terrifying gap in front of goal. Brendan Lowry was behind John O’Keeffe. If Guinan got the ball and transferred it, Lowry was in. O’Keeffe flung himself towards the ball as Guinan leapt into the air. Guinan’s hip caught him flush on his chin. O’Keeffe was laid out, but Offaly had a free 20 metres from goal. This time Connor nailed it, and Offaly were level for the eighth time.
The game was swirling with intensity now. It was becoming clear that, to win five in a row, Kerry could leave nothing behind them on the field. More drama. Páidí launches a line ball at the Offaly defence. Pat Fitzgerald grabs the ball in front of goal but coughs it up. Liam O’Connor sweeps up, but his handpass is pilfered by Tom Spillane. Liam Currams hacks the ball away, but Sean Walsh sends it back towards goal to John Egan. His kick lands on the crossbar. Martin Furlong tries to catch it, but the ball bounces off the black spot into the square. It sits like a grenade waiting to go off. Furlong dives headfirst to smother it. Liston lands on top of him. Free out. Furlong shrugs The Bomber off. He bangs his shoulder with his fist three times, screaming. Not one step back. Not one.
A Sheehy free puts Kerry ahead again and John O’Keeffe wins another ball above Matt Connor. He holds the ball above his head, offers it to the heavens and bounces it off the turf. Kerry pour forward again and Offaly are caught short in defence. With the ball heading towards John Egan, Furlong races out and sweeps the ball away, but Tom Spillane gathers it again and feeds Egan on the edge of the square; Egan leans into Stephen Darby and tries to find a way past. Darby holds his arms out and tries to resist fouling him, but gravity takes over. Egan falls with Darby beneath him. As he gets up, Darby has a clump of Egan’s jersey in his hand. Egan leans in to shoot again, and falls for the second time. It’s enough. PJ McGrath whistles. Penalty.
Darby throws the ball away, but Offaly’s protests dissolve without incident. A bottle comes flying on to the pitch. Liam O’Connor picks it up and flings it back into the Canal End. ‘Cop on, Liam,’ shouts Mick Fitzgerald. ‘Concentrate!’
Kerrymen are looking round for Mikey Sheehy. Offaly are looking at Martin Furlong. Two men. One moment.
17 MIKEY AND MARTIN
The ball sits on the penalty spot, unattended. No one dares touch it. Kerry lead by one point. A Kerry goal now would decide the game. Five-in-a-row could be decided in an instant.
Finally Mikey Sheehy steps forward, and replaces the ball on the ground. He looks at Martin Furlong, then trains his eyes on McGrath. He waits for the nod. His mind is turning over. The memory of his missed penalty in the semi-final against Armagh is gone. The previous Tuesday night in training he had smashed eighteen penalties out of twenty past Charlie Nelligan. He had thought this out. He reckoned Furlong was weaker on his left side. Don’t go for power. Place it. Stroke it, don’t blast it.
In goals, Furlong is waiting. The game is between them. Everything that went before or that is yet to come could be rendered irrelevant in this moment. Mikey begins his run-up. Six steps between him and immortality.
One step …
Mikey was the first at home to make it as a footballer and nothing ever compared to that. Years later his father would slip on the Golden Years video and watch it through when Mikey might call. ‘He had it worn out,’ says Mikey. ‘When I was retired [from football] I often used go over in the evenings during the winter and he’d have it on. He’d have it on two or three days a week. I used say to him: “Unless you put that thing off, I’m going.” And he’d put it off and put it on again when I was gone.’
There was a crew of them that headed for the matches. Tom McCarthy and PJ O’Halloran were there. Gerry Savage. Vincent Fuller. The crew followed Mikey everywhere. When he retired they went everywhere to see Kerry.
‘There was nothing else only football in their lives. My father would be at every dog fight. Colleges matches, the whole lot. I have a sister, Phil, living in Kilmacanogue and he was up there with my mother seven or eight years ago. Someone said Dublin were playing Kerry in a challenge game to open a pitch or something – this is January or February – he had to get Phil to bring him to the match.’
When Sheehy was a child, they travelled everywhere together to see matches. In 1962 he saw his first All-Ireland final when Kerry beat Roscommon and never missed a game in Croke Park alongside his father after that. They went to Railway Cup matches and Sheehy was enthralled with Connacht’s pristine white jerseys.
He started with Kerry seniors in 1973 with a snazzy hair-do streaking down his back and a name as a free-taker. At half-time in the Munster final he spent the break kicking around out on the field in Killarney when Andy Mullin, another sub, came over with news. Eamon O’Donoghue had been taken off. ‘You’re going in,’ he said.
Mick O’Dwyer had cornered the market on free-taking with Kerry for a decade, but coach Johnny Culloty wanted to break the monopoly. O’Dwyer had missed one or two in the first half. Sheehy was sent to take over, but he could deliver the message himself.
Having hit a few points with his first handful of touches, Kerry were awarded a free 30 metres from goal. ‘I was kind of half going for the ball, but Dwyer was out. No way was he letting me near it. ‘Ah that’s grand,’ he says. ‘I’ll take it.’ It was like: what part of fuck off do you not understand? He was minding his own corner. And he was dead right.’
Kerry lost that Munster final and another, but in Sheehy they saw the beginning of a future that radiated with promise. His father knew. Everyone did.
Two steps …
People said a lot of things about Martin Furlong. They reckoned he was wild on the field. Reckless. When he came from his goals to challenge for a ball, no one was saf
e, not even his own teammates. He launched himself to meet it, arms outstretched, bandaged knees sticking out like two battering rams. Sometimes he got hurt. Sometimes it was others. That was the game. That was life.
People didn’t always like it. Martin sometimes wondered about that. Did people think about the environment where he learned his football? In the sixties, goalkeeping was a dangerous pastime. When the ball dropped in the square, it was easy for a hefty full-forward to allow the goalkeeper catch the ball before driving him into the net and claiming the goal. In one of his first games as an Offaly minor, Furlong watched a shot sail over the bar, but never noticed the forward charging at him. When he spotted him, it was too late. The forward buried him in the net. Martin punched him. He punched back. By the time the referee got to them, they were tangled up in a fight.
‘That’s not the way I play football,’ he said. ‘Now off to the line the two of ye.’
‘I swore after to make sure the ball was going over the bar,’ said Furlong, ‘and after that I’d watch what was coming to me.’ He was never sent off again, but he was never nailed like that again either.
Football always drew the Furlongs into battle. He grew up with three brothers in Tullamore: Mickey, John and Tom. Their house became a point of reference for the entire county. On weekend nights after the Second World War and the worst penances of the Emergency had passed, the cinemas and dancehalls of Tullamore were packed out with people. Hundreds of people would cycle to the outskirts of town and park their bicycles at Furlongs’ wall. Late at night, the door would reverberate with knocks as people sought a pump to inflate their tyres before heading home.
A garage and engineering works sat across the road, and Furlongs’ backyard was often a makeshift store for parts and machinery ready for collection. Accents from all over the country danced through the house when people called to get their purchases, bringing a certain allure about the world beyond Tullamore.
For five decades the Furlongs had a boy on an Offaly team. Mickey came first with the minors in 1946 and the seniors in 1948 before emigrating to New York in 1954. The older people in Tullamore always said John could have been the best of them. He was over six foot tall, built like an old round tower and recalled in the same breath as the venerable old Meath full-back Paddy ‘Hands’ O’Brien. When he took sick, no one was sure what had happened, but he spent the following three years in hospital. He was diagnosed with meningitis. He lost his hearing, and when he finally left hospital, football was an old memory.
His third brother, Tom, was a prodigy. He made the Offaly minors and missed the All-Ireland senior final in 1961, returned in 1962 and had fitted in a career’s worth of football before he was twenty-one. Spectators loved Tom. He was tall and rangy, but blessed with searing pace and a superb kicking ability. He was a genius in goals, but his talent demanded him further outfield.
People saw a precocious talent in Martin, too. In 1963 Offaly minors came looking for him, but soccer already had a hold on him. The GAA’s ban on playing sports outside Gaelic games was still in force, and as a child Martin took on the name ‘John Smith’ when playing soccer. Smith played for Tullamore in the FAI Minor Cup and in the Leinster Cup. They met Athlone in both competitions, a soccer town dotted with stars.
One Friday, Turlough O’Connor lined out for Athlone against Tullamore before playing for an FAI youths’ team against West Germany a week later. Turlough played Gaelic football too, and was picked to line out for Westmeath against Offaly. When the Offaly officials got wind, they prepared an objection to O’Connor’s presence. But first, they had to cover their own tracks. In the dressing room, Martin was putting on his jersey when the officials told him not to bother. They were objecting to O’Connor, so he couldn’t play either. Westmeath won the game. Martin went home that night, and cried his eyes out.
‘That hurt. But that’s the joys of it. You want to prove you’re right. Walking away doesn’t prove that. Sometimes fellas quit the game because they fall out with selectors or managers. But you’ll never prove your point that way. You’re better to stay and fight your corner.’
Tom loved football, but sometimes the people around the game could kill the romance. He was established on the senior team, but threatened not to play in protest at the treatment meted out to his brother. The Offaly board talked him round, but something inside him in relation to playing football for Offaly had been lost. A year later, in September 1964, Tom left for New York and a job with the City Transit Authority.
When Tom left, Martin didn’t feel too bad. That was the way of these things. There was nothing in Ireland for Tom but football and fighting with county board men and a lifetime spent scraping out a living. America was new and glamorous, and the Furlongs had never closed their doors to the opportunities presented by the outside world.
A couple of years after arriving in America, Tom called into Jim McDowney’s Bar on 44th Street. Eddie McDwyer was an old friend from Daingean, and had asked him to call in. McDowney’s had become a regular haunt for a few players from the New York Giants NFL team. Their season was petering out, all for the lack of a good placekicker. Every night they came into McDowney’s and grumbled, but there seemed to be no solution. Eddie McDwyer thought he knew someone who might help.
A few mornings later, Tom Furlong arrived at Yankee Stadium at eight o’clock as the ground staff were pulling the tarpaulin off the field. He kicked twenty-eight frees from varying distances up to 50 yards, and converted twenty-four. The Giants liked what they saw, and put him in a ‘taxi squad,’ a reserve team that trained during the week, but didn’t play.
At $200 a week for training, Tom got a taste for the business. He wrote to nine NFL teams offering his services, and got picked up by the Atlanta Falcons. Atlanta was different to New York. They didn’t care too much for foreigners, and especially foreigners who reckoned they could play football, but his kicking was too good to be ignored.
His role, solely as a kicker, in the game intrigued him. The maths were challenging. When the ball was snapped back from the line of scrimmage for the kick, Tom had an average of 1.4 seconds to raise the ball eight feet into the air over the first six yards while the opposition attempted to the charge the kick down. There was no margin for error, but Tom was proving a success. As the summer ended and the new NFL season dawned, he had seen off four other kickers and approached the season as the Falcons’ first choice.
Then, everything fell apart. During a training session, a team mate fumbled a routine snap. He dropped the ball, Tom kicked fresh air and blew his knee out. His career was over before an autumn leaf had fallen.
Offaly missed Tom at home, but Martin had stepped from his shadow. He was fifteen in 1962 when Tullamore dropped him into goal and won a county title. Two years later, he was making a save in the All-Ireland minor final and withstanding the bull rush from the Cork forward that would endure through Offaly’s history to secure the county’s first ever All-Ireland title. In 1971 Furlong was there when Offaly won their first senior title. He returned the following year and won another. The celebrations were joyous. Cars were sprayed green, white and gold and mounted on stands. Their All-Ireland winners were heroes. Furlong was a star, but just as his career reached its apex, it suddenly started to fall away.
Three steps …
By 1982 Mikey Sheehy had already been valued among the most cherished stones in a team that sparkled with gems. Even when racked by injury, he was the only player to play every minute of Kerry’s four-in-a-row. And 1982 had already been another good year. He saved Kerry in the Munster final against Cork with a set of points late-on, and ripped Cork to shreds in the replay by scoring 2-4. Of Kerry’s four championship matches, Sheehy had been top scorer in three, but as the pressure built all week in Kerry, Sheehy had sensed it more than the others.
On Tuesday night some journalists landed into Killarney to sweep up the last of the quotes and news for the week. That night, training went on, and on, and on. By the end of the session, an early autumn c
hill had descended and the players felt it. They returned to the dressing room cold and tired. Mikey thought it wrong. On the Thursday night before the final, he watched Mick O’Dwyer hound a hawker selling T-shirts from outside the stadium in Killarney. Then there was the county board official on the Saturday and his talk of homecomings in Sneem and Tralee. He was worried.
When the players went for a walk on the beach in Malahide, Sheehy listened for his instructions. Every year it sounded the same – keep moving, keep swapping with Egan, take the frees, and relax – yet every year Mick O’Dwyer seemed able to infuse it with fresh urgency. He knew the buttons to press. He always knew how to handle Sheehy.
‘He’d push me a good bit a lot of years. I might be carrying a bit of poundage and, particularly when we’d be starting out in the championship, he’d say: “Get away out to Banna, you need to shed a bit of weight and watch yourself.” Another year he’d say: “Jesus, you’re going well now, keep yourself ticking over. Just kick your frees and whatever.”
‘Injuries? You’d nearly want a doctor’s cert with you. Desperate man for injuries. If he knew you were injured though, he’d give you every support, but he’d push you. That’s why he was so good. He kept us going when we trained like dogs and no match for three weeks. Fellas were working and driving miles to get there. There was one year and I’d been injured for a while. Probably around April or May. There were seven or eight of us. In one week in Killarney we did four nights and a Saturday morning. It was torture.’
That Saturday night he knew the new jerseys were arriving. It didn’t bother him, but he knew it shouldn’t have been happening. He roomed with Sean Walsh and had slept soundly as he always did in Malahide, but that morning there was still something in the air. Was it fear? Nerves? His stomach started churning. It stayed around in the bus. It was in the dressing room. It followed him on to the field. Mikey was starting to worry.
Kings of September Page 18
