The Club

by Christy O'Connor

  I kept going: ‘They won’t fucking roll over us again if we meet them because we’ll be ready for them this time. And if it’s Kilmaley, we’ll be gunning for them too because we’ll always owe them one after 2004 [when we lost the county final to them by a point]. Somebody said to me the other day that Inagh-Kilnamona were flying. I was impressed with how they took Tulla apart, but I don’t care how well they’re going; they do not want to meet us. They can go on about wanting revenge for last year but, deep down, they don’t want to see us coming near them because we put doubts in their heads last year. I knew that game was over ten minutes into the second half because they couldn’t get the ball past our half-back line. We bullied them around the place, fucked them out of our way. No matter how well they’re going, if they meet us, those doubts will be still there.

  ‘Anyway, what have they done? What the fuck have Newmarket done? Fair play to Clonlara, they’re a serious crowd. But let’s see how they respond when they’re in a war with us! Stick your chest out now. All the big guns – Clarecastle, Wolfe Tones, the ’Bridge – they’re all gone. We’re the fucking top dogs now left in this championship. We’re Doora-Barefield and we don’t forget that. Just think of what this club stands for. Think of what we have done. We spin it whatever way we have to now. We mightn’t be going as well as we’d like, but we use whatever positives we have for our benefit. What are we being so negative about? Look around ye! Look at the positives in this group. Look at the fucking power!’

  I was scanning the eyes in the group around me. I fixed a stare on Cathal O’Sullivan and hit him a shot into the chest with my fist. He didn’t flinch, just gritted his teeth.

  ‘Look at the power Cathal has. You might as well be hitting the wall. Look at the experience around here! What other team has that? For Christ’s sake, we’ve one of the greatest players who ever played the game standing over there [Seánie]. What would any other club left in the championship give to have him in their corner?’

  By that stage I was wired. One point I had wanted to make was the contribution of Ken Kennedy and Marty O’Regan. They had been our two best players all year because they’d been playing with an arrogant, almost belligerent attitude towards their opponents, physically dominating them, railroading anyone who got in their way of the ball. They were putting in savage body hits, opening guys up whenever they got the chance, but it was mostly disciplined and intelligent play. For God’s sake, Marty made 35 plays against Broadford – mind-blowing statistics for a corner-back in 60 minutes. If we followed the lead of Marty and Ken, we’d physically dominate any team left in the competition. Using that example just went out of my head but I felt I’d done enough talking by then so I just nodded over to Seánie.

  ‘We have everything going for us, but what’s bringing us down is that we’re not working hard enough,’ he said. ‘We start now the second the session begins and when we come to play Adare tomorrow night, we work like fucking dogs.’

  Given that we were playing 24 hours later, Jamesie’s session was mostly tailored around forward play and creating goal chances. We finished the session with a conditioned game of backs and forwards, but in the final minutes Ivor Whyte turned sharply for a ball and collapsed in a heap. His cries were piercing the cold night air and Patsy just blew the whistle and concluded the session. We gathered around Ivor and a couple of lads carried him into the dressing room.

  It looks like his knee has gone. Again. Three days before we played Inagh-Kilnamona in last year’s quarter-final, he tore his cruciate ligament. After the operation, he took up residency in a gym to build his knee back up, and his return to full fitness during the summer was a major boost to our championship aspirations. Now, it looks like another season is gone for him.

  I texted him the following morning to see how he felt, and the prognosis didn’t seem good. ‘It’s still badly swollen and it feels like what happened last year,’ he texted back.

  I met him at lunchtime and he was a little bit more upbeat. ‘Eugene [the physio] thinks it might only be the medial ligament,’ he said.

  A couple of hours later though, his worst fears were confirmed. His cruciate ligament was gone again.

  It was another huge hammerblow. Another good player gone. Yet when I arrived into the dressing room in Gurteen before the Adare game that evening, the tone of the mood felt different. Almost giddy. I had completely forgotten that the draw for the quarter-finals had been made at 6 p.m.

  ‘Who did we get?’ I asked Mikey Cullinan.

  ‘Newmarket.’

  A kind of excited energy shot through me. Interesting. Difficult, but interesting. Just at that point, I caught Davy Hoey’s eye. ‘Great draw,’ he said. ‘Just what we needed.’

  Ken Kennedy, who was togging off beside Davy, was equally happy. ‘I’m delighted we got them. It’s time to set the record straight now from last year.’

  Although they were the only unbeaten team in the competition and they’d emphatically dominated the group of death, it was still a decent draw for us. Even though our form has been poor, if we’d been drawn against one of the lesser teams, we might not be as tuned in as we’d need to be. And if there is any resistance or pride left in us now, a joust with Newmarket will surely draw it out of us.

  Maybe it’s just meant to be. We initially drew Kilmaley, but when the last two names were drawn – Clonlara against Inagh-Kilnamona – they realized that those teams had already met in their group and couldn’t possibly meet again. The whole draw had to be done again. And the second time, we got Newmarket, with the winners to play either Clonlara or Clooney-Quin in the semi-final.

  We couldn’t have got a harder draw, but there was only one thing on our mind and John Carmody focused on it as soon as he entered the dressing room. ‘Ye’ve all heard the draw and ye know what’s ahead of ye. And if ye have any doubts, just remember the sick feeling ye had in yere stomachs coming out of Cusack Park last year after they’d walked all over ye. Do not forget that feeling.’

  Before we went out, I went through our puckout signals, to make sure everyone was on the same wavelength. Then Seánie reaffirmed the importance of our new puckout strategy, especially in the context of having drawn Newmarket. ‘Against Clarecastle, they brought their half-forward line out to midfield, and they’re going to do the exact same to us on our puckout. So we’ve got to get used to our strategy here now and be ready for what’s coming in ten days. Half-backs and midfielders, make the space and Christy will find you.’

  There was just one more thing I needed to say on that before we left the dressing room: ‘If I’m going short, stick up your hand and catch the fucking ball. I don’t want to see any of this craic of guys taking it on your stick. You won’t have time against Newmarket. Get it into your hand and then move it.’ Patsy just nodded at me.

  Our performance was a sign that we finally seem to be getting it right. We didn’t win. But we didn’t lose. We drew a very competitive game: 1-14 each. Adare are going for three-in-a-row, they are the best team in Limerick by a distance and they weren’t holding back. They’d all their big guns out – Mark Foley, Timmy Houlihan, Conor Fitzgerald, Donncha Sheehan – and we should have beaten them because we had more possession. We only scored 14 points again, but we’re pretty confident that we can beat Newmarket with 14 or 15 scores because we feel our defence can limit them to less than that total.

  Two nights later, we only did a light session because the footballers were playing a relegation semi-final the following day. They were beaten less than 24 hours later and management arranged our Sunday session for 7.30 a.m. Everyone was there and, while the club was naturally disappointed after the football result, the mood among the group was positive and energetic.

  ‘We’re sharp and we’re fresh and I think we’re coming good at the right time,’ Patsy said to us as we were completing our warm-down. ‘I’m a lot happier now than I was a week ago. I feel really positive for next weekend.’

  Then John Carmody raised the tone a couple of notches. �
��We think about nothing else now all week, only Newmarket. If we suck them into a battle, we’ll see then how good they are.’

  Patsy then clearly became more animated as he raised another issue. ‘One final thing. How many more times is Ciaran O’Neill going to beat us? How many more fucking times? I might have beaten ye in 2007 with Corofin, but by Jesus Patsy Fahey wasn’t going to beat ye in 2008. Because there was no way ye were going to let it happen. I have great respect for O’Neill, but he’s our enemy now for the next week. And we’re not going to let him get one over on us again.’

  The situation with O’Neill just emphasizes how intertwined the whole club championship is. Apart from being a former teammate and a close friend to some guys on the panel, he also trains our minor hurlers, two of whom are on the senior panel. Before we played Adare last Wednesday evening, O’Neill’s son Alan was pucking around the goalmouth, just after the draw had been made. ‘Has your father put you here to spy on us?’ I said to him in jest. ‘And I hope it’s us that you’ll be shouting for next weekend.’

  ‘Of course I’ll be shouting for us,’ he responded.

  O’Neill knows everything about us, but he got an updated version after the Adare game because word came back to us afterwards that one of our clubmen – someone intensely loyal to O’Neill – was there taking notes for him. It was disappointing for us to hear, but that’s the nature of club life: there are always schisms and fallouts and collateral damage. And there’s nothing anyone can do to avoid it.

  One thing we are sure of, though, is that O’Neill doesn’t really rate us as a team. He still harbours that feeling after his time with us as manager in 2006, when we lost our opening game by a point and he ran us into the ground over the summer. Guys were just burned out, but he interpreted it as softness and weakness. Our capitulation to Newmarket last year may have been a confirmation of that theory for O’Neill, but we’re aiming to blow it out of the water now.

  We’re ready for O’Neill and his crew, and we got the perfect confidence boost at 9.30 the following evening when Conny rang me: ‘Just to let you know that the Red Lad will be there to talk to ye Wednesday evening.’

  By the Red Lad, he means Paul O’Connell.

  14. The Red Lad

  I sometimes refer to Conny as Jerry Maguire – after the sports agent played by Tom Cruise in the 1996 film. Through his business, Conny acts as a sports agent to some of the top sports people in the country, but he’s actually more like a Rod Tidwell – the Cuba Gooding Jr trash-talking, love-bombing, extrovert character – than a Jerry Maguire.

  He’s the main character on our team and he has a nickname – that only he uses – for nearly every one of us: ‘Blue’, ‘Joey the lip’, ‘Rigsby’, ‘Mac the knife’, ‘Jorge Santos’, ‘Le Blanc’, ‘Hokey’, ‘Daz’, ‘Madser’. When we were in Dublin, he used to call Hass ‘Reno Raines’ – after the character on the old TV series The Renegade.

  Like Tidwell, the man has his own language. ‘I hear you barking, big dog.’ ‘He’s more demons than Lord of the Rings.’ ‘You’re so wise, brother, you’re like a mini Buddha.’ ‘That lad wouldn’t work off a battery.’ ‘Heartbreak city – population one.’

  Sometimes he borrows his inspired words off films, especially Will Ferrell characters. ‘I’m in a glass cage of emotion.’ ‘That will give you a deep burn in your triceps.’ ‘By the beard of Zeus.’

  Conny has a unique personality and an amazing ability to connect with people. In 2003, he was voted ‘Escort of the Year’ on the Rose of Tralee. When he was being presented with his award, he was high-fiving the host, Ryan Tubridy, and comparing an Escort and a Rose to Batman and Robin. There he was, live on TV in front of one million viewers, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. And all of us laughing at the irony that only a gangster like him could pull that one off.

  When he went back to the Rose of Tralee festival a year later as a guest escort, he struck up a friendship with Tyrone manager Mickey Harte, whose daughter Michaela was a Rose. Conny told Harte that he’d take care of Michaela, but the man was hardly able to take care of himself once the partying started. At the end of the week, Mickey told Conny what he really thought of his offer: ‘I wouldn’t let you look after my dog, never mind my daughter.’

  Yet Conny and Harte maintained their friendship ever since, partly through their business dealings. He was at Conny’s wedding four weeks ago. And so was Paul O’Connell.

  Conny has been friends with Paul O’Connell for four years now, after first getting to know him when he worked on a contract with Powerade, for whom O’Connell is a brand ambassador. On one of their first meetings, Conny drove O’Connell from Limerick to Dublin for a photo-shoot. When he picked him up outside his house, O’Connell arrived out the door with a copy of the Sunday Times.

  As soon as he got into the jeep, he opened it up.

  ‘Listen here now, boss,’ Conny said to one of the most powerful athletes in world rugby. ‘If you think you’re going to read that paper between here and Dublin, you’ve another think coming to you. You’ve got two choices: you either talk to me, or else you read every article out loud to me.’

  O’Connell chose the first option and they hit it off straight away. At the time Conny was, as he’d say himself, ‘in the darkness’ over some domestic row he’d had with Sinéad, and he spilled his heart out to O’Connell. The Munster captain just saw it as bait; he spent half the journey home twisting the dial on the radio, searching for love songs, trying to torture Conny.

  Like all of us, though, O’Connell connected so well with Conny because of his immense personality and character. During Conny’s speech at his wedding last month, O’Connell spent most of it bent over laughing at its content.

  Through that friendship, O’Connell has developed a real understanding of our club, especially what this season means to us. He knows all about our hurt and our recent history; about Ger Hoey, Fr Mac, our desire to win a county title, our quest to beat Newmarket. When Conny asked him if he’d come to talk to us four days before we played Newmarket, O’Connell didn’t even have to think twice about it.

  Only a few of us knew about his impending arrival on Wednesday night. We kept it quiet because we didn’t want word leaking out and it creating a circus around the club. We certainly didn’t want it getting back to Newmarket; but that was almost taken out of our hands because there was a U-13 match between the two clubs on in Gurteen before O’Connell was supposed to arrive. On the way into the dressing room, one of the Newmarket midfielders, Paudie Collins, was standing in front of our dressing rooms. Another one of their players, Anthony ‘Scony’ Kilmartin, was watching the game from behind the goals.

  When I went into the dressing room, I broached the subject with Ken Kennedy. ‘You haven’t a big bag in the jeep, so we could somehow smuggle the Lions captain in here?’

  ‘The boys should tell him to go down to the Shibeen for half an hour and have a few hot whiskeys,’ Ken responded.

  Seánie McMahon, who I always sit beside, overheard us. ‘To hell with them. Who cares if they see him.’

  We went outside for about ten minutes to puck around before we were all called back in to sit down. A minute later, O’Connell walked in behind Patsy and John Carmody. Dressed in his Munster tracksuit, he almost had to stoop down as he came in the door.

  Some guys who hadn’t been told were staring at him with their mouths open.

  ‘Lads, Paul is here to talk to us,’ said Patsy. ‘And if training isn’t going that well afterwards, we’ll put him on the tackle-bags.’

  So Paul O’Connell, British and Irish Lions captain, Munster captain, probably future Irish captain, and one of the best rugby players in the world, was suddenly addressing us.

  O’Connell said that he didn’t have anything specific in his head to say to us. He had planned on formulating something on his way from Limerick but he had come through a cobweb of back roads in east Clare and ended up in Kilkishen, where he was forced to ring Conny, who became h
is sat-nav between there and Gurteen. He said that he didn’t know much about hurling but that he’d talk to us about some of his rugby experiences and then he’d get us to ask questions. And we’d take it from there.

  From the very outset, it was clearly obvious that he wasn’t brash or arrogant. His humble demeanour belied his status as a world-class player, and he was able to relate to us from his own experience as a young player with Young Munster. The broader context of this game didn’t matter; he immediately knew that it was the most important game in our lives at this particular time.

  He impressed on us how the same basic principles of honesty and hard work applied to all sports, no matter what level you play at. It was clear from his tone how important friendship was to him as a player – how much it should mean to play for the guy beside you. Not all professional sports teams had that unique spirit and motivation, but he was sure that our bond was unbreakable. He said that it was incredible how the 30-year-olds on this team have been watching the 20-year-olds since they were ten and now we were all teammates. In his opinion, there was no other sporting environment which could foster relationships that deep.

  He marvelled at how unique and personal that relationship was and how motivating it was for guys to be in the same dressing room as Jamesie. O’Connell looked over at him and said that Jamesie was always an immensely skilful player, but he also struck him as an unbelievably passionate player who gave everything for the team. He said that that type of player in rugby really inspired him. And that having somebody like Jamesie in our dressing room had to be inspiring for us. He told us to draw on that because he felt that being on a team beside someone who had gone way beyond the call of duty always gave him great confidence.

  For the next 40 minutes, we peppered him with questions. What was the spirit like in the Munster dressing room? How do they keep that spirit so strong? Do Munster prepare any differently for home games than they do for away games in the Heineken Cup? How does he keep motivating himself? What’s the best advice to help address our tendency to start slowly in games? What’s the best plan of action for dealing with a game plan coming apart during a match?