Gooch by Colm Cooper

Author:Colm Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2017-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

15

When Bull Becomes Gospel

SIX MINUTES CHANGED everything. Barely the time it takes a kettle to boil took us from a looming coronation to a wake.

‘Retirements Expected’ ran a back-page headline in The Kerryman the week after our 2011 All-Ireland final loss to Dublin. That’s how football life works in the Kingdom. Winning is the only acceptable language. A different last six minutes to that final and the headline might just as easily have read ‘Heroes All’. But you suck it up. You don’t take it personally.

We live in a climate of extremes in Kerry and the best thing, always, is not to overanalyse.

Was I a good or bad Kerry captain that year? Well, history will say I didn’t deliver, and I’m not in a position to argue. But up until Kevin McManamon’s sixty-fourth-minute goal in that final, I would have said that we were headed for the perfect season. True we hadn’t pulled up any trees in the National League, but seeing Cork win their seventh spring title hadn’t unduly bothered us; nor, we can now safely say, did it bother their final opponents, Dublin.

Everything we wanted seemed to be within our reach that September Sunday as we stretched four points clear in a game that looked under control.

Needless to say, I’ve looked at the video a few times since. The clock reads 63.37 when McManamon’s shot hits the Hill End net. That’s the moment that killed us. The team completely lost its shape after and, while it took Stephen Cluxton’s injury-time free to win it for the Dubs, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to forgive ourselves for how completely we unravelled.

It was incredibly naive for an experienced team like ours to allow that to happen. Because we’d have felt we were pretty good at seeing tight games out. In that kind of scenario we’d probably even expect to ease away to win by seven or eight.

Maybe there’s a touch of arrogance in that. I mean, would Tyrone have allowed McManamon to waltz in on their goal in such circumstances? I doubt it very much. But we were Kerry. We were comfortable. I suppose fellas didn’t feel the need to be unscrupulous at that moment.

And the regret is something we may well carry to our graves.

Jack had shaken up his back-room team earlier that year and the biggest change was his introduction of Donie Buckley as coach.

A Castleisland man, he’d spent three seasons working with Mickey ‘Ned’ O’Sullivan in Limerick, and we knew from personal experience the steel that had been added to their game in that time. I didn’t know him personally but the Monday after we’d beaten Limerick in the 2010 Munster final I met him in Adare. A few of us had clearance to attend the J. P. McManus Pro-Am that Tiger Woods was playing in and we were having a few pints in the village before heading for the hills when I bumped into Donie, a keen golf fan.

It was a fairly brief, superficial conversation really.

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