The ‘North Star’ of Jim Gavin’s remit to reinvent Gaelic football was to make it ‘the most exciting amateur game in the world’.
With 141 years of history, Gaelic football had grown to be the most popular and widespread competitive sport in Ireland. It has endured plagues and wars and repression to emerge as something that was guaranteed an eternal future.
Yet for a time that future did not seem so assured.
Why? Well, in short it seemed after decades of cumulative effort, the tacticians had won. The thinkers had figured out the game; coaches had deciphered the sport and established the most efficient and risk-free means of attacking and defending. The main casualty was the spectacle. And so it was necessary to tear down the pillars of Gaelic football and built the game up again.
But who were the men who advanced the sport over a course of almost a century and a half? Who made this such a loved, played and obsessed-over sport? And how did it come to need saving in the end?
Here, in the first part of a three-part series, Declan Bogue tells the evolution from a crude ball game and documents the trainers, the dreamers, the tacticians, the teams, the philosophers, the managers, the administrators and the players who shaped the game through three distinct periods of evolution to become what it is today.
*****
IT WAS A highlighted text in the Football Review Committee final report that caught the eye.
Printed in The United Irishman newspaper by Michael Cusack soon after he had codified the sport of Gaelic football, he thundered, ‘We have to remind those who play football that is not to be passed or carried in any way. It may be caught, but it must be kicked or put on the ground at once. It may also be hit with the hand. The passing and carrying is entirely foreign, having been imported from rugby.’
And you know, there’s been a rule change here and there. Goalposts became the ‘H’ we all know. Throw-ins became kicks from the ground and, around a century later, kicks to be taken from the hand.
A personal favourite was a rule abolished in 1886 that allowed players to break off from general play and wrestle each other while play continues. It took a while to die off.
You could say it was a difficult birth, and rule changes have been trying to make up for it since.
For example, the very first game of Gaelic football under the freshly-minted rules – mainly established by Cusack himself – was played in mid-February 1885 between Callan and a gather-up of other Kilkenny teams.
The statue of Michael Cusack outside Croke Park. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
It finished scoreless. It was a common outcome before the introduction of upright posts and points.
While the sport certainly evolved and improved, helped by advancements in sporting kit, and equipment, along with lighter and uniform footballs, and the accumulation of training knowledge, practically all of the 20th century was a slow burn for tactics.
Many things would change with Gaelic football. The early market leaders shaped the habits of those around them. Training methods were adopted and shared widely. But as for a healthy divergence of tactical ideas? The progress was haltingly slow.
Take a sport like soccer. Few would have been keen to admit it at the time, but the early incarnations of Gaelic football were remarkably similar to the English sport.
The very origins of formation in the early 1870s included one defender – say a full-back in GAA parlance – two in front of him, and seven attackers.
It was the arrival of a Hungary team in the 1950s that opened up possibilities.
In a run of 50 games, they lost only once: the 1954 World Cup final to West Germany.
Hungary coach Gusztáv Sebes had a flexible formation of 2-3-3-2, with a withdrawn centre-forward and wingers that could tuck into midfield when required. The role of the centre-forward was to get out of the road of Ferenc Puskás who would score 84 goals in 85 international games.
After that, the doors of perception opened.
*****
Dublin dominance
In the beginning, there was Dublin. By 1902, they had already racked up eight All-Ireland titles, at a time when clubs represented their county, often illicitly supplemented by a few guest players from neighbouring clubs.
As a result, the Dublin team wasn’t packed with culchies, as per common belief, a trend that only truly took off with the establishment of the Gardaí and Civil Service of the Irish Free State.
The Dublin teams of this era had a distinct advantage that they retain today: mainly the access to sporting facilities and being in close proximity to each other.
But this was a sport in its infancy. A certain brawniness and fitness went a long way and in a numbers game, they had numbers.
*****
Louth emergence
Louth’s first All-Ireland arrived in 1910 in underwhelming circumstances. Slated to play Kerry in the final, the Great Southern and Western Railway refused to sell tickets to the Kerry fans at reduced rates. In solidarity with their fans, Kerry refused to play the game and Louth were awarded the cup.
Two years later, however, they beat Antrim to win their first Sam Maguire on the field of play.
On a roll, the following year they reached the Croke Memorial Cup final but lost to Kerry after a replay. They had a three-man selection committee of Jack Clarke (Tredaghs), Philip Morgan (Dundalk Rangers) and John McArdle (Geraldines) and a 21-man panel that went into Dundalk for a two-week training camp.
Advertisement
As these things do, news leaked from the camp that they had also the help of Jimmy Blessington (a former Glasgow Celtic player and Scottish international who was later player-manager for Leicester Fosse, the original club before the foundation of Leicester City) and John Booth of Belfast Celtic who trained the team. There were also rumours of players having their wages covered for the duration of the training camp. The battle with amateurism had begun.
*****
Collective training
Just over 20 years ago, the former Galway hurler Frank Burke switched codes and produced a mammoth book called ‘All-Ireland Glory – A Pictorial History of the Senior Football Champions 1887-2005’.
Within the pages, there were pictures of the Kerry teams of 1913-14 when they beat Wexford two years in a row. The presence of one man in a white turtleneck jumper brought much puzzlement.
It was Jerry Collins, a trainer who also togged out for Kerry in 1914.
From Currans, Farranfore, ironically right at the site of Kerry GAA’s current Centre of Excellence, Collins was a champion sprinter and long jumper. After leaving for England at the turn of the century, he founded the Irish Athletic Club.
Word of his achievements reached home and Austin Stack – the All-Ireland winning Kerry captain of 1904 and later commandant of the Kerry Irish Volunteers and county board chairman – invited him home to help training Kerry. Stack had heard of the Belfast Celtic duo coaching Louth for the replay and, knowing that Collins had spent the previous 10 years training with Tottenham Hotspur, brought him home.
The diet that Collins introduced must have felt alien. For the training camp, the players would go for a walk in the morning and at noon, following by an hour of special exercises. Afternoons were taken up by swimming in Fenit Harbour (this being late October) and then another session of exercises.
Kerry won the replay and the All-Irelands of 1913 and 1914 with Collins on board. He straddled two generations as he was brought back to coach them for the 1923 final – played in 1924 – and then handed over the reins to Dr Éamonn O’Sullivan. More of which soon.
*****
Dick Fitzgerald: Player, coach, writer
It takes some nerve to write a book called How To Play Gaelic Football during your playing career, but Dick Fitzgerald was one of the most influential figures in shaping the sport.
A Dr Crokes player, he was there for Kerry’s first All-Ireland title, the 1903 championship, which was played in 1905 and featured a three-game saga with Kildare.
He won four more titles, peaking in his final triumphs of 1913 and 1914, as captain against Wexford both years.
At the same time, he published his own playing guide in 1914. A ground-breaking document, it was a coaching manual with a detailed breakdown for each position and with illustrations of the principal skills of the game.
There was also a think-piece of sorts around how teams might cope with a 13-a-side game, which is how he felt things might evolve. He espoused a preference for attacking football over defensive, and condemned the practice of training camps.
Fitzgerald was born in a tumultuous period, and his life reflected that. His birth was just two years before the formation of the GAA and following the 1916 Easter Rising, he was one of the many around the county who were interred in Frongoch, Wales.
Later, he spent the last few months of the War of Independence on the run as a member of the local flying column.
In 1917, he helped coach the Clare side that reached the All-Ireland final to be beaten by Wexford and would later perform many duties across administration and coaching for Kerry, including organising their controversial 1927 trip to America.
*****
Importing expertise from soccer, boxing and athletics
The first incarnations of team management for Gaelic football could be complex and the system of a ‘selection committee’ persevered.
It was only with the introduction in the mid-70s of Mick O’Dwyer and Kevin Heffernan, that the notion of a ‘manager’ was popularised.
Even then, the word manager was not in circulation – ‘trainer’ being more commonplace.
From the early days, county teams brought in specialist help in physical preparation. A cast of colourful and inventive characters aided county teams, flavouring their influences. There was little in the way of cross-pollination between counties, but the depths of knowledge were being sunk ever so deeper as the years passed.
The brawny Jem Roche, despite not being particularly active as a boxer, somehow managed a shot at a world title against Canada’s Tommy Burns, who was touring Europe in early 1908. The two fought on St Patrick’s Day at Dublin’s Theatre Royal and Roche lasted all of 88 seconds of the first round before he was knocked out.
His interest in Gaelic football was strong, however, and he had won a county title with St Patrick’s in 1896. This gave him the background to becoming the trainer of the Wexford team that won four successive All-Irelands from 1915 to 1918.
Charlie Harris was a champion runner of his time and had excelled over a series of distances. In 1912, he even took on a trotting pony named ‘Kathleen H’ over a ten-mile distance event around Jones’ Road, later Croke Park, in the process setting a new Irish record for that distance.
It was eight years later when he was the trainer of the Dublin football team on Bloody Sunday, pictured in the team photograph with waistcoat and roll-neck jumper. He later went on to be associated with Bohemian FC for decades and earned two testimonials, against Belfast Celtic and later Manchester United in recognition of his contribution.
While he was just six months old when he left Ireland for Glasgow, John ‘The Runner’ McGough had a storied life that brought him to the 1908 Summer Olympics and a Silver medal in the Intercalated Games in Athens in 1906.
In his young days, he helped out with Glasgow Celtic as a masseur and ended up as assistant manager to Bob Davies. He also made the move with Davies to Manchester City, but returned to Ireland to farm some land at the outbreak of the First World War.
In 1915, he founded the Blackhill Emeralds club and helped Monaghan to the Ulster Junior titles in 1939, 1940 and 1945, while also training Cavan for the famous Polo Grounds final of 1947.
Action from the 1947 All-Ireland final. Paddy Donohue scores a goal for Cavan. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
He may have been more synonymous with Cork hurlers, having trained the likes of Jack Lynch to Liam MacCarthy success, but another scrappy bantamweight boxer in Jim ‘Tough’ Barry was cracking the whip for the Cork footballers when they won their second All-Ireland in 1945.
As expertise grew and the sport developed, Gaelic football soon spawned a generation of ‘football coaches’, but there has always been a healthy respect and regard for athletes coming from different spaces — the latest of which, is the appointment of Bernard Dunne to a Talent and Culture Development role with Wexford GAA in September.
*****
Dr Éamonn, ‘this quiet, elegant man’
As impressive as his predecessors were, Kerry Gaelic football was arguably modernised and shaped by Dr Éamonn O’Sullivan.
At just 27, he was the Kerry trainer for the 1924 All-Ireland final (played in April ’25).
His background was one of extensive education that pointed towards a life in the clergy, but at the age of 22, and after nine months in the Irish Pontifical College in Rome, he decided it wasn’t for him.
Returning home, he started studying medicine at UCD and qualified as a doctor in 1925.
While there, he captained the Sigerson Cup side and played club championship in Dublin. He won the intervarsity javelin title in 1922 and was the first President of the Irish National Union of Students in 1924.
Gaelic football and Kerry gave this remarkable man a mode of expression and he trained the team to eight All-Ireland titles; 1924, ’25, ’37, ’46, ’53, ’55, ’59 and ’62. That’s a 39-year period and he wasn’t always there.
His working life was centred in St Finan’s Psychiatric Hospital, overlooking Fitzgerald Stadium. As the Resident Medical Superintendent, he pioneered a means of occupational therapy whereby the inpatients would assist in the building of the stadium itself.
Whenever the Kerry ship was listing, somebody on the board would be dispatched up the hill to speak to Dr Éamonn, to see if he might be convinced to give another spell of service.
A column in The Kerryman by the former Kerry goalkeeper, referee and host of Terrace Talk, Weeshie Fogarty in 2007, readily outlined his childhood memories of O’Sullivan as he regularly stood watching Kerry training in the early ‘50s.
‘The Dr would line them up in a straight line, blow the whistle, the players would sprint flat out for about 14 yards, he would whistle again and they would slow to a fast walk, and this exercise would be repeated up and down the field.
‘His theory was, fast off the mark, quick reactions. Piggyback, rope skipping, hand passing in fours up and down the field and big groups standing around in a circle passing the ball alternatively with the right and left hands.
‘These were only a few of the drills I remember of those long gone days of the fifties. While the group hand passing was going on he would talk in his low quiet measured tones, passing on his vast knowledge to his players.
‘And there in the middle of the field was this tall stately man, dressed in a suit, shirt and tie wearing either brown or black shoes always shining and brightly polished.
‘He always had a stop watch in one hand and a whistle in the other and some evenings he would sit down as he regularly carried with him one of these golf sticks you could open at the top and form a little seat. He was never dressed in a tracksuit, never wore a pair of football boots, and a wet evening, he would have a brightly coloured umbrella and wore a gabardine raincoat.
‘And my most abiding memory of all, in stark contrast to today’s trainers, this quiet elegant man never once raised his voice to shout at, encourage, or berate one of his players.’
There was a method and a science to it. But soon, imagination would enter the picture.
*****
Heffo: the third midfielder
By 1955, popular culture was getting its hands around the world of intercounty Gaelic football. Kerry and Dublin was far from a rivalry, having only met in the finals of 1904, 1923 and 1924.
But in 1955, a record attendance of 87,102 showed up to see these two, with the intrigue of some city sorcery.
In the Leinster final of that year against Meath, Kevin Heffernan was named in the full-forward line. His marker that day was Paddy ‘Hands’ O’Brien, later to be named on the Team of the Century. But he was avowedly conservative in his style, a catch and kick man to his fingertips.
Heffernan had studied Don Revie, more famous as manager of Leeds United, but in the 1954-55 season, he won the FWA Footballer of the Year while playing for Manchester City. Their gameplan was called the ‘Revie Plan’, with Revie coming from centre-forward to midfield to pick up the ball and therefore drawing the centre-half out of position.
Heffernan did that to create space in the inside line, thereby becoming the first ‘Third Midfielder’ of Gaelic football. He scored two goals in the first half.
The tactic felt underhand to O’Brien. Even though Meath had used their full quota of subs, O’Brien simply walked off the pitch before the final whistle.
Dublin lost the final to Kerry, fielding 14 St Vincent’s outfield players with the goalkeeper Tony O’Grady playing for the Air Corps.
From the Dick Fitzgerald booklet, when he sternly warned that players should remain in their own positions and fight their patch, the art of movement had arrived.
*****
Tomorrow: Part 2 of our series, where we delve into shifting cultures, the arrival of a Down team that changed everything, and the emergence of The Manager as a charismatic figure.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Close
4 Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic.
Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy
here
before taking part.
The dreamers, schemers, thinkers and doers who brought tactics and design to Gaelic football
The ‘North Star’ of Jim Gavin’s remit to reinvent Gaelic football was to make it ‘the most exciting amateur game in the world’.
With 141 years of history, Gaelic football had grown to be the most popular and widespread competitive sport in Ireland. It has endured plagues and wars and repression to emerge as something that was guaranteed an eternal future.
Yet for a time that future did not seem so assured.
Why? Well, in short it seemed after decades of cumulative effort, the tacticians had won. The thinkers had figured out the game; coaches had deciphered the sport and established the most efficient and risk-free means of attacking and defending. The main casualty was the spectacle. And so it was necessary to tear down the pillars of Gaelic football and built the game up again.
But who were the men who advanced the sport over a course of almost a century and a half? Who made this such a loved, played and obsessed-over sport? And how did it come to need saving in the end?
Here, in the first part of a three-part series, Declan Bogue tells the evolution from a crude ball game and documents the trainers, the dreamers, the tacticians, the teams, the philosophers, the managers, the administrators and the players who shaped the game through three distinct periods of evolution to become what it is today.
*****
IT WAS A highlighted text in the Football Review Committee final report that caught the eye.
Printed in The United Irishman newspaper by Michael Cusack soon after he had codified the sport of Gaelic football, he thundered, ‘We have to remind those who play football that is not to be passed or carried in any way. It may be caught, but it must be kicked or put on the ground at once. It may also be hit with the hand. The passing and carrying is entirely foreign, having been imported from rugby.’
And you know, there’s been a rule change here and there. Goalposts became the ‘H’ we all know. Throw-ins became kicks from the ground and, around a century later, kicks to be taken from the hand.
You could say it was a difficult birth, and rule changes have been trying to make up for it since.
For example, the very first game of Gaelic football under the freshly-minted rules – mainly established by Cusack himself – was played in mid-February 1885 between Callan and a gather-up of other Kilkenny teams.
It finished scoreless. It was a common outcome before the introduction of upright posts and points.
While the sport certainly evolved and improved, helped by advancements in sporting kit, and equipment, along with lighter and uniform footballs, and the accumulation of training knowledge, practically all of the 20th century was a slow burn for tactics.
Many things would change with Gaelic football. The early market leaders shaped the habits of those around them. Training methods were adopted and shared widely. But as for a healthy divergence of tactical ideas? The progress was haltingly slow.
Take a sport like soccer. Few would have been keen to admit it at the time, but the early incarnations of Gaelic football were remarkably similar to the English sport.
The very origins of formation in the early 1870s included one defender – say a full-back in GAA parlance – two in front of him, and seven attackers.
It was the arrival of a Hungary team in the 1950s that opened up possibilities.
In a run of 50 games, they lost only once: the 1954 World Cup final to West Germany.
Hungary coach Gusztáv Sebes had a flexible formation of 2-3-3-2, with a withdrawn centre-forward and wingers that could tuck into midfield when required. The role of the centre-forward was to get out of the road of Ferenc Puskás who would score 84 goals in 85 international games.
After that, the doors of perception opened.
*****
Dublin dominance
In the beginning, there was Dublin. By 1902, they had already racked up eight All-Ireland titles, at a time when clubs represented their county, often illicitly supplemented by a few guest players from neighbouring clubs.
As a result, the Dublin team wasn’t packed with culchies, as per common belief, a trend that only truly took off with the establishment of the Gardaí and Civil Service of the Irish Free State.
The Dublin teams of this era had a distinct advantage that they retain today: mainly the access to sporting facilities and being in close proximity to each other.
But this was a sport in its infancy. A certain brawniness and fitness went a long way and in a numbers game, they had numbers.
*****
Louth emergence
Louth’s first All-Ireland arrived in 1910 in underwhelming circumstances. Slated to play Kerry in the final, the Great Southern and Western Railway refused to sell tickets to the Kerry fans at reduced rates. In solidarity with their fans, Kerry refused to play the game and Louth were awarded the cup.
Two years later, however, they beat Antrim to win their first Sam Maguire on the field of play.
On a roll, the following year they reached the Croke Memorial Cup final but lost to Kerry after a replay. They had a three-man selection committee of Jack Clarke (Tredaghs), Philip Morgan (Dundalk Rangers) and John McArdle (Geraldines) and a 21-man panel that went into Dundalk for a two-week training camp.
As these things do, news leaked from the camp that they had also the help of Jimmy Blessington (a former Glasgow Celtic player and Scottish international who was later player-manager for Leicester Fosse, the original club before the foundation of Leicester City) and John Booth of Belfast Celtic who trained the team. There were also rumours of players having their wages covered for the duration of the training camp. The battle with amateurism had begun.
*****
Collective training
Just over 20 years ago, the former Galway hurler Frank Burke switched codes and produced a mammoth book called ‘All-Ireland Glory – A Pictorial History of the Senior Football Champions 1887-2005’.
Within the pages, there were pictures of the Kerry teams of 1913-14 when they beat Wexford two years in a row. The presence of one man in a white turtleneck jumper brought much puzzlement.
It was Jerry Collins, a trainer who also togged out for Kerry in 1914.
From Currans, Farranfore, ironically right at the site of Kerry GAA’s current Centre of Excellence, Collins was a champion sprinter and long jumper. After leaving for England at the turn of the century, he founded the Irish Athletic Club.
Word of his achievements reached home and Austin Stack – the All-Ireland winning Kerry captain of 1904 and later commandant of the Kerry Irish Volunteers and county board chairman – invited him home to help training Kerry. Stack had heard of the Belfast Celtic duo coaching Louth for the replay and, knowing that Collins had spent the previous 10 years training with Tottenham Hotspur, brought him home.
The diet that Collins introduced must have felt alien. For the training camp, the players would go for a walk in the morning and at noon, following by an hour of special exercises. Afternoons were taken up by swimming in Fenit Harbour (this being late October) and then another session of exercises.
Kerry won the replay and the All-Irelands of 1913 and 1914 with Collins on board. He straddled two generations as he was brought back to coach them for the 1923 final – played in 1924 – and then handed over the reins to Dr Éamonn O’Sullivan. More of which soon.
*****
Dick Fitzgerald: Player, coach, writer
It takes some nerve to write a book called How To Play Gaelic Football during your playing career, but Dick Fitzgerald was one of the most influential figures in shaping the sport.
A Dr Crokes player, he was there for Kerry’s first All-Ireland title, the 1903 championship, which was played in 1905 and featured a three-game saga with Kildare.
He won four more titles, peaking in his final triumphs of 1913 and 1914, as captain against Wexford both years.
At the same time, he published his own playing guide in 1914. A ground-breaking document, it was a coaching manual with a detailed breakdown for each position and with illustrations of the principal skills of the game.
There was also a think-piece of sorts around how teams might cope with a 13-a-side game, which is how he felt things might evolve. He espoused a preference for attacking football over defensive, and condemned the practice of training camps.
Fitzgerald was born in a tumultuous period, and his life reflected that. His birth was just two years before the formation of the GAA and following the 1916 Easter Rising, he was one of the many around the county who were interred in Frongoch, Wales.
Later, he spent the last few months of the War of Independence on the run as a member of the local flying column.
In 1917, he helped coach the Clare side that reached the All-Ireland final to be beaten by Wexford and would later perform many duties across administration and coaching for Kerry, including organising their controversial 1927 trip to America.
*****
Importing expertise from soccer, boxing and athletics
The first incarnations of team management for Gaelic football could be complex and the system of a ‘selection committee’ persevered.
It was only with the introduction in the mid-70s of Mick O’Dwyer and Kevin Heffernan, that the notion of a ‘manager’ was popularised.
Even then, the word manager was not in circulation – ‘trainer’ being more commonplace.
From the early days, county teams brought in specialist help in physical preparation. A cast of colourful and inventive characters aided county teams, flavouring their influences. There was little in the way of cross-pollination between counties, but the depths of knowledge were being sunk ever so deeper as the years passed.
The brawny Jem Roche, despite not being particularly active as a boxer, somehow managed a shot at a world title against Canada’s Tommy Burns, who was touring Europe in early 1908. The two fought on St Patrick’s Day at Dublin’s Theatre Royal and Roche lasted all of 88 seconds of the first round before he was knocked out.
His interest in Gaelic football was strong, however, and he had won a county title with St Patrick’s in 1896. This gave him the background to becoming the trainer of the Wexford team that won four successive All-Irelands from 1915 to 1918.
Charlie Harris was a champion runner of his time and had excelled over a series of distances. In 1912, he even took on a trotting pony named ‘Kathleen H’ over a ten-mile distance event around Jones’ Road, later Croke Park, in the process setting a new Irish record for that distance.
It was eight years later when he was the trainer of the Dublin football team on Bloody Sunday, pictured in the team photograph with waistcoat and roll-neck jumper. He later went on to be associated with Bohemian FC for decades and earned two testimonials, against Belfast Celtic and later Manchester United in recognition of his contribution.
While he was just six months old when he left Ireland for Glasgow, John ‘The Runner’ McGough had a storied life that brought him to the 1908 Summer Olympics and a Silver medal in the Intercalated Games in Athens in 1906.
In his young days, he helped out with Glasgow Celtic as a masseur and ended up as assistant manager to Bob Davies. He also made the move with Davies to Manchester City, but returned to Ireland to farm some land at the outbreak of the First World War.
In 1915, he founded the Blackhill Emeralds club and helped Monaghan to the Ulster Junior titles in 1939, 1940 and 1945, while also training Cavan for the famous Polo Grounds final of 1947.
He may have been more synonymous with Cork hurlers, having trained the likes of Jack Lynch to Liam MacCarthy success, but another scrappy bantamweight boxer in Jim ‘Tough’ Barry was cracking the whip for the Cork footballers when they won their second All-Ireland in 1945.
As expertise grew and the sport developed, Gaelic football soon spawned a generation of ‘football coaches’, but there has always been a healthy respect and regard for athletes coming from different spaces — the latest of which, is the appointment of Bernard Dunne to a Talent and Culture Development role with Wexford GAA in September.
*****
Dr Éamonn, ‘this quiet, elegant man’
As impressive as his predecessors were, Kerry Gaelic football was arguably modernised and shaped by Dr Éamonn O’Sullivan.
At just 27, he was the Kerry trainer for the 1924 All-Ireland final (played in April ’25).
His background was one of extensive education that pointed towards a life in the clergy, but at the age of 22, and after nine months in the Irish Pontifical College in Rome, he decided it wasn’t for him.
Returning home, he started studying medicine at UCD and qualified as a doctor in 1925.
While there, he captained the Sigerson Cup side and played club championship in Dublin. He won the intervarsity javelin title in 1922 and was the first President of the Irish National Union of Students in 1924.
Gaelic football and Kerry gave this remarkable man a mode of expression and he trained the team to eight All-Ireland titles; 1924, ’25, ’37, ’46, ’53, ’55, ’59 and ’62. That’s a 39-year period and he wasn’t always there.
His working life was centred in St Finan’s Psychiatric Hospital, overlooking Fitzgerald Stadium. As the Resident Medical Superintendent, he pioneered a means of occupational therapy whereby the inpatients would assist in the building of the stadium itself.
Whenever the Kerry ship was listing, somebody on the board would be dispatched up the hill to speak to Dr Éamonn, to see if he might be convinced to give another spell of service.
A column in The Kerryman by the former Kerry goalkeeper, referee and host of Terrace Talk, Weeshie Fogarty in 2007, readily outlined his childhood memories of O’Sullivan as he regularly stood watching Kerry training in the early ‘50s.
‘The Dr would line them up in a straight line, blow the whistle, the players would sprint flat out for about 14 yards, he would whistle again and they would slow to a fast walk, and this exercise would be repeated up and down the field.
‘His theory was, fast off the mark, quick reactions. Piggyback, rope skipping, hand passing in fours up and down the field and big groups standing around in a circle passing the ball alternatively with the right and left hands.
‘These were only a few of the drills I remember of those long gone days of the fifties. While the group hand passing was going on he would talk in his low quiet measured tones, passing on his vast knowledge to his players.
‘And there in the middle of the field was this tall stately man, dressed in a suit, shirt and tie wearing either brown or black shoes always shining and brightly polished.
‘He always had a stop watch in one hand and a whistle in the other and some evenings he would sit down as he regularly carried with him one of these golf sticks you could open at the top and form a little seat. He was never dressed in a tracksuit, never wore a pair of football boots, and a wet evening, he would have a brightly coloured umbrella and wore a gabardine raincoat.
‘And my most abiding memory of all, in stark contrast to today’s trainers, this quiet elegant man never once raised his voice to shout at, encourage, or berate one of his players.’
There was a method and a science to it. But soon, imagination would enter the picture.
*****
Heffo: the third midfielder
By 1955, popular culture was getting its hands around the world of intercounty Gaelic football. Kerry and Dublin was far from a rivalry, having only met in the finals of 1904, 1923 and 1924.
But in 1955, a record attendance of 87,102 showed up to see these two, with the intrigue of some city sorcery.
In the Leinster final of that year against Meath, Kevin Heffernan was named in the full-forward line. His marker that day was Paddy ‘Hands’ O’Brien, later to be named on the Team of the Century. But he was avowedly conservative in his style, a catch and kick man to his fingertips.
Heffernan had studied Don Revie, more famous as manager of Leeds United, but in the 1954-55 season, he won the FWA Footballer of the Year while playing for Manchester City. Their gameplan was called the ‘Revie Plan’, with Revie coming from centre-forward to midfield to pick up the ball and therefore drawing the centre-half out of position.
Heffernan did that to create space in the inside line, thereby becoming the first ‘Third Midfielder’ of Gaelic football. He scored two goals in the first half.
The tactic felt underhand to O’Brien. Even though Meath had used their full quota of subs, O’Brien simply walked off the pitch before the final whistle.
Dublin lost the final to Kerry, fielding 14 St Vincent’s outfield players with the goalkeeper Tony O’Grady playing for the Air Corps.
From the Dick Fitzgerald booklet, when he sternly warned that players should remain in their own positions and fight their patch, the art of movement had arrived.
*****
Tomorrow: Part 2 of our series, where we delve into shifting cultures, the arrival of a Down team that changed everything, and the emergence of The Manager as a charismatic figure.
Check out the latest episode of The42′s GAA Weekly podcast here
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
A history of football GAA Gaelic Football History