WHEN CORK CITY won the league in 1993, some of their fans were so thrilled that they decided to invade the pitch – from the second tier.
“Get off the roof,” came the instruction from the RDS tannoy.
In the boom-bust history of soccer in Cork, where an arduous climb is often followed by more rapid descent, this could have been the most dramatic fall from grace.
The supporters fortunately regained their appreciation of the forces of gravity and backed up into the stand again, before tearing down the stairs and into the field of their frenzied celebrations.
To understand their fervour you’d have to know about the longing and despair that had come before; the near misses, the build up and let downs, and the gathering sense that theirs would always be a story of guts but no glory.
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It’s tough for young fans to understand what League of Ireland football was like on Leeside 30 years ago: a time of elegant kits, Copa Mundials and tangos; no broadband, no bypasses and Standing Room Only; the top 40 and Cork bands in it; fanzines and the Phantom Whistler; winter football with barely a blade of grass on the pitch by February, and a dogged, talented football team that was growing older together with little by way of silverware to mark their contribution.
Before 1992/93, the most eccentric of seasons in an eccentric league, City had come close. They lost the FAI Cup final to Derry City in 1989. In 1991, Dundalk beat them on the final day of the season at Turner’s Cross to snatch the title from their grasp. Then came 1992 when a Dave Tilson goal won the FAI Cup for Bohemians and condemned City to yet another unfulfilling campaign.
“It’s funny, I think when you’re in the actual moment at that time, all you’re trying to do is win all the time,” Declan Daly, the club captain at the time, says now. “You don’t really make huge analyses around, ‘Jesus is it ever going to be our time?’ You just start each season and hope you’re going to win trophies. You deal with them as you go along.”
This particular group had started to come together in the mid-80s, says John Caulfield, City striker from 1986 to 2001, and more recently, the manager who led the club to two FAI Cups and a league title during his tenure from 2013-19.
“The team started to form around 86, 87, 88,” says Caulfield. “We had a very strong base of homegrown Cork lads.”
It was a collection of “hardened guys,” says Caulfield, a mix of locals such as Daly, Dave Barry, Liam Murphy, Pat Morley, and Philip Long, which would be augmented by shrewd signings from Britain.
“We were very lucky or very choosy,” says Daly, “I’m not sure which, but the people we brought across from the UK were brilliant additions. Phil Harrington, Gerry McCabe, Paul Bannon, Mick Conroy, they were top quality guys and players.
“The beauty of it was they lived in the city, they lived with us here and so if we had a shit performance on a Sunday, they weren’t in the UK on Monday morning, they were in Cork the same as the rest of us.”
It was, says Caulfield, “a tight knit group of people”.
The team won a league cup in 1988, beating Shamrock Rovers in the final, and travelled with hope to the FAI Cup final against Derry City a year later. A late volley from Barry which hit the inside of the post and refused to cross the line was as close as they got to victory. A 0-0 draw was followed up with a Derry win in the replay.
Come 1991, City led the race for much of the season and a crowd of more than 10,000 thronged Turner’s Cross for the last game, a winner-takes-all showdown with Dundalk. A late goal for Tom McNulty at the St Anne’s end sparked jubilation in the pocket of a few hundred Dundalk fans among the stunned home support.
The Shed end started chanting again within seconds as City rallied to their task. Conroy came close with a powerful shot, but Dundalk withstood the pressure.
“Ah, I think the frustration was we were at home,” says Caulfield. “There was a packed crowd. There was a lot of hype. Cork had won the double in the GAA, there was a lot of talk it was going to be Cork with the clean sweep. It was a just a bad game. We didn’t play well.”
After the game, many in the Shed stayed behind and boomed out defiant songs of support. In the old dressing rooms, the line between joy and despair was thin.
“The thing was at that time in Turner’s Cross, both teams shared the same showers,” says Caulfield. “… so you can imagine, it just wasn’t a good feeling.”
Daly says: “Standing in the shower, you can actually see inside both dressing rooms, like, and the difference between the width of a brick in one dressing room and another, I’ll never forget it. You’re looking at champagne on one side and God knows what on the other side.”
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The Cork City fans massed towards the back of the South Stand at the old Lansdowne Road moved down to behind Phil Harrington’s goal towards the end of the FAI Cup final a year later. Were they readying themselves for a victorious dash onto the pitch at full-time? If so, you’d have to admire their optimism.
The nervy game was poised at 0-0, until Dave Tilson ran onto a headed ball over the top. Those young City fans got a close-up view of the striker lofting the ball over Harrington and into the net, against the backdrop of a bouncing East Stand.
“Those defeats level you,” says Daly, “but you do store it, you do bring it along and I always think that however low you feel on those defeats, it’s reciprocated on the other side when you win. When you lose, you’re so low, so that when you win, you’re up in the stratosphere somewhere.”
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City would have their moment in the stratosphere, at the end of a season which was as surreal as it was lengthy.
Some of the unusual goings on included Cork City playing home games in three venues, St Coleman’s Park, Bishopstown and Turner’s Cross – the latter was technically a neutral venue (stay with us); City suffering a 4-1 loss to Bohs and a 6-2 defeat to Shels; a three-way play-off to decide the title after City, Shels and Bohs finished level on points with goal difference not acceptable as a means of separating teams; and with one last twist, the play-off then going to a second set of games.
“It was really weird, like,” says Daly of the year.
A familiar sense of a chance slipping away took hold of the City players on the last day of the regular season. Bohemians needed just a point away to Dundalk, where kick off had been delayed. Yet an unlikely ally was about to emerge.
“It’s amazing, sport has an irony that’s nearly funny, if not dark,” says Daly.
“All the games were finished except Bohs and Dundalk, so we were huddled around a radio in Bishopstown listening to the end of the match in Oriel Park, and who was it got the winner? Tom McNulty.”
The man who had broken 10,000 hearts in Turner’s Cross two years previously had struck to give City a reprieve. So the top three finished level on 40 points (this was still the time of two points for a win). The result was the trio would play each other home and away.
City beat Bohs at home, 1-0, and then lost 1-0 to Shels away. A home draw with Shels followed so City set off for Dalymount Park needing a win to leave them in a strong position.
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Little seemed surprising during this campaign, but to see an account of that game through the eyes of a committed City fan on the BBC show Standing Room Only did cause a double take at the time.
There was Morty McCarthy and a bunch of City fans climbing onto a minibus outside O’Flaherty’s in Parnell Place. McCarthy edited No More Plastic Pitches, a Cork City fanzine full of verve and wit, and was the drummer with the Sultans of Ping. Not that he would describe himself as any kind of rock star.
“If you try to act the big head in Cork, they’ll quickly cut you down to size,” he says in the film.
Standing Room Only got in touch due to his profile with the band and sent a camera crew over to track the fans for the day, McCarthy says now from Stockholm, where he lives. McCarthy still gets back a few times a year with his 14-year-old son Kilian to see the club he has followed since its birth in 1984.
His father Michael is a “Cork football fanatic” who introduced Morty to, first, Cork Hibs and then City. Long before he would tour with a band, weekends were spent on the road.
“My dad went everywhere,” says McCarthy. “Sometimes I went on the bus with the guys but I liked to go with my dad. Yeah, he never missed a game. Never spoke about the game, we’d just get in the car. He just loved the excitement, he wouldn’t analyse anything tactically, he just loved Cork and if Cork were playing, we were going. If it was Gaelic football or hurling, it didn’t matter, he was going. He just loved the thrill of it all.”
At a trip to Dalymount earlier in the season, the pair had encountered some unwelcome attention. “We parked pretty near the ground. And there was a bit of trouble after the game actually and they saw me and they were shaking the car singing Where’s Me Jumper at me. It was quite intimidating to be honest really.”
There was no such aggressive serenading with the BBC cameras in tow during the play-off, but the result left a desolate feeling for McCarthy and City fans. A 0-0 draw meant that if there was a winner in the Shels-Bohs game, they’d take the league.
The match finished as a 0-0 draw. This meant another round of games at “neutral venues”. Some in Dublin were skeptical that Turner’s Cross, the home of Cork City until months previously, could be designated as such.
But then Cork fans and players would observe that the RDS was a lot closer to Drumcondra and Phibsboro than it was to the Jack Lynch tunnel.
And of course the tunnel was not built yet, nor was the network of motorways which made Ireland a smaller place than it was in 1993. Caulfield believes it was far harder for a team from places like Cork or Derry to win the league given the amount of hard miles put in on the old winding roads.
“It’s hard to explain to someone now, but you if you think about it, you’re in Cork and you’re going out by the train station and you’re going through Glanmire, Watergrasshill, Rathcormac – you go through Fermoy, you’ve gone through four towns,” he says.
“The slagging with Dublin lads, they had no idea, they were just so used to travelling around that greater Dublin area, whereas every second week all our games were Dublin or north of Drogheda. Derry, Sligo . . .”
Bohemians set off for Turner’s Cross, taking in the sights of Abbeyleix, Durrow, Johnstown, Cashel, Mitchelstown and everywhere else and drove the same road back with a 1-0 loss to show for their journey. This meant that if City beat Shelbourne at the RDS on Saturday 22 May, they’d be champions.
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“It was a freaky game, a really frantic game,” says Daly.
Morley put City one-up, Garry Haylock equalised from the spot after Mark Rutherford was upended by Harrington. Dave Barry then finished with typical coolness to put City ahead and set off mad celebrations among their fans who thought that their side would not be denied now. But this was Cork Cork, and this was the year 1993.
“It came down to that situation then which happens in games,” says Daly, “when teams… God forgive me for using the analogy but how many times has it happened Mayo? When they’re coming towards the last 10-15 minutes of an All-Ireland and they’re doing great and winning and all of a sudden, ‘Oh Jesus we can win this actually.’ You start tensing up. You start freezing up a little bit. Take a little bit longer to do things because you want to be extra careful. You don’t want to make mistakes. And sure that’s when all the mistakes happen.”
All the mistakes happened in the build up to Anto Whelan’s equalizer – three, arguably four, errors in the box which culminated in their advantage being wiped out.
Bannon, though, responded with a scuffed shot which looped into the top corner, with Morley, always the predator, following up to make sure it crossed the line.
“We held out,” says Daly. “It was backs to the wall at the end. We were defending, and then relief, like, when you hear the final whistle. Brilliant.”
The players were soon mobbed by the fans who had made their way down from the top tier, everyone together in that blissful moment. Well, not quite everyone.
The Sultans were on tour in Europe with a band called The Lunachicks. Michael McCarthy was at the game as always and left to find a phone box.
“He called me at the hotel to tell me the score. I was crying down the phone,” Morty says.
City’s manager then, the late Noel O’Mahony, had soldiered for decades before this day, in many roles for different Cork outfits. The players were particularly glad that he would go out as a league champion.
“He was probably the most passionate person you could get about Cork soccer, he just drilled it into us. We knew he was finishing after the game because the rumour was there that Damien Richardson was going to be coming in,” says Caulfield.
“Recently Jerry Harris died, who was 100% Cork City. Noel was an ex-player who was with Cork Hibs, and he just lived for Cork soccer. He understood the struggles, that Dublin had a bigger pool of players, players moved around a lot more often. Whereas in Cork, they didn’t.
“He’d been managing Cork teams when they were terrible. Cork Alberts. Teams that are bottom of the table where you’re trying to win a few games. And then he ends up with a team like us, that hadn’t been great. He’d been there since ’86, we’d been bottom half of the table. He’d been let go then, Eamonn O’Keefe came in, and then he came back. He was really significant, I think, in who we were and our identity. That’s why the group were really aggressive and really strong in that regard because he had a massive influence over the group.”
O’Mahony wasn’t the only manager in the winning dressing room; Jack Charlton was there amid the happy chaos and posed for a picture with Daly. As things eventually calmed down, the captain began to feel the type of contentment that comes to those who have known the other side of the result.
“It was just to sit down and see the cup,” he says. “Have it in the middle of the dressing room. You can relax then, for two minutes.”
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The team had other notable achievements, a 1-1 draw with Bayern Munich; running a Galatasaray side who would eliminate Manchester United close over two legs. Many were still around for the 1998 FAI Cup win. They finished second to Shamrock Rovers in 1994, second again in 1999 to Pat’s, and to Shels in 2000.
The team is still tight all of these years later, with Turner’s Cross the main meeting spot for the group comprised of locals and those who came and stuck around.
“Phil is still there, Mick Conroy is still here; Bannon, God rest him, was here up until the time he died; Gerry McCabe was back recently. They’re all guys we’d be good buddies with and became a real part of our team,” says Daly, who has had the same seats at the ground since he finished playing.
“We’re just supporters now at this stage and it’s great. I love going out there. It was a huge miss for me when Covid was on. Jesus, the Friday nights in Turner’s Cross are brilliant.”
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Cork soccer has a certain tendency. When it’s up, like in ’93, ’05, ’17 and before that in the days of Hibs and Celtic, it can appear to be poised to dominate. But then the downfall happens, spectacular and often swift.
Yet even in the most hopeless moments, the wheel stays spinning and the next group of players, often largely local in origin, begins to form. New supporters come through the Cross turnstiles for the first time and take their places among the regulars and the veterans of 93. The men who kept showing up.
