THESE DAYS TAKE on their own rhythms for Éamonn Cregan. He’s crammed in as much hurling as any life could fit, or any marriage could sustain he reckons, crediting his wife Anne as the unsung hero in all his sporting days.
They don’t go out into the midday heat. His low-grade addiction to golf has eased off to the point where he might squeeze in a few holes late on. But at half three every day, all his children living close by in Castletroy descend upon the homeplace for ‘Coffee Time’.
He remembers the heatwave of 1976, but this? This is unnatural.
“I am one of these people, I don’t like extremes of anything. I am boring and middle of the road,” he chuckles.
That claim might be under dispute.
A man who hurls with his club Claughaun until he is 43, a man who played county for 18 seasons, a man who had a couple of spells of managing his own county, who was Limerick U21 manager at the same time as coach of the Clare seniors?
The man who led that travelling ‘second day of the wedding’ party of Offaly hurlers to the 1994 All-Ireland, against his own? The man who even at the age of 71 was leading the previously Mary Immaculate College to a Fitzgibbon Cup?
There’s nothing moderate about a man like that.
****
With no training sessions to make, no phonecalls to make like back in the day, Cregan has spent the last number of years digging around his roots and thinking more about his heritage. Some of it he knew, some of it he has worked on, tracing the family roots right back to 1741.
“I find it fascinating and it can hook you,” he says.
From the off, the Cregans were a fighting people. He has records that tell him they came from around the bogland borderlands of Tyrone and Fermanagh. Old maps of those counties betray dozens of ‘Cregan’ townlands.
The theory is that they joined the long march south throughout the winter of 1601, Chieftains Hugh O’Neill at the vanguard, Hugh O’Donnell at the rearguard. Some 6,180 men, according to estimates, travelled down the left side of the Shannon, heading for Kinsale to rescue a trapped Spanish Armada.
They suffered a rout in a pivotal moment of the Nine Years’ War.
“Anyway, it was a disastrous defeat and I assumed the Cregans turned around to head home,” Éamonn says.
“On the way back the only thing I can think of is they saw the land around Shanagolden and thought it was lovely, and dropped there, were all the Cregan people stayed and we could trace it back to a site where it was a Cregan plot of land.
“One of those Cregans was buried outside in Newcastle West. There are links like that.”
It’s coming up to 100 years from when his father Ned first played hurling for Limerick.
He was a late starter, joining the county team in 1928 when he was a ripe 27 years old, playing his club hurling with Newcastle West. Matters of rebellion had kept him from the playing field. He was a member of the West Limerick IRA.
“He was an information officer, with the Limerick Flying Brigade,” says Cregan.
“The house had always been, well it was on numerous occasions, attacked by the Black and Tans.
“During the Civil War, and I hate talking about it because so many bad things happened. But if you came down the road where the Cregans had their land, and you saw a hat on the pillar, that meant the house was about to be raided by the Free State.”
Whether this was by the hand of anti or pro-Treaty combatants, they cannot be sure. Either way, they were warned and Ned and three brothers disappeared up into the hills around West Limerick, were they evaded capture.
Left at home, their father Michael took beatings that he didn’t survive, dying a young man.
“But the family was very active. My father was 20 years of age at the time. He was anti-Treaty. All the Cregans were.”
When the initial discussions were taking place around the formation of a new political party, Fianna Fáil, they took place in Michael Cregan’s house.
In the 1981/82 elections, Éamonn stood for election on a Fianna Fáil ticket in east Limerick.
“I learned very quickly,” he says ruefully.
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“I was above in the Sarsfield Barracks and a helicopter came down with Haughey in it. He came down along the line, gave me a limp handshake and didn’t know who I was.
“I said to myself, ‘You’re some eejit. Enjoy the next few days and go home.’
“There was nothing about who was working on behalf of Fianna Fail, it was all about Numero Uno: Charlie Haughey.”
His own working life was varied.
He was in Cadet School for 12 months and didn’t take to it. He worked over eight years in a medical factory in Shannon doing quality control.
As Limerick manager. INPHO
INPHO
Later, he was appointed as a travelling sales rep, advising GPs on the latest medical products. They were one of the first to ‘detail’ as he puts it, the miracle drug of Amoxicillin.
To his regret, he left to manage a golf club in Newcastle West. The hours were long. People threw their weight around. It was a one-man show a lot of the time and everything was his fault. He was glad to finish up.
You get the sense that nothing came close to the games of Gaelic football and hurling, and his own family.
****
He doesn’t go to hurling games any more, but that hasn’t stopped him getting head and shoulders into the battle for tickets for others.
Some people still keep him right and he is glad of the loyalty of the Limerick county board.
“It’s a quiet build-up. Ok, you see the flags flying around the place alright. But compared to previous All-Ireland finals, it’s easier. People are not willing to go over the top. They want the team to win but they have to perform because Galway are very good,” he says.
“They surprised me now in the semi-final. What amazed me in the end, was how easy it was. They had done the work and their tactics were right.
“We struggled (against Clare) and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. In one of the interviews, John Kiely spoke about the Limerick supporters and how quiet they were. But they were quiet because the Limerick team weren’t playing up to the levels they were capable of.
“We are hoping they will overcome that and do a proper job.”
During the semi-final against Clare, he found himself nodding off in the stifling indoors heat. He was glad of it.
“I have one pacemaker and if I had stayed awake, I might have needed a second one. It was that close,” he jokes.
Hugging Ciaran Carey after a Limerick win. INPHO
INPHO
But he knows the players. From Harty Cup games and, more closely, his involvement with Mary I and the Fitzgibbon Cup.
He was the manager in 2016. They won that title, the college’s first, in the final against University of Limerick. Brian Lohan was the opposing manager.
“UL had beaten us in the round robin. We came back through the back door, won the semi-final and met UL in the final,” he recalls.
“We approached it in a different way and played a different hurling. That was a first in a school that had around one male to ten females.”
He had some fine players over a few seasons: Darragh O’Donovan, Declan Hannon, Richie English, Cian Lynch, David Reidy, John Conlon, Jamie Wall and Ronan Maher among others.
Against UL, they had to contend with Gearóid Hegarty, while Nickie Quaide played midfield for Tralee IT.
Coaching at college level opened his eyes.
“Well, they are all of a certain intellect. If I were picking fellas, I would need to know what they were like, mentally,” he says.
“You won’t believe this now, but when we trained for the Fitzgibbon, we didn’t do any physical training. When we were coming up to the final, there was a player’s meeting and they decided that there was no point to make it Tuesday and Thursday trainings and being short five or six fellas who were with the county.
“So they decided they would come one night, and everybody would be there for the one night.
“Davy Fitz wouldn’t have understood it. He is a different animal. But we had one hurling session and that’s all it was – a hurling session.”
His own beliefs would have aligned with the likes of Justin McCarthy: basics are everything. They kept it simple.
As manager of Mary Immaculate College with Declan Hannon. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
Around that time, the hand-passing epidemic was filtering through every level of hurling, with players being coached that way. A lack of variety was stifling.
They played Declan Hannon at full-forward. One day Cregan went behind the goals to see the game from Hannon’s perspective. He was getting thumped and bumped. The butt of the hurley was constantly in his ribs and knees in his back as he waited, and waited, and waited, for a ball to be sent his way.
“I stood there for a while and it took seven handpasses out of our defence to get the ball up to the forwards.
“That to me was not the way I wanted hurling to be played. It was too slow, it gave the backs a chance to settle down. All this kind of stuff, so we needed to get the ball in faster.”
By the time they met UL in the 2016 decider, they had trained to become a different prospect. During in-house games, defenders and midfield were permitted one handpass to get themselves out of trouble and the ball had to be sent long after that.
“We moved Declan from full-forward to right corner-forward,” he says.
“We didn’t play him centre-back because we already had a centre-back and Declan at that stage already had played an awful lot of his hurling in the forwards and he was an outstanding forward.
“As it transpired, in the final he scored 1-12. 1-3 of that was from play.
“Once the ball came diagonally, he took off. The backs were slow to see that. Declan’s thinking was a second or two ahead of the back and a back hates a diagonal ball as it pulls them out of position.”
Few teams throw the ball around quite like Limerick now. Cregan may not like it but he accepts it, just as he accepts not being able to go inside the training ground to see how the sausage is assembled.
“I can’t complain about the present system because we have won five All-Irelands with it! Six Munster championships, three national leagues…” he says.
ON THIS DAY: 60 years ago The Limerick team that beat Tipperary by 4-12 to 2-09 in the first round of the 1966 Munster hurling championship at the old Cork Athletic Grounds. A young Eamonn Cregan scored a staggering 3 goals and 5 points for Limerick that day. @officialgaapic.twitter.com/SBle5OrFmh
— Cuimhnigh ar Luimneach : Limerick Supporters Group (@LimerickFanPage) June 5, 2026
“But I don’t like the amount of handpassing. Sometimes I watch other counties and clubs trying to play the Limerick way. It’s a difficult thing to do – it took Paul Kinnerk and John Kiely to get the style of game that they wanted.
“It’s just fascinating. I couldn’t go to watch the training sessions because you weren’t allowed. And no stories were coming out of their camp. Which is unreal.
Making his way across Croke Park. INPHO
INPHO
“Like, when I was manager, every Tom, Dick and Harry in town knew what was going on inside in the Gaelic Grounds. Nobody would keep their mouth shut! They had to get telling it around the place: ‘Listen up now, wait ‘til I tell you what happened the other day…’
“Ah it was terrible.”
He doesn’t know if he would have the stomach for all the endless analysis and statistics.
He had his own way of analysing games. When he was a senior hurler, his father fell into bad health and was bed-ridden. His interest never waned.
From the young man who hid out in forests and dugouts in the west Limerick mountains, Ned Cregan made himself into a county hurler that incredibly played until he was 35, winning the 1934 All-Ireland at corner-back, with Mick Mackey at centre-forward.
When Éamonn returned home, he would go upstairs, sit down beside his father and describe the entire match from start to finish; turning points, tactical shifts and decisive scores. Together, they would make sense of it all.
****
You cannot begin to imagine how much Cregan packed into his sporting life. For several years he was an intercounty dual player. He won three county hurling titles and eight football titles with Claughaun. He was 41 when he won his final hurling medal, operating as coach, selector and player.
With Limerick, he won the 1973 All-Ireland title, four Munsters and a national league. When the All Star system was introduced, he won three of them at a time when the team was more democratic in picking.
With Claughaun, he managed every age group and seniors. He was Limerick coach of the minors in 1977 and spent two years as manager of the U21s. He managed Limerick seniors twice and had a spell with the county camogie team.
But whether he likes it or not, the day he managed Offaly when their late salvo of 2-5 won the 1995 All-Ireland final, at the expense of Limerick, was the day most remember him for.
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Sometimes he could not make head nor tail of that Offaly side. Even now, he’s still not sure he understands them.
He always had his old school friend, Derry O’Donovan of Cork, as team trainer with him. The two would meet on the road and head for Tullamore.
“And none of them wanted to train, they only wanted to hurl. No fitness!” he says.
His final role as Mary I manager. Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO
Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO
“We trained in all kinds of weather. We were there one night and it was snowing. The lads were in the changing rooms and saying, ‘We are not going out in that.’
“The whistle blew and there was Derry in the middle of the snow, it falling around him. ‘C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.’”
O’Donovan was a lean athlete himself and belonged to the cohort that wouldn’t ask a player to do what he himself was incapable of.
When he led them for laps of the field, he would call out commands to sprint, get down, go right or left and so on. Anyone who got the command wrong, would have to do press ups.
One time his command did not match his action. The players stopped and demanded he do the press ups himself. So he did, and it instantly forged a respect on a deeper level.
“They would have done anything for him after that. Because what he was doing to them, he was willing to do himself,” Cregan says.
“But they were a hard bunch to coach and train. They were very good hurlers. Every one of them. But to get them to run, or do anything physical, was next to impossible.
“That night, Derry turned the switch and got them all on his side.
“He got a lot of his coaching from soccer coaching and he would do this drill were players had to do a set of exercises, non-stop, for 18 minutes. And once you got to 18 minutes, he knew they were able to last the 70 minutes that would be required. He had them flying.”
Another time, Cregan and O’Donovan had left the dressing room for a Leinster final against Kilkenny. They burst onto the pitch and into a downpour. Kilkenny were already out, getting drenched. After a moment, they wondered where everyone was.
The Offaly players were still in the tunnel, looking out like wily farmers waiting for the clouds to pass before they emerged in their pristine, dry jerseys to face the sodden Cats.
“The three Dooleys were like a triangle. Right corner-forward, right half-forward, left corner-forward. Eventually we were able to get the ball in a way that Billy Dooley would come out and grab it and if he was being blocked down, he would hand pass it to somebody coming through the middle. It was that simple.
“Brothers are peculiar like that. They can read each other’s mind and what they are going to do. Watching each other for years, pucking around outside. But they were an unusual team, now.”
Unusual enough to win that All-Ireland.
On the sideline, Cregan was trapped in his own private hell. When he agreed to taking the Offaly job in the winter of 1992, he assessed where both camps sat. He felt Limerick would win All-Irelands while they might, just might, be able to squeeze a Leinster out of the Offaly lads.
At that final whistle, there were no whoops and hollers out of Cregan.
“I was very proud of the Limerick supporters that day,” he says.
“Never bothered me after. You would be slagged occasionally. But it’s only a slagging.
“The one thing I regretted when we took over in ’93, I was looking at how Offaly were doing and they were down while Limerick were on the up. I was sure Offaly and Limerick would not meet, and sure enough . . .
“It was just the way it happened. But we never got any abuse whatsoever from the Limerick supporters. And I was grateful, very grateful for that because of the way it happened.
“I often got abused playing for Limerick but your own crowd didn’t boo you.
“Unless you were playing club! And then you could get awful abuse. I wouldn’t like to repeat what I got called.”
For all that, few gave greater service to Limerick through good times and bad.
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'I was very proud of the Limerick supporters that day' - the fascinating life of Éamonn Cregan
THESE DAYS TAKE on their own rhythms for Éamonn Cregan. He’s crammed in as much hurling as any life could fit, or any marriage could sustain he reckons, crediting his wife Anne as the unsung hero in all his sporting days.
They don’t go out into the midday heat. His low-grade addiction to golf has eased off to the point where he might squeeze in a few holes late on. But at half three every day, all his children living close by in Castletroy descend upon the homeplace for ‘Coffee Time’.
He remembers the heatwave of 1976, but this? This is unnatural.
“I am one of these people, I don’t like extremes of anything. I am boring and middle of the road,” he chuckles.
That claim might be under dispute.
A man who hurls with his club Claughaun until he is 43, a man who played county for 18 seasons, a man who had a couple of spells of managing his own county, who was Limerick U21 manager at the same time as coach of the Clare seniors?
The man who led that travelling ‘second day of the wedding’ party of Offaly hurlers to the 1994 All-Ireland, against his own? The man who even at the age of 71 was leading the previously Mary Immaculate College to a Fitzgibbon Cup?
There’s nothing moderate about a man like that.
****
With no training sessions to make, no phonecalls to make like back in the day, Cregan has spent the last number of years digging around his roots and thinking more about his heritage. Some of it he knew, some of it he has worked on, tracing the family roots right back to 1741.
“I find it fascinating and it can hook you,” he says.
From the off, the Cregans were a fighting people. He has records that tell him they came from around the bogland borderlands of Tyrone and Fermanagh. Old maps of those counties betray dozens of ‘Cregan’ townlands.
The theory is that they joined the long march south throughout the winter of 1601, Chieftains Hugh O’Neill at the vanguard, Hugh O’Donnell at the rearguard. Some 6,180 men, according to estimates, travelled down the left side of the Shannon, heading for Kinsale to rescue a trapped Spanish Armada.
They suffered a rout in a pivotal moment of the Nine Years’ War.
“Anyway, it was a disastrous defeat and I assumed the Cregans turned around to head home,” Éamonn says.
“On the way back the only thing I can think of is they saw the land around Shanagolden and thought it was lovely, and dropped there, were all the Cregan people stayed and we could trace it back to a site where it was a Cregan plot of land.
“One of those Cregans was buried outside in Newcastle West. There are links like that.”
It’s coming up to 100 years from when his father Ned first played hurling for Limerick.
“He was an information officer, with the Limerick Flying Brigade,” says Cregan.
“The house had always been, well it was on numerous occasions, attacked by the Black and Tans.
“During the Civil War, and I hate talking about it because so many bad things happened. But if you came down the road where the Cregans had their land, and you saw a hat on the pillar, that meant the house was about to be raided by the Free State.”
Whether this was by the hand of anti or pro-Treaty combatants, they cannot be sure. Either way, they were warned and Ned and three brothers disappeared up into the hills around West Limerick, were they evaded capture.
Left at home, their father Michael took beatings that he didn’t survive, dying a young man.
“But the family was very active. My father was 20 years of age at the time. He was anti-Treaty. All the Cregans were.”
When the initial discussions were taking place around the formation of a new political party, Fianna Fáil, they took place in Michael Cregan’s house.
In the 1981/82 elections, Éamonn stood for election on a Fianna Fáil ticket in east Limerick.
“I learned very quickly,” he says ruefully.
“I was above in the Sarsfield Barracks and a helicopter came down with Haughey in it. He came down along the line, gave me a limp handshake and didn’t know who I was.
“I said to myself, ‘You’re some eejit. Enjoy the next few days and go home.’
“There was nothing about who was working on behalf of Fianna Fail, it was all about Numero Uno: Charlie Haughey.”
His own working life was varied.
He was in Cadet School for 12 months and didn’t take to it. He worked over eight years in a medical factory in Shannon doing quality control.
Later, he was appointed as a travelling sales rep, advising GPs on the latest medical products. They were one of the first to ‘detail’ as he puts it, the miracle drug of Amoxicillin.
To his regret, he left to manage a golf club in Newcastle West. The hours were long. People threw their weight around. It was a one-man show a lot of the time and everything was his fault. He was glad to finish up.
You get the sense that nothing came close to the games of Gaelic football and hurling, and his own family.
****
He doesn’t go to hurling games any more, but that hasn’t stopped him getting head and shoulders into the battle for tickets for others.
Some people still keep him right and he is glad of the loyalty of the Limerick county board.
“It’s a quiet build-up. Ok, you see the flags flying around the place alright. But compared to previous All-Ireland finals, it’s easier. People are not willing to go over the top. They want the team to win but they have to perform because Galway are very good,” he says.
“They surprised me now in the semi-final. What amazed me in the end, was how easy it was. They had done the work and their tactics were right.
“We struggled (against Clare) and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. In one of the interviews, John Kiely spoke about the Limerick supporters and how quiet they were. But they were quiet because the Limerick team weren’t playing up to the levels they were capable of.
“We are hoping they will overcome that and do a proper job.”
During the semi-final against Clare, he found himself nodding off in the stifling indoors heat. He was glad of it.
“I have one pacemaker and if I had stayed awake, I might have needed a second one. It was that close,” he jokes.
But he knows the players. From Harty Cup games and, more closely, his involvement with Mary I and the Fitzgibbon Cup.
He was the manager in 2016. They won that title, the college’s first, in the final against University of Limerick. Brian Lohan was the opposing manager.
“UL had beaten us in the round robin. We came back through the back door, won the semi-final and met UL in the final,” he recalls.
“We approached it in a different way and played a different hurling. That was a first in a school that had around one male to ten females.”
He had some fine players over a few seasons: Darragh O’Donovan, Declan Hannon, Richie English, Cian Lynch, David Reidy, John Conlon, Jamie Wall and Ronan Maher among others.
Against UL, they had to contend with Gearóid Hegarty, while Nickie Quaide played midfield for Tralee IT.
Coaching at college level opened his eyes.
“Well, they are all of a certain intellect. If I were picking fellas, I would need to know what they were like, mentally,” he says.
“You won’t believe this now, but when we trained for the Fitzgibbon, we didn’t do any physical training. When we were coming up to the final, there was a player’s meeting and they decided that there was no point to make it Tuesday and Thursday trainings and being short five or six fellas who were with the county.
“So they decided they would come one night, and everybody would be there for the one night.
“Davy Fitz wouldn’t have understood it. He is a different animal. But we had one hurling session and that’s all it was – a hurling session.”
His own beliefs would have aligned with the likes of Justin McCarthy: basics are everything. They kept it simple.
Around that time, the hand-passing epidemic was filtering through every level of hurling, with players being coached that way. A lack of variety was stifling.
They played Declan Hannon at full-forward. One day Cregan went behind the goals to see the game from Hannon’s perspective. He was getting thumped and bumped. The butt of the hurley was constantly in his ribs and knees in his back as he waited, and waited, and waited, for a ball to be sent his way.
“I stood there for a while and it took seven handpasses out of our defence to get the ball up to the forwards.
“That to me was not the way I wanted hurling to be played. It was too slow, it gave the backs a chance to settle down. All this kind of stuff, so we needed to get the ball in faster.”
By the time they met UL in the 2016 decider, they had trained to become a different prospect. During in-house games, defenders and midfield were permitted one handpass to get themselves out of trouble and the ball had to be sent long after that.
“We moved Declan from full-forward to right corner-forward,” he says.
“We didn’t play him centre-back because we already had a centre-back and Declan at that stage already had played an awful lot of his hurling in the forwards and he was an outstanding forward.
“As it transpired, in the final he scored 1-12. 1-3 of that was from play.
“Once the ball came diagonally, he took off. The backs were slow to see that. Declan’s thinking was a second or two ahead of the back and a back hates a diagonal ball as it pulls them out of position.”
Few teams throw the ball around quite like Limerick now. Cregan may not like it but he accepts it, just as he accepts not being able to go inside the training ground to see how the sausage is assembled.
“I can’t complain about the present system because we have won five All-Irelands with it! Six Munster championships, three national leagues…” he says.
“But I don’t like the amount of handpassing. Sometimes I watch other counties and clubs trying to play the Limerick way. It’s a difficult thing to do – it took Paul Kinnerk and John Kiely to get the style of game that they wanted.
“It’s just fascinating. I couldn’t go to watch the training sessions because you weren’t allowed. And no stories were coming out of their camp. Which is unreal.
“Like, when I was manager, every Tom, Dick and Harry in town knew what was going on inside in the Gaelic Grounds. Nobody would keep their mouth shut! They had to get telling it around the place: ‘Listen up now, wait ‘til I tell you what happened the other day…’
“Ah it was terrible.”
He doesn’t know if he would have the stomach for all the endless analysis and statistics.
He had his own way of analysing games. When he was a senior hurler, his father fell into bad health and was bed-ridden. His interest never waned.
From the young man who hid out in forests and dugouts in the west Limerick mountains, Ned Cregan made himself into a county hurler that incredibly played until he was 35, winning the 1934 All-Ireland at corner-back, with Mick Mackey at centre-forward.
When Éamonn returned home, he would go upstairs, sit down beside his father and describe the entire match from start to finish; turning points, tactical shifts and decisive scores. Together, they would make sense of it all.
****
You cannot begin to imagine how much Cregan packed into his sporting life. For several years he was an intercounty dual player. He won three county hurling titles and eight football titles with Claughaun. He was 41 when he won his final hurling medal, operating as coach, selector and player.
With Limerick, he won the 1973 All-Ireland title, four Munsters and a national league. When the All Star system was introduced, he won three of them at a time when the team was more democratic in picking.
With Claughaun, he managed every age group and seniors. He was Limerick coach of the minors in 1977 and spent two years as manager of the U21s. He managed Limerick seniors twice and had a spell with the county camogie team.
But whether he likes it or not, the day he managed Offaly when their late salvo of 2-5 won the 1995 All-Ireland final, at the expense of Limerick, was the day most remember him for.
Sometimes he could not make head nor tail of that Offaly side. Even now, he’s still not sure he understands them.
He always had his old school friend, Derry O’Donovan of Cork, as team trainer with him. The two would meet on the road and head for Tullamore.
“And none of them wanted to train, they only wanted to hurl. No fitness!” he says.
“We trained in all kinds of weather. We were there one night and it was snowing. The lads were in the changing rooms and saying, ‘We are not going out in that.’
“The whistle blew and there was Derry in the middle of the snow, it falling around him. ‘C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.’”
O’Donovan was a lean athlete himself and belonged to the cohort that wouldn’t ask a player to do what he himself was incapable of.
When he led them for laps of the field, he would call out commands to sprint, get down, go right or left and so on. Anyone who got the command wrong, would have to do press ups.
One time his command did not match his action. The players stopped and demanded he do the press ups himself. So he did, and it instantly forged a respect on a deeper level.
“They would have done anything for him after that. Because what he was doing to them, he was willing to do himself,” Cregan says.
“But they were a hard bunch to coach and train. They were very good hurlers. Every one of them. But to get them to run, or do anything physical, was next to impossible.
“That night, Derry turned the switch and got them all on his side.
“He got a lot of his coaching from soccer coaching and he would do this drill were players had to do a set of exercises, non-stop, for 18 minutes. And once you got to 18 minutes, he knew they were able to last the 70 minutes that would be required. He had them flying.”
Another time, Cregan and O’Donovan had left the dressing room for a Leinster final against Kilkenny. They burst onto the pitch and into a downpour. Kilkenny were already out, getting drenched. After a moment, they wondered where everyone was.
The Offaly players were still in the tunnel, looking out like wily farmers waiting for the clouds to pass before they emerged in their pristine, dry jerseys to face the sodden Cats.
“The three Dooleys were like a triangle. Right corner-forward, right half-forward, left corner-forward. Eventually we were able to get the ball in a way that Billy Dooley would come out and grab it and if he was being blocked down, he would hand pass it to somebody coming through the middle. It was that simple.
“Brothers are peculiar like that. They can read each other’s mind and what they are going to do. Watching each other for years, pucking around outside. But they were an unusual team, now.”
Unusual enough to win that All-Ireland.
On the sideline, Cregan was trapped in his own private hell. When he agreed to taking the Offaly job in the winter of 1992, he assessed where both camps sat. He felt Limerick would win All-Irelands while they might, just might, be able to squeeze a Leinster out of the Offaly lads.
At that final whistle, there were no whoops and hollers out of Cregan.
“I was very proud of the Limerick supporters that day,” he says.
“Never bothered me after. You would be slagged occasionally. But it’s only a slagging.
“The one thing I regretted when we took over in ’93, I was looking at how Offaly were doing and they were down while Limerick were on the up. I was sure Offaly and Limerick would not meet, and sure enough . . .
“It was just the way it happened. But we never got any abuse whatsoever from the Limerick supporters. And I was grateful, very grateful for that because of the way it happened.
“I often got abused playing for Limerick but your own crowd didn’t boo you.
“Unless you were playing club! And then you could get awful abuse. I wouldn’t like to repeat what I got called.”
For all that, few gave greater service to Limerick through good times and bad.
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GAA Hurling Interview treaty