Out of the Blue

It was during the bleakness of the early 1970’s that I fell in love with the Dublin football team. Back then we lived in one of the new middle class suburbs springing up in Lucan in west Dublin. My father was instrumental in introducing me to Gaelic football, although as he entered his late sixties he no longer went to matches. My family loved sport. We’d gather around the telly to watch gaelic football, hurling, soccer, racing, showjumping, tennis, boxing and cricket. We didn’t discriminate; there was no such thing as a foreign game in our house.

I learnt very quickly that sport was not for the faint-hearted. The Dutch getting beaten by West Germany in the 1974 World Cup final showed that fairy tales rarely came true. An invaluable lesson for a young Dublin fan in waiting. But it wasn’t all bad news. Don Givens, a lanky Republic of Ireland striker, took us to places we had never been with successive hat-tricks against the U.S.S.R. and Turkey. Magical days when anything seemed possible. Little did we know it that the summer of 1974 would demonstrate the healing power of sport as the Dublin football team played a big part in bringing a struggling city back to life.

I was nine years-old. Nine was young back then and we were allowed to grow up in our own time. Ireland may have been stuck in a never-ending recession but it didn’t matter. We had plenty of other things to keep us happy. Sport gave us hope and I was already clued-in enough to know when something special was happening. I listened very carefully to what my father and my two older brothers were saying. Apparently, something was stirring in the world of Dublin football. To tell you the truth, until then, I hadn’t even been aware that Dublin had a football team and now here they were in with a chance of winning something called the All-Ireland. Cork were the reigning All-Ireland football champions as Dublin started the season as no-hopers. Since their last success in 1963, they had been existing in the GAA doldrums.

My father was full of wonderful sporting wisdom. He was a typical father of that generation, unsure how to connect with us. It was obvious he but showing it was another matter and it was sport that allowed us to share his world. I still remember the time when he crept into our room in the middle of the night to tell us that Muhammad Ali had beaten Smokin’ Joe Frazier,  the kind of news that was too big to wait until morning. It was a time when big news was really big news because it travelled so slowly back then. The first man on the moon, Bloody Sunday, Nixon leaving the White House, and the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings where just a few of the events that left a mark on all of us.

That fanous day in Dalymount Park was right up there with them as a young Liam Brady with his wild hair did for the Soviet soccer team on a glorious autumnal Wednesday afternoon,. It was our contribution to the Cold War. Noo one saw it coming and it was the same with Dublin, not even my father. Even the players seemed surprised by their sudden change in fortune and it was only when Dublin upset Cork in the semi-final that the city, nevermind the rest of the country, began to take notice. Excitement gripped the capital as it looked forward to the third Sunday in September. The rest of the country buried their heads in their hands and feared for the worst.

Only Galway stood between this Dublin team and a place in history. The man responsible was a former player called Kevin Heffernan. A wily man manager with footballing wisdom to burn. I could tell my father was fascinated by him. He always had a liking the clever ones that threw something different into the mix and Heffo, as he was affectionately known, was certainly something different. He carried himself with a confidence that suggested anything was possible. It helped that he resembled a student revolutionary, his anorak and slacks fitting nicely with his wispy hairstyle. Heffo was cool in a seventies sort of way, a bit of a character, a leader of men. Having been raised on the daring deeds of the footballing gods across the water like Busby, Stein and Shankly, we now had our very own messiah in waiting. Heffo and I even had something in common, with both of us reared far from the world of the GAA. His father was more hunting and shooting than Gaelic football and it was only when his family moved to Marino that the young Kevin came into contact with the game that would define his life. His playing days for St. Vincent’s and Dublin are the stuff of legend, culminating in an All-Ireland final victory over Derry, but it was the 1955 loss to Kerry that he carried in his heart as he started out as Dublin manager in 1974. Heffernan’s day job in the ESB may have contributed to providing

Dublin with the electricity it needed, but what he was about to do was to give the city a power surge that would endure for decades. I may have been young and innocent but I was still old enough to know when a bandwagon was starting to roll and I was determined to be on it. I booked my place in front of the TV and waited for the big day. Such was the tide of support building up behind the Dublin team that  I even  began to feel a little bit of sympathy for the Galway team. I was always a sucker for an underdog.

On the day of the final any compassion I felt was quickly forgotten. Galway it appeared were far from being harmless fodder and an early Michael Rooney goal for the Tribesmen came as a real shock. But Dublin kept their cool and picked off their points to stay in the hunt even though they trailed at half-time. It was neck and neck midway through the second half, disaster struck, when Galway were awarded a penalty.

Time stood still as Liam Salmons placed the ball down. Apparently Salmons had never missed a penalty. The Dublin goalkeeper Paddy Cullen, who lived down the road from us in Palmerstown, was wandering along his goal-line like a man waiting anxiously for a CIE bus to show up. Salmon hit the ball at a nice height, allowing Paddy to dance to his left and push the ball away.

“He’s saved it! He’s saved it! Oh Paddy Cullen!” roared the disembodied voice of RTÉ commentator Michael O’Hehir in celebration. Michael celebrated everything that happened on a football field, even a

plastic bag blowing across the pitch had a part to play in the unfolding story. This was his world, the place where he came alive. It was as if voice hopped across across the grass with the footballing gods Michael was born to describe. He had a way of making you feel like you knew each of the players personally. His description always straightforward; often poetic but never pretentious. Michael called a spade a spade and a shemozzle a shemozzle. He willed the players on to do great deeds. He was a dramatist with the power to make even the most pedestrian match sound epic. He introduced us to the Dublin players in 1974 and kept us up to speed with their progress, along with their Kerry counterparts, throughout a wondrous decade of Gaelic football. I missed him when he was gone.

Michael was right. It was a stunning save. Pandemonium ensued as the blue and navy crêpe paper hats bounced up and down on the Canal End terrace behind the goal. Galway hearts were broken as Dublin’s saw an opportunity. “Another point by Jimmy Keaveney; the man who came back,” roared Michael. Jimmy was Dublin’s sharp shooter, enticed out of retirement by Heffo to be the final piece in the jigsaw. The last few minutes passed in a sky blue blur as Dublin knocked over the points that guaranteed that the Sam Maguire was coming home to the capital city for the first time since 1963. O’Hehir summed it as only he could: “The Jacks are back and the way they are playing now, the Galway backs are jacked.”

I remember Hill 16 pouring onto the end line in those last few minutes to acclaim their heroes at the final whistle, the anxious stewards doing their best to hold the blue tide back. With the Galway keeper lining up a kick out deep into injury time, the yellow shirted referee took off for the centre of the pitch with a sprint before turning sharp right towards the tunnel. As the ball sailed towards the safety of centre field with a flurry of his arms he blew the final whistle with his back to the play. He was surrounded by a number of Gardai before he reached the tunnel. It was textbook stuff and he wasn’t the only one to make it home safely that day. After 11 long years Sam was finally back in the capital and a little boy sitting in front of the TV in Lucan knew that dreams could indeed come through. It was just a pity nobody ever told the Germans.