‘We had huge physical strength and strength of character as well’

Interview

PAUL FITZPATRICK speaks to Niall Brennan, who captained St Patrick’s College to the Hogan Cup title 50 years ago this week.

A text from a former foe was what started it all. This time last year, Niall Brennan was sitting in his home in Dublin when a text arrived from a friend, Eugene O’Sullivan, who played for St Brendan’s of Killarney in the 1972 Hogan Cup final.

The message – “49 years ago today” – got Brennan thinking. He fired off a text of his own, to his former teammate Paddy McGill.

“I said ’49 years ago this day’ and he sent me back a load of expletives! To paraphrase it, ‘oh my God’!” Niall laughs.

“That got the ball rolling. I set up a Whatsapp group and got all the numbers of all the members and representatives of the deceased members. And it just took off and got legs of its own and since then, it has probably been one of the best things I have ever done, purely from a point of view of reconnecting with people I wouldn’t have seen in years and years.

“In actual fact, some of these people, I wouldn’t have seen since I did my Leaving Cert in May or June of that year and it was an amazing thing to be back in touch with those guys.”

Niall’s wife teases him that he has a selective memory but, five decades on, much of the extraordinary 1972 campaign had understandably slipped from his mind. Brennan captained the team and in recent months, as he helps organise a reunion this Saturday, his memories have been jogged by yarns and tales on the WhatsApp group.

“Things that I had forgotten about or I had put away in some compartment of my memory… A lot of it has come back to me recently,” he smiles.

One of the most pleasing aspects is that while so much time has passed, the camaraderie remains and even on the phone, old friends have slipped back into familiar roles in the group.

“Leopards don’t change their spots! The same characters are there, some have grown and some have shrunk. They may have grown in stature around the waist but their egos haven’t shrunk!

“All great winning teams have characters in them. Some are hidden characters which come out in adversity. Those characters revealed themselves during the ’71-72 season and those lads still have the same personalities and are still as feisty.”

‘Character’ is a word that Brennan repeats more than once over the course of the interview. St Pat’s had been steeled by the year before, leaving behind a MacRory title they probably should have won, and they trained extremely hard for another crack at it.

“The gurus always say you learn more from your losses than your victories. The previous year we got mugged by St Michael’s in Teemore when we were the better team, we really should have won it. We lost in silly circumstances and they went on to win it.

“We knew the following year that we just weren’t going to be caught again and we knew we had the character built from the year before. And then we grew in strength.

“When we went into the campaign in ’71-72, that character really came out and shone. There was simply no place to hide in those matches. You just couldn’t.”

Team manager back then was Fr Bennie Maguire, with Patsy Lee as trainer. They formed a formidable duo and had the team humming when it came to the business end of the campaign.

“Patsy Lee had an extraordinary influence on the team in terms of his physical preparation. Fr Bennie was more a football man but Patsy’s background was in athletics and he took a great interest in preparing a team properly. There were certain guys on the team who needed structure to their training to get them fit and keep them fit.

“We had one or two guys who were like trying to get a juggernaut moving. All the effort was to get it moving, once you got it moving it was easy. The training was ferocious.”

The atmosphere was intense but fun. They were young men, playing ball and winning matches; it was the time of their lives.

“What was Fr Bennie like? Mad! Crazy! He smoked about 200 cigarettes a day. Even when he was on the football field. We had him for science and he would regularly come into class, open a window, light a cigarette and put one elbow on the window and just talk football for the entire science class. That would happen at least maybe once a week.

“We had 30 players and he would put the senior backs on the senior forwards so effectively you had your ‘A’ forward playing on your ‘A’ back. The problem with this was, we trained five evenings a week so the same guys were meeting all the time in the same situations and very, very quickly, we just got fed up of each other.

“Then you’d get frustrated and the tackles would fly in. It would spill over at least once a week, fists and boots would fly and Fr Bennie would come in and calm us all down.

“It would not be unusual for it to start up in the showers again! There was no room for hiding.”

About half of the panel were boarders, which Brennan feels was crucial. St Pat’s was a football factory and the players embraced it.

“The boarding element was a big advantage to us. Speaking for myself, I just lived to play football. I did not go to St Pat’s for an education, I went to play football.

“Academically I was average enough, I got by, but my interest was totally on football. I spent five years boarding and I loved it. It never bothered me at all. Football every evening and Saturdays and Sundays.”

While St Pat’s had gone a decade without winning the MacRory and their management were obsessed with putting that right, the players felt no pressure, Brennan insists.

“We lived in the moment, day to day, training session to training session, and looking forward to the next game. We only ever looked forward to the following Saturday, get on a bus away up the north. It was a gigantic ‘jollier’ for us. There was no pressure on us, we never felt any pressure to perform or deliver or that St Pat’s had won X or Y… It never entered our heads.”

The MacRory Cup final saw a crowd of 3,500 flock to Dundalk for a bitterly contested battle with Abbey CBS.

“I think that was the point at which I realised this thing was hugely important. I didn’t particularly play well that day. It was the first time that year I think we found ourselves in a serious, backs-to-the-wall dog fight and the real character of the team shone that day. It was do or die.

“We should have lost that game by five, six points. We were playing into a very, very strong wind and Abbey threw the kitchen sink at us. A couple of guys stood out that day and in later years, you could say that was the defining moment when you knew they were going to be county players or they were going to be successful men in business or they were going to be strong personalities. That was an amazing game.”

Then came the college football aristocrats, St Jarlath’s of Tuam.

“That game stands out in my mind more than any other game. I wasn’t playing well that day but Hugh Reynolds had the game of his life. Everything he touched turned to gold.

“The Jarlath’s goalkeeper got a lot of blame unfairly for letting in four or five goals but he stood no chance. It was like standing in front of an oncoming train.

“Reynolds had new glasses. Fr Bennie discovered his problem before the MacRory Cup final – he was as blind as a bat. Fr McManus took him away some place and got special sports glasses with a rubber band around them and we suddenly discovered Reynolds could play football!

“The other thing I remember was there was an enormous crowd at it. I had an altercation at half-time with Fr McKiernan, who was a selector. This man could be very direct, now.

“In the dressing-room, Fr Bennie laid down the law, we were well ahead at that stage anyway and we came out in the second half and we blew them away. The centre half-back had me in his pocket but whatever Fr McKiernan done to me, I started playing football in the second half!”

As the final approached, the hype grew. St Pat’s had never won a Hogan Cup before and the football public had latched on to the team, whose matches were covered in great detail in the local and national press.

“Fr Bennie used to send me home to my own house in Lacken to sleep before every match. I couldn’t sleep in the college, there was just too much excitement. My father would drive into St Pat’s and collect me on a Friday night and drop me back in the next morning to get a bus to the match.

“We were young men, we were excitable anyway. We got the bus from St Pat’s, it was quite informal. We went as far as Kiltegan, the other side of Navan, and had Mass and breakfast and on to Croke Park from there. There was the usual hype with a bunch of 18-year-olds on a bus going to Dublin.

“It was an amazing experience for us at the time. The bus pulled up at the back of the old Cusack Stand. We had all wondered what the dressing-rooms were going to be like but we quickly realised it was just another dressing-room.

“I remember Fr Bennie calming us all down, we were a little bit giddy. We got togged out. There were very few tactics talked in those days and very little spoken about the opposition players.

“I do remember three or four days before the All-Ireland, Fr Sean Murphy asked me had I my speech prepared. I said ‘for what?’ He said ‘if we win the cup, or when we win the cup, you will have to make a speech’. It only dawned on me then, I literally spent all my time worrying about training and the games themselves.

“Myself and Fr Bennie were quite close in ways, we would talk about players, ‘should I play this guy or that guy?’... We had those kind of discussions but other than that, my full concentration was on my own game.

“He gave me the team list, I stuck it in my sock and in the other sock, I had the speech. I never once thought about those socks, I was actually heading back to the dressing room after we won and some of the guys had to come and get me. I was totally focused on the game.

“Once the referee threw in the ball, I never heard the crowd or anything else. After about two or three minutes, Ciaran O’Keeffe gave me an absolute peach of a pass and I found myself on my own and I stuck it over the bar and I just said to myself ‘holy shit, I’ve just scored in Croke Park!’”

Croker, then as it is now, was the Mecca. Raising that first white flag was a culmination of a lifelong dream for the St Pat’s captain and from there, there was no looking back.

“It’s funny, last Wednesday I was down in Cavan at a meeting in the school and I went for a coffee with Adge King after and who did I meet only Gene Cusack. I wouldn’t have seen Gene in 40-odd years.

“They say you shouldn’t meet your boyhood heroes but I went up to him and shook his hand and told him I was glad to have met him because when I was a young lad, I used to solo up and down the back lawn of our house and tell everyone I was Gene Cusack and I was scoring points in Croke Park.

“I went on to get a goal and a couple of points but that first point settled me down and gave me the confidence. It was one of those days I had lots of room but a lot of that came from the fact that we were so dominant in our half-back line and midfield that the St Brendan’s defence was so badly stretched that I got room.”

Ask him to name the best players and the strongest and warmest characters in the group and the names roll of his tongue. From goalkeeper Aiden Elliott, Eamon Gillick in the full-back line to Brian Brady among many others, they formed a unique bond. No other St Pat’s team – and there have been some great ones – has done what they did.

“Right up the middle of the field we were strong. McGill at full-back was a phenomenally strong man and very determined. You had Ollie ‘Texas’ at centre half-back who went on to prove his ability over and over again. Ciaran O’Keeffe at midfield and Hugh Reynolds at full-forward, they were guys you did not mess with.

“And there was real quality around the field. John Sweeney from Killeshandra was one of the most under-rated footballers, Gerry Smith from Kill was one of those guys who nobody wanted to play on.

“Sean Leddy had an engine that would never stop going and a very smart footballer. You had other really clever players, Charlie O’Donoghue, he would terrorise any defence on his day. Michael English was a really clever corner-forward who combined perfectly with Reynolds.

“In terms of physicality, we had huge physical strength and real strength of character as well.”

As the years went on and the memories faded, it was still there. Captaining that team to win that cup was a life-changing experience.

“It gave me great confidence. I was at functions where I had to speak and do other things that other 18-year-old lads wouldn’t and it gave me confidence to do other things with my life and to get into coaching afterwards, which I really, really enjoyed. It has helped me enormously in many ways in my personal life.”

And now, they are getting the band together again. Life takes people on their own paths but the group will reconvene this Saturday night at the Hotel Kilmore.

“The only way I would meet these guys over the years would be flipping funerals or at football matches, if Cavan or Lacken were playing and I was at the match. There are some I wouldn’t have come across.

“When I started putting the WhatsApp group together, it was very easy to get phone numbers very quickly. There would be a core group in Cavan who would be quite close.

“When we got this group together, I proposed that we would use it as a way of raising some funds for football in the school and the funds would be ring-fenced for football in the college. We came up with a proposal that the 26 members of the group would raise €500 each from corporate donations and then we’re branching out to look for similar donations from anybody else who wants to support it.

“I have a view that St Pat’s should be the nursery for Cavan football and it should be supported as such and valued in a way that it’s not currently being valued. We are the only college in Cavan playing in the MacRory Cup so it should be supported.”

The group will attend Mass in St Pat’s for the deceased members of the panel at 5.30pm on Saturday, after which a plaque will be unveiled and an oak tree planted. Afterwards will be a drinks reception at the Hotel Kilmore at 7.30pm followed by a meal at 8pm.

Nine of the St Brendan’s team will be in attendance as well as St Jarlath’s player Brian Talty and the 1972 St Pat’s Corn na nÓg team.

“We are looking forward to a great night of fun, chat, music and laughter,” says Niall.

And there might even be some football matches replayed too.