Flanagans Ball
December 31, 2001
Meath's All-Ireland SFC title-winning celebrations of 1954 may not have been the original of the species but they were enjoyed to the full nonetheless by gaels across the Royal County - none more so indeed than by former county player of the time Bernard Flanagan.
Bernard Flanagan speaks with the sort of grá for Gaelic football, a la fifties style, which practically makes a body want to go back in time for a taste of same.
The Kells man talks about his time with Kells Harps and Meath with a kind of passion and vigour that characterised his approach to the game as a flying defender for club and county.
In simple terms, the retired postman would make for a good PR man for the the world of Gaelic games as existed some 40/50 years ago. Not that he's a man who's wont to live in the past. No, it's just that the 'oul days were full of so many bloody good days on the GAA scene for him.
A member of the Meath senior panel which skipped to All-Ireland honours in 1954, Bernard looks back on his football career with great fondness and, significantly, absolutely no regrets.
"I enjoyed my time on the football field immensely. We had great craic playing the game and a lot of fun meeting up afterwards with different fellas you might have played alongside or against," Bernard reflects.
In this respect, the former Kells and Meath star relates of how much he enjoyed meeting up earlier this year with surviving team-mates to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the club's success in winning the 1951 Junior Championship.
"It was a great night. Unfortunately there are quite a few of the players from that era who have since died."
But what of the '51 success itself?
"I don't think it was any great shock to anyone in the county that we won the junior title that year. Beating Kilberry in the final wasn't easy but I think we were the best team in the county that year and we proved it.
"The win in '51 was Kells' first major success in a long time and there were great celebrations afterwards. I remember Cissie Smith from the park prepared a terrific meal for all of us in the technical school."
In the days when every gasun in the county ate, slept and drank football and when getting into a match set a body back no more than one and six, the young Flanagan was in his element and, boy, did he have a whale of a time:
"We were forever kicking a ball about up and down the streets and over in the park. If there wasn't a match on a particular Sunday, we might go to see a film, otherwise it was football all the time because there was very little else to do at that time," Bernard recalls.
Not that our man Flanagan and his contemporaries' enthusiasm for the big ball game was fuelled by any suspicion that they were snowed under with medals or other types of silverware. Far from it.
During Bernard's time with Kells seniors, the opposition was poker-like in its stiffness and medals were extremely hard to come by although Bernard and co. did pick up a Feis Cup medal on their travels.
During the height of Bernard's football career, if you wanted to meet up with hungry, hardy fellas you could take your pick from the lads from Skryne, Oldcastle, O'Mahonys, and Ballinlough.
There were great derby matches too. Like the jousts against the Fintan Ginnity (Co. Board Chairman) powered Drumbaragh lads when "you'd have fellas getting out of their sick beds to play."
Bernard recalls the strength of the Skryne club of the time in particular. He talks of how Skryne were able to supply the core of the aforementioned all-conquering Meath team of '54. He thinks, in this respect, of men like Tom, Sean, Miceal and Paddy O'Brien. There was Brian Smyth too. All outstanding footballers and men who so often stood between Kells and senior championship glory.
For instance, Skryne and St. Vincents of Ardcath (powered by a Des Taaffe/Mick Donegan/Cha Hand/Jimmy Curran axis) denied Kells in the blue riband finals of '54 and '55.
"We could have won both of them but didn't. Skryne would have been the favourites to beat us and they were just too strong and had too much experience for us.
" On the other hand, we were more experienced than 'Vincents, having played in the final the year before, and we should have beaten them. They had more physically stronger players than we had though with the likes of Des Taaffe well over six foot and built in proportion."
Despite the relative lack of success which came his way, Bernard had the personal satisfaction of proving, year after year, that he was a more than useful defender.
The born and reared Kells man didn't quite make the Meath first team for their All-Ireland final triumph over Kerry in '54 perhaps but he is proud nonetheless to say that he was part of the squad back then.
Along with fellow Kells clubmen, Miceal Grace, (voted Man of the Match) Nobbie Clarke and Gerry Smith (plus Ballinlough's Mattie McDonnell), Bernard was collected by car in Kells and transported to Dublin on the morning of the match.
A snack on arrival in Barry's Hotel preceded the journey onto Croker. He has a smile to himself when he witnesses all the razzmatazz that accompanies the visit of All-Ireland finalists to headquarters these days.
Ironically, because he didn't come on as a sub against the Kingdom, he didn't actually receive a winners' medal (shades of the Hassetts of recent Kerry vintage). He did however receive a beautifully inscribed gentleman's watch as a memento. Understandably, the affable 70-year old still has the self-same watch to this day.
Even though he didn't figure on the Royal County's successful side against Kerry, Bernard was still regarded as one of the best defenders in Meath during the fifties decade. He was good enough, indeed, to man the centre-back berth for Meath in the 1955 league semi-final against Armagh.
Bernard was, in truth, always going to 'get a run' with Meath. He had shown tremendous promise as a teenager and was one of the few players to shine (Brendan Maguire was another) over the course of the Royal County's defeat to neighbours Westmeath in a Leinster minor football championship first round tie at Mullingar.
Son of Joe Flanagan (famed for scoring a point in a hurling club match at Navan's Erins Own ground from a puck-out), Bernard mentions quite regularly how he gained great satisfaction and enjoyment from his involvement in the GAA. And although he still follows the fortunes of the Meath seniors, it's been 1996 - the year of the Mayo/Meath row at Croker - since he last attended headquarters.
"I don't agree with a lot of this business of taking frees and sideline balls out of the hand. It's better to see a fella placing a ball on the ground and sending it accurately to a team-mate or over the bar.
"The idea of kicking the ball out of your hands was supposed to speed up the game but you're always seeing refs pulling up the player when he tries to take it quickly. I didn't like to see the way Padraic Joyce was allowed this year to get away with taking so many steps forward before kicking the ball.
"There's too much hand-passing too. You can't beat a long, well-directed ball into the forwards. Look at how well Meath have done over the years by sending in long balls to the full-forward line."
So we can expect Sean Boylan and co. to recover, post-haste, from their shock defeat to Galway?
"Oh, definitely. Sean has a great way with the players and if anyone can lift their heads, he can. I think a bit of work will have to be done though on the half-back line and at midfield but overall there's not a lot that needs fixing."
Bernard doesn't go as far as to advise a body to make a B-line for the local bookies, but his enthusiasm does tend to be very convincing and infectious. Somehow some people never change.
Carry on Kells
The premier football team in Kells are reckoned by many pundits to be capable of beating almost all of the top drawer clubs in blue riband fare in the county in any given year. However, the fact that the town team hasn't cracked open the bubbly, big time, since 1991 suggests something's amiss. Kevin Carney reports.
Alan Carry represents the senior wing of Kells' football elite. Although he's still only 26 - comparatively young in even footballing terms - few others in the Gaeil Colmcille club can boast the sort of premier grade football that the flying defender can. He's been at the coalface since 1994 after all.
Like the trio of Conor Ferguson, Eugene McGillick and Thomas Shine, Alan has amassed a lot of mileage recorded over the course of nearly eight years of adult football and while it's natural that he should lose some of his enthusiasm for the big ball game, there's no sign of his passion for competition being diluted.
Fact is, as another domestic league season fast approaches, Alan is once again looking forward to Kells making waves against the Skrynes, Dunshaughlins and Dunboynes of this world. He feels strongly that his adopted club has the ability to distinguish themselves in such company:
"I think most people around the county would feel that we have players with enough ability within the team to give any other team a hard time on any given day.
"The fact that we went so close to making the league final this year indicates that we're not that far off the pace. If we had won our last two games, we would have made the league final."
Granted, there are few clubs in Meath who could say that they actually look forward to playing against the north county side. Kells are an enigmatic, erratic lot though. Clubs don't know what day they're going to catch them on. The problem is though Alan and co. can't really predict how they themselves are going to perform almost from one day to the next.
"We've traditionally done very well in the league and winning it in 1994 is the last adult success we've had. But we've underachieved in the championship and for too many years we failed to get by the group stages of the championship because when the going got really tight we didn't show the necessary determination or hunger to win by a point instead of losing by a point."
Sadly for Alan, his time with Kells seniors has been one largely made up of what might have beens. The club's aborted raid on the championship title in 1997 is a case in point.
Paired with their most deadly of rivals, Cortown, in the quarter-final of the senior championship, Kells were hot favourites to make it through to the last four. After all, just a couple of years earlier, Kells' second team had defeated Cortown in junior fare.
Anyway the stage was set. A real town versus country affair was in the offing and the stand in Parc Tailteann was appropriately jam-packed.
"Things didn't go our way unfortunately even though they had two men sent off. That match will always stick in my mind - it was a devastating defeat for the Kells club because a lot of us felt that we had a team capable of winning the championship outright that year.
"That 1997 team was probably the best Kells team I've ever played on. We had players like Dermot Wilson of Westmeath on board plus Hugh Carolan but that defeat marked a watershed for the club because after that year, the club saw about six or seven players drift from the scene and the type of quality they boasted probably really has never been replaced since.
The fact that only Conor Ferguson, Eugene McGillick and Thomas Shine survive from the Kells team which won the Meath SFC title in 1991 is redolent of the metamorphosis which Gaeil Colmcille's premier side has undergone over the last ten years. It's easy to understand why Alan bemoans the absence of quality footballers such as Hugh Carolan, Michael Farrelly, John Lacey and Derry Hunt from the current side.
"We do lack players with enough experience right now and possibly a bit of character which would see us do that bit better when the heat is turned on. The team is young enough and can improve and I'd be hopefully that the coming year will see us doing much better on all fronts."
Certainly all concerned with Gaeil Colmcille will be expecting matters to be much more palatable on the championship front at least in 2002.
Not that things didn't look half-promising at the commencement of the 2001 season as Kells accumulated a series of wins in pre-season challenge matches and league ties.
The good results boosted expectations even among the players and even though the trio of Oldcastle, Skryne and Syddan were bound to prove difficult obstacles, Alan, for one, was fairly confident going into the campaign.
"Training had been going very well under Martin (Barry) and once we won our first round match with Syddan I thought we were in for a good run. We used to have a lot of trouble getting over the first round but beating Syddan in Carlanstown - even without the injured Eugene McGillick - gave us a great confidence boost as did the fact that our juniors hammered Nobber on the same day. Things looked very positive for the club that day as we headed home after the match."
Sadly matters were to go pretty pear-shaped thereafter. A combination of perhaps over-confidence on the part of Kells and a feeling within the camp that Oldcastle weren't the force they once were ultimately scuttled the chance of a second win on the trot as Kilskyre proved to be Kells' championship grave.
"We lost by two points to Oldcastle but it really was a match we should and could have won if we had prepared ourselves better mentally for the game.
"I think the fact that we were without the injured Simon Cahill for the full hour and that Eugene (McGillick) was also out didn't help us but, either way, instead of being able to relax in our last match against Skryne in Navan, it turned out to be a do-or-die match for us."
And his assessment of the Skryne game?
"They ran through us, simple as that. They had their full squad out and unlike previous years when we ran them very close, we had no answer to them on the day."
In analysising the club's untimely championship exit, Alan honestly feels that the spirit in the camp for the Skryne game wasn't what it should have been. Heads, he says, dropped after the setback against Oldcastle.
Morale plummeted after the Oldcastle setback and the character and spirit needed to take on and beat Giles, McDermott, Mick O'Dowd and co thereafter just wasn't there. Indeed, the fact that Kells only managed to score one point from play over the hour had their critics saying that the team really didn't deserve to progress anyway.
With the likes of aspiring county under 21 Robbie Flanagan bolstering the senior team now, the future of Kells' senior team may just be as promising as Alan Carry hopes/expects.
There's no doubt he'd love to taste the same sort of success at senior level that he did as an under 16 player when he combined with the likes of Errol Roche, Mikey Farrelly, Derry Hunt and Thomas Shine to beat all-comers in the county.
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