Dinny Allen on 1989: 'Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it wouldn’t have worked out the way it did'

I was wondering if I was mad, going back in 1988, because coming back doesn’t work sometimes. Billy asked me and I was genuinely humming and hawing, wondering if I needed it in my life.

***

I had played in the Munster final of 1984 down in Killarney, it was a shocking match and we all played terribly. Any one of us could have been dropped after that game but I was 32 or 33 by that stage so I was one of the obvious fellas to fall first. I was disappointed when I wasn’t on the panel when the league came around again for the winter, but at the same time, I was half-glad.

I was thinking that the team didn’t look like a force or anything like that at that stage and I hadn’t played well. Everyone is upset to be dropped and there’s no easy way to get out of that but I half-deserved it, along with other fellas. Then Nemo won the county in 1987 and 1988 and that got me back into the limelight, for want of a word.

***

I played in 1972 in Killarney, when I was still a teenager. We won our first county with Nemo that year too – we beat UCC in the final – but I started playing a bit of soccer as well because the infamous ban was gone. I was approached by St Mary’s up on the northside to know if I’d play a few matches with them and I was told, through other guys, that if those games went well, Cork Hibs or Cork Celtic were lingering around the place.

That was my own decision then and I joined Hibs in January of 1973 and I was missing then until the Munster final of 1975. I didn’t pack up soccer, I said that I’d give my preference to the GAA as my friends were in Nemo and with Cork – not that I didn’t have friends in the soccer, but I was only getting to know them. So I went back with Cork in 1975 and we had eight Munster finals in a row without winning any of them until 1983. The flipside of that is that, while it took nine years to win a Munster football final, it took only four months to win a hurling one!

Nemo went senior hurling in 1973; we were there for ten years and I was having a ball. I nearly enjoyed the hurling more than the football, even though people looked at me as more of a footballer. I played as much hurling growing up as football and it was a breath of fresh air for me that time with Cork and, while Nemo never won a county, we got to two semi-finals. Fellas were asking me at the time which I preferred and I probably answered that I liked them both the same but in reality I favoured hurling a little bit. The game was a bit fresher and there was less pulling and dragging. There’s more to play with when a fella has a hurley in his hand!

The All-Ireland hurling semi-final in 1975 against Galway was a big disappointment. It was a game that we were expected to win and it was big shock for us to lose, even though they were a good team.

***

I knew there’d be pressure on me going back in 1988. I was gone now for three-and-a-bit years and, if it didn’t turn out, there’d be egg on my face. Billy asked me; he was obviously involved with Nemo too and he knew what I could do, but I don’t think there were too many fellas other than Billy who were calling for me to come back! There was a little bit of thinking that you had something left in you and something to prove.

I did come back and it turned out alright. I got a goal and a couple of points in the Munster final and I played well. We got to the final against Meath, which was disappointing but I did alright for myself for the year. I didn’t make a fool of myself!

I never played against Meath, in league or championship, until the 1988 All-Ireland. They were never in our section in the league all the time I was there up to 1984. Their style of football was hard to play against and at the time there was no love lost. We wouldn’t admit that they were good and they probably wouldn’t admit that we were any good, either! History shows that both teams were good.

***

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it wouldn’t have worked out the way it did – losing in 1988 and sticking it out another year and becoming captain and then winning the All-Ireland. It was a freak thing, really.

After 1988, I was saying that that was it, but Billy and the other selectors were pushing me to give it another go, that I still had a lot to contribute to the team. I had bene Cork captain in 1976 and again in 1982. Tony Nation was captain in 1988 but he was in and out of the team during the national league and I was the oldest Nemo player so it automatically went to me then – that was the way it was in the club. We won the league in Dublin – the ‘home’ final – and went on to New York and the captaincy stuck with me. To beat Dublin in that match in Croke Park gave us fierce belief.

***

Before the All-Ireland final, the fear of failure was definitely there, but there was none of us talking about it. I remember, as it got close to the match, a group of us – Jimmy Kerrigan, Davie Barry, Barry Coffey, Colman Corrigan – saying that if we didn’t the win this time, we wouldn’t be able to go back to Cork.

We tried to focus and Billy is an eternal optimist anyway, so he’d have kept us bouncing along. Deep down, we knew that we had to win. There was definitely a fear factor in that regard and in fairness to Mayo, they really put it up to us in the final. At the same time, at that stage and after all the bad results I’d had over the years, I was quite calm about it. When I was playing, friends of mine were nearly more worried about me than I was about myself. My view was, “I’m playing with Cork and I’m 36, 37 – if we win, we win and if we don’t, we don’t,” but fellas would say, “Jesus, you’ll have to win it eventually.” I wasn’t exactly laidback about it but I felt that if it was going to happen, it would.

In terms of a pre-match ritual, having two or three pints before an All-Ireland is a good recipe for a sound night’s sleep! People nowadays wouldn’t drink for three months before an All-Ireland final, but we always had a few and that would be it. It definitely helped to calm you down if you were over-excited.

We were up against it, we were playing a team that was focused but we were focused, too. Anthony Finnerty got the goal at a great time for Mayo and we might have wavered but then the second one he shot wide – or so everyone thought! We found out afterwards from John Kerins that he touched that ball out for a 50 and the umpires didn’t see it and John certainly wasn’t going to tell them! If he didn’t get his fingertip to that, we could be talking about a loss, a third in a row.

I was marked by Peter Forde. I didn’t score but my attitude had changed by then. I always liked to think I was able to make scores for fellas, even when I was younger, but the older I got, I knew that I wasn’t scoring a lot and Billy knew that as well. I just tried to get it into my head that I had five good forwards around me and I was going to get the ball and look for them and not worry about scoring or anything like that. That never really worried me anyway because I always seemed to get a few points, club or county.

Those scores weren’t coming in the 1989 final but I didn’t mind because the object of the game was to win it. Davy Barry, Larry Tompkins, Paul McGrath, John Cleary – they were great players around me so all I had to was try to bring them into the game when I got the ball. It was a kind of a simple tactic I had, but it seemed to work. The disappointing thing – maybe ‘disappointing’ is the wrong word, because we won the match – is that we had very few goal chances. We didn’t create them that day, but we still managed to pull away. I think we deserved it.

At the end, it was really relief. Just to get past the finishing post, finally. After playing for 17 or 18 years, there are little men in your head, talking to you. When the final whistle blew, it was total relief. It was a nice feeling that was there for a few weeks or a month or two.

Fellas involved in the county board and the selectors were saying to me that I surely had something written out for the speech, or even a few bullet points but I said that I wasn’t even going to think about that, because it would have been tempting fate. The speech took care of itself.

***

We had a good group of fellas and we had got to know each other very well. We had good fun for a couple of weeks afterwards. It’s a great memory to have.

I knew that it was the end for me. One or two of the selectors were saying that I’d still have a big influence in the dressing room if I stayed on and I might start or whatever, but I cut that decision off at the pass. Billy said not to announce it for two months, that you’d never know what might happen. I waited but I knew for every day of those couple of months that there was no chance I’d play again.

I had had the perfect finish.

Cork Football: Game of My Life, published by Hero Books and written by The Echo's Denis Hurley, is out now