Páidí Ó Sé

[catchandkick]

I was only debating this one with a fella in Kerry this week.

He contended that Paudge Quinn had moved to wing forward by the time he scored that goal. I disagreed and said that Paidi marked Quinn all through and saw no reason why they would have changed as 1) Quinn I don't think was causing any major trouble up to that point and 2) players in those day tended to stick to positions more rigidly than the fluid nature of today's positions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9PKpElvjpc

If you look at the video there at 1 minute 43 seconds Plunkett Donaghy launches the long ball. Sean Walsh, Kerry full-back abandons his man Damien O'Hagan to try and win the catch. The ball is missed by Walsh and another Kerry player and a Tyrone player and falls to O'Hagan. It is then a two on one situation with Paidi having to decide between approaching O'Hagan and abandoning his own man Quinn.

So that myth is debunked in my view.

One thing I am wondering though is why Quinn was wearing number 13 and clearly playing left corner forward (13 is traditionally the jersey of the right corner forward. You can also see him and Paidi in close proximity in parts of the first half)

Anyone know why this was the case? Art McRory ahead of his time tactically?

And who was Tyrone numer 10?

11 Eugene McKenna 12 Sean McNally 13 Paudge Quinn 14 Damien O'Hagan 15 Mickey Mallon

[BennyHarp]

10 was Mickey McClure

[orangeman]

A few nice tributes this weekend obviously -

'IN Kerry you expect something weird to stand up at any moment beside you on the hills. One day alone in Kerry, away from the roads, on mountains that go down sharply to the sea, and you understand why in lonely places the Irish believe in fairies and things not of this earth.''

The above lines, from a book entitled 'In Search Of Ireland'' by the great British travel writer HV Morton back in 1930, strangely came to mind this week as news of Paidi O Se passing spread like wildfire across the country.

Much has been written and said about Paidi in recent days. But one wonders whether some of the understandably eulogistic tones from his countless friends, acquaintances and admirers, missed the essence of the real man and his battles to chart life's often narrow furrow.

As an outsider, Morton, during his travels in Kerry, tried to grapple with the mysterious link between place and person.

For his part, Paidi was granite-like, rooted to where he came from, with his mellifluous capacity for speaking Irish, his love affair with Gaelic football as an outlet for his very being, and in latter years by the guttural tone and cadence of the words and phrases he used to express himself.

The physicality and the poetic fulfilment of his All-Ireland winning years, when he bestrode our playing fields, hands on hips, replete with the jutting jaw line, hair cut tight, lurking like a coiled spring ready to unleash himself upon the world, is for many an enduring image.

For the young Paidi, the exquisite feeling of having all that youthful hunger satiated in those trail-blazing All-Ireland campaigns, the intoxication of supreme effort, the sweet consolations of success, and the adulation of the crowd, would shape the rest of his life.

But his golden playing days would have to end – and when he took off that green and gold jersey for the last time he especially knew the rhythm of the seasons back in the west Kerry lands could never be the same again.

On one occasion I heard him admit in a radio interview that winter could press hard on him.

Now that his playing epoch was over, he would know that without the springtime possibility of another gilded summer to look forward to, those darker days would weigh especially heavy.

Paidi tried to stave off the inevitable onset of his own sporting winter when he embraced football management. But it could never compare with the elixir of the years he was known simply as a footballer.

The self-imposed discipline, and the byzantine politics required by the job of team manager could never be for him.

A free-range spirit he would have to remain.

When he eventually retreated from the playing fields to his fastness in the Ventry hinterland, his voluble presence increased – whether it be discussing sport or politics, or simply sounding off for the sheer thrill of it.

In the summer visitors would come from all over Ireland, and abroad, drawn by the soulfulness of the place itself – and Paidi's capacity to talk and remember.

And for Paidi, their coming helped ease the memory of times that could never be again, as he relived his days of power and passion on the playing field.

How many nights of bonded camaraderie kept the fire burning late and the lights on till the break of dawn?

But often he felt the need to sally forth from Ard An Bhothair to other places and seek new stimulus.

Frequently he travelled to Dublin – a second home for so many Kerry people. The last time I was in his pub a few years ago, a helicopter suddenly arrived out of a clear blue sky, landing in a field at the back of the building.

The stocky figure of the one-time Kerry half-back, wearing his Sunday best, could be seen running towards it, his head down as the propeller whirred overhead.

He was off again somewhere, to engage with the wider world.

And so he chose to remain the king of his castle. A troubadour who had sung his songs and paid his dues.

But we should be thankful for the Paidis of this world. The price they pay – whether as sportsman, raconteur, or whatever – for adding that special colour to our lives is often heaviest on themselves.

Maybe the last words should be left to HV Morton and how he described one of those moments in Kerry as he moodily observed evening time fading into night.

It's emblematic of this week's final leave-taking by our lion in winter. It is redolent for all of us who hail from the Dingle Peninsula.

"The hollows of the hills fill with blue shadows. Just before the sun sets there is a silence, a suspended excitement in the air, and in the silence no bird sings and no creature moves, only the clouds change colour and the wind cries among the stones.''

- Gerry O'Regan

[orangeman]

This piece is simply brilliant -

By Eamonn Sweeney


Sunday December 23 2012

Be the first to comment
Let's talk about football. Because more than anything else he was a footballer, first, last and always.

It's 1980 and the All-Ireland football final is poised on a knife edge. Roscommon have Kerry rocking and reeling on the ropes. All the challengers need is a KO punch.

The ball falls to Roscommon left half-forward Aidan Dooley around ten yards out. Charlie Nelligan is stranded so all Dooley has to do is stroke the ball into the empty net. And as he hits it you can practically see the net bulging already.

But here, coming from nowhere and diving full length across the goal-line is Páidí ó Sé and he gets his hands on the ball. Yet this is only the half of it; he also holds on to it and makes sure he keeps his arms off the ground so he doesn't concede a penalty. Páidí gets up, Kerry clear their lines and go on to make it three in a row by three points.

Aidan Dooley, a good player from the Pádraig Pearses club who could have ended up becoming the most famous man in Roscommon, never seems to recover from that moment and his inter-county career fizzles out. His nemesis, on the other hand, continues his voyage into legend.

Everything which made Páidí great was in that little cameo: his speed, his anticipation, his courage, his strength, his intelligence. Those qualities were perhaps most spectacularly demonstrated at that moment but it was the accumulation of hundreds of similar episodes of excellence which made him perhaps the greatest back in the history of Gaelic football. His only real rival is his nephew Tomás who exhibits the same virtues as his uncle.

The figure of one point from play conceded to direct opponents in ten All-Ireland finals is the famous one and says everything about Páidí's ability as a man marker. But even that incredible statistic doesn't capture quite how thoroughly the Ventry man dominated his opponents. Being put in on Páidí ó Sé was the football equivalent of being posted to the Russian Front. Nothing good was going to happen to you there.

It's ironic that a man who in his autobiography said he parted company with the Gardaí after being found asleep on a security duty turned out to be the most diligent bodyguard in the country. If Páidí was assigned to mind you, he'd always have your back, and your front, and any other convenient bits of you.

He played on the greatest team of all time and was as integral to its success as Jack O'Shea or Mikey Sheehy. When we think of O'Dwyer's Kerry, we think of great flowing moves cutting defences apart and Sheehy, Egan, Spillane, Liston and Power coming in at the end to finish. But the back-line on that team was every bit as great as the attack.

While winning four All-Ireland finals in a row between 1978 and 1981, Kerry conceded a scarcely believable average of barely over nine points a game. In the 1981 championship, they allowed a total of 1-23 in four games. Eight losing All-Ireland finalists in the last 40 years have failed to reach double figures, four of those teams were up against that Kerry defence between 1978 and 1984. The unit was a steel trap. It was full of truly great players, John O'Keeffe, Tim Kennelly, Paudie Lynch, Jimmy Deenihan, Charlie Nelligan, but Páidí was the greatest of them all.

Yet if Páidí's greatness as a player is inarguable, his achievements as a manager have been undervalued. We've become so used to Kerry winning All-Irelands that it doesn't seem all that difficult to steer the county to a Sam Maguire. How quickly we forget. Because when Páidí ó Sé took over as manager in 1996, Kerry hadn't won an All-Ireland title in a decade and were a distinct second best in Munster behind Cork who had won seven of the previous nine provincial titles. Kerry and Clare were at level pegging on one title apiece in the same period.

Manager after manager had tried to lift this malaise. And manager after manager had failed. Páidí didn't fail. In 1996, Kerry dethroned Cork in Munster and the year after they beat Mayo in the All-Ireland final to end the drought. Hindsight, and the resumption of normal service in the Kingdom, have tended to diminish the significance of Páidí's achievement but it was he who put the swagger back into Kerry. The job only looked routine after he'd done it. It's been said that his legacy is tarnished by the dropping of Maurice Fitzgerald in 2000. Yet at the end of that year Kerry were All-Ireland champions again and you can't second-guess a manager who's won the ultimate prize. That's the nature of the game – winning puts you in the right. Páidí's name was above the door, the buck stopped with him.

The tendency to under-rate Páidí as a manager may derive from the attitude he inherited from his mentor Mick O'Dwyer. Páidí, like Micko, didn't tend to shout the odds or play up his achievements. He preferred what we might scientifically term the Cute Kerry Hoor approach, the 'ah sure there's not much to this, we're just plodding along, don't mind us' number which masked the razor-sharp intelligence both men brought to bear on the game. But there is nothing more dangerous than a modest Kerryman. He's plotting something.

Páidí followed O'Dwyer's example as well when picking his next job after Kerry showed him the door in 2003. Except this time the pupil was trying to go one better than the master. Earlier that year, Micko had brought Laois their first Leinster title in 57 years. Páidí would be trying to win a provincial title with one of only three counties which had never managed the feat. If it wasn't quite Mission Impossible, it was Mission Not Fierce Likely.

Westmeath were far from a bad team when he took them over. But for all the improvements wrought by the excellent Luke Dempsey they still hadn't reached a provincial final since 1949 and had exited the previous year's championship after a first-round qualifier defeat to Monaghan.

Initially, the appointment looked like a match made in Hell. Westmeath struggled in the league, winning just one of seven games. Longford beat them in Mullingar, Tyrone stuck an 11-point trouncing on them, there were rumours of internal dissension and a loss of faith in the new boss.

They began the championship as underdogs against Offaly. Westmeath won that one by a point, a result which most observers agreed would do Páidí fine in his first year in the job. Then they played the Dubs in the provincial quarter-final and went several points down early on, looking severely out of their depth as they did so. Yet they rallied to win an extraordinary 0-14 to 0-12 victory which had Westmeath people beginning to dream all kinds of impossible things.

All the same, Micko's Laois in the Leinster final looked a bridge too far. At the time Laois were being spoken of as potential All-Ireland champions yet they were lucky to get out of the first game with a draw, a late Chris Conway point denying Westmeath at the death. The chance, one presumed, had gone. Yet just six days later Westmeath won on a 0-12 to 0-10 scoreline which hugely flattered the losers and set off celebrations whose joyousness I've never seen equalled in the GAA. It was one of the greatest emotional moments in football history and one of the finest managerial achievements.

The week after that win I visited Ballinagore, the tiny club where Westmeath had trained through the winter and spring, and where Páidí had asked for a sand track to be put down. Club manager Liam McDaniel told me at the time, "The first time we met Páidí, he came along, ran up and down the track four or five times and said 'it's f**king brilliant' . . . Lads would go down four inches into it when they were running. The state of the lads coming off the pitch some nights, Jesus."

In its chutzpah, the notion of importing sand dunes to the Midlands was typical Páidí. He laid the foundation on the track in Ballinagore and built from there. A fly-on-the-wall documentary covering that campaign, Marooned, may capture the spirit of the man better than anything else.

The director, Pat Collins, was best known for films on the writers John McGahern and Michael Hartnett, but this made him an inspired choice, not least because Páidí, like McGahern and Hartnett, was a complex character from a rural background who was very much rooted in his locality while being somehow set apart from it by virtue of his gifts. Whatever you say about Páidí, you can't describe him as an average guy. He always seemed larger than the setting he inhabited, whether that setting was at home or away.

Two things, Pat Collins recalled, stood out that year. One, the inspirational nature of Páidí's team talks which made not just the team but everyone else within earshot believe that anything was possible and, two, his absolute faith that whatever happened in the league everything would be right come the championship. I'm sure RTE are working on a tribute programme to Páidí but it would be hard to beat Marooned, which Setanta Ireland screened again on Friday night. It captures the essence of the man during what may well have been his finest hour.

As a character, Páidí had more than a little in common with a couple of famous West Kerry publicans of an earlier vintage. Kruger Kavanagh, whose charisma caused people to flock from far and wide to his pub in Dún Chaoin, is an obvious spiritual ancestor. Tom Crean, who ran a pub in Annascaul after retiring from polar exploration, may not seem as immediately analogous. But reading Ernest Shackleton's descriptions of Crean's tough and dogged nature, and his willingness to keep up the spirits of his companions at the toughest of times, brings Páidí to my mind at least.

He came from a mythic territory, something best captured in the famous photo of him walking alongside another West Kerry football hero, Paddy Bawn Brosnan, with the Atlantic Ocean beside them. They look like two stony emanations from the wild landscape around them. There was something in Páidí too of the roguish high spirits described in Tomás ó Criomthain and Muiris ó Súilleabháin's great books about the Blaskets. And he could be a bit Peig Sayers when he felt the ref was doing him wrong.

There's no denying that there was a hell-raising element to Páidí's character and that sometimes this hell-raising is more fun for people to talk about or watch than it is for the man involved. Yet I recall, a few months back, talking to a former Cork footballer about the time he and his brother met Páidí on a train to Dublin and they shared a bottle of whiskey. "Such stories he had, such laughs as we had with him, you wouldn't believe what crack he was," said your man and beamed and shook with laughter at the memory of it all 20-odd years later. Páidí was a family man too. I remember meeting him in Dublin once when all he wanted to tell people about were the good exam results his daughter had achieved that day.

Do you know what he was above all? He was alive. And it was that vitality which made his funeral such an extraordinary occasion. The sense of loss and tragedy which had attended the funerals of his great peers, Dermot Earley and John Egan, was nowhere present.

Instead the memory of Páidí's indomitable spirit had turned the day into one of celebration. As if Death was one more opponent he'd held scoreless. As if this was one more scheme to get a crowd down to the pub and he'd pop up at the end of the evening and say, 'alright lads, same time next year'. But it is not so and we must face the fact that in the words of Walter Scott, that great chronicler of swashbuckling heroes from an earlier age, "He is gone on the mountain, he is lost to the forest."

It was a wonderful life.

backpage@independent.ie

- Eamonn Sweeney

[ONeill]

Great read.

Paudge Quinn still shunned!

[seafoid]

A few nice tributes this weekend obviously -

'IN Kerry you expect something weird to stand up at any moment beside you on the hills. One day alone in Kerry, away from the roads, on mountains that go down sharply to the sea, and you understand why in lonely places the Irish believe in fairies and things not of this earth.''

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2012/0423/1224315048110.html

The phenomenon of the untraceable "humming noise", pitched at E flat, heard recently over parts of Kerry (Home News, April 17th James Pembroke, April 19th), can be easily explained if one remembers that this note is known to players of the uilleann pipes as the "ghost D". Are we hearing the spirits of Gandsey, Micí Cumbá and Canon Goodman? Could the "days of the Kerry pipers" have returned? – 


TERRY MOYLAN,

Archivist,

Na Píobairí Uilleann,

Henrietta Street, Dublin 1.

[5 Sams]

Just had a week back west. Those people are seriously hurting about the loss of PO. Paid my respects at his grave. It'll not be the same back there...it's gonna be tough for the family after the Christmas/Wren/ New Years stuff dies down.

[Croí na hÉireann]

Marooned is on RTE1 at 22.15 tonight, set your timers.

[5 Sams]

Marooned is on RTE1 at 22.15 tonight, set your timers.

Well worth a watch!!

[gerrykeegan]

Marooned is on RTE1 at 22.15 tonight, set your timers.

Excellent, thanks for that.

[All of a Sludden]

On now.

[ballinaman]

Paidí making a speech with his eyes closed, made the hair stand up on the back of my neck there.

[leaveherinsir]

How did C.Whelan not get sent off for the elbow?

[BennyCake]

How did C.Whelan not get sent off for the elbow?

Thats easy. Because he was playing for Dublin.

[heffo]

How did C.Whelan not get sent off for the elbow?

Thats easy. Because he was playing for Dublin.

Not this chestnut again.

Funny that - Dublin had eight players suspended for a brawl in Parnell Park v Meath in 2008 - all missed the league final that year.

Kildare v Armagh on the same day engaged in what the Irish times described as a '20 man brawl' - how many suspensions arose out of that? zero.