The memories of winning and losing All-Ireland Finals never fades. In this excerpt from ‘Kings for One Day’, which I had the pleasure of writing, Waterford hurling legend and 1959 All-Ireland Senior title winner Martin Óg Morrissey casts his mind back on the MacCarthy Cups that got away…
I WAS VERY keen to take possession of a starting position for the county and nail it down for as long as I could. I always felt I had enough hurling in me to do just that. I felt I’d accomplished that by 1957 and I had my hands on the jersey until ’64 when we lost a high-scoring Munster semi-final to Cork in Thurles, going down by one point in a 4-10 to 5-6 defeat.
That loss was effectively marked the end of that great Waterford team’s era. It was a special team to be part of. Great and all as the 1959 All-Ireland win was, we left at least two All-Irelands behind us in 1957 and ’63.
In 1957 we beat Limerick by 4-12 to 5-5 in Cork to advance to a Munster final against Cork in Thurles. For that final, Willie John Daly was brought back into Cork’s starting team to play centre-forward against us. The story that went round that day was that Paddy Greene – All Star winner Jim’s father – was sitting on the sideline in Thurles and he was surrounded by Cork fellas talking about what Willie John was going to do during the match.
Well, we ended up winning that day by 1-11 to 1-6 to take the Munster title for the first time since the great 1948 team’s success. At full-time, Paddy got up, turned around and addressed the Cork men with a wide grin on his face.
‘Well, there ye have it now, lads. After all yer talk... Willie John didn’t do anything!’ After that, we beat Galway by 4-12 to 0-11 to advance to a final and a meeting with our Kilkenny neighbours. It was the beginning of a great rivalry between the two counties.
In that period, we also lost two National League finals along with the two All- Ireland finals – both to Tipperary in 1959 (by 0-15 to 0-7) and in 1961 (by 6-6 to 4-9). No two ways about it, we had a good old team but I still don’t think one All-Ireland, one league, an Oireachtas title and three Munster Championships reflected just how good we actually were.
In saying that, I think we were probably short of one outstanding player, the fella who would have made all the difference in tight matches.
As I’ve said already, I still look back on both the 1957 and ’63 All-Ireland finals with a huge sense of frustration. We really should have won three All- Irelands during that spell. We were more than good enough to have done just that. The size of the crowd in any of the finals I played in, be it Munster or All- Ireland, never really came into it for me.
It was all about the ball, where I’d put it next and how I’d try and keep my opposite number quiet. You have to play the game. You can’t allow it to become an occasion... sure you’d have been better off up in the stands if that’s the way you were thinking.
Of course, the 1957 final stands alone in the history of the GAA given the presence of an additional ‘player’ in Kilkenny colours during the pre-match parade. The actor John Gregson was starring in a movie called Rooney, a story about a binman who hurled for his county – and Barry Fitzgerald and Noel Purcell, big names at the time, featured in the cast. Now, Gregson ended up in Kilkenny colours, but he’d asked to parade with us first.
The thought in the Waterford camp at the time was that there was no place in our parade line at Croke Park on the first Sunday in September for a fella that didn’t play hurling... so our answer was no. So then Gregson went into their dressing-room, asked the Kilkenny fellas the same question and they said yes... so he paraded with them. He pulled a fast one on us!
By the way, about a fortnight after the 1957 All-Ireland final, we were back up in Croke Park for, would you believe it, a few more shots with John Gregson for Rooney. Now we only got told about this around four days before the scenes were shot.. we’d no idea we’d be going back up to Dublin right after we’d lost the All-Ireland.
But off we went and we ended up making a weekend out of it. So all the Waterford and Kilkenny players were there again, not knowing we were foreshadowing the real replay we’d end up playing two years later. Well, it took Gregson about three- quarters of an hour to score a goal... it took him nearly as long to solo with the ball, so it’s safe to say his acting skills outshone his hurling ability.
I was still pretty down in the dumps about the All-Ireland, so to be back in Croke Park so soon after losing, was a bit strange alright. But we got paid for it, over 60 pounds each and I earning only eight pounds a week at the time... so I reckon we must have been the first inter-county players to get payment from appearing at GAA headquarters. I felt like a millionaire coming home that evening.
We were in control of most of the actual 1957 final and then Kilkenny’s Mick Kenny, who ended the day with 2-5, scored a goal with eight minutes remaining to leave us just a point ahead. At one stage in the second-half we led by 3-10 to 2-7 and we really should have seen it out. Seán Clohosey put over the equaliser with five minutes remaining, before Mick Kelly scored what turned out to be the winning point.
There’s not many teams score 3-12 in an All-Ireland final and end up losing. But that was our fate on the day Kilkenny lifted Liam MacCarthy for the 13th time.
The Cork Examiner match report (September 2, 1957) offered a very fair assessment of the previous day’s events, even though it’s hardly a day Waterford supporters have reminisced over:
In the splendour of its hurling, in the breathtaking uncertainty of its relentless vigour and excitement, the 1957 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Final at Croke Park yesterday will long be remembered and always with pleasure. It was at once a victory of highest courage and magnificent tragedy. Kilkenny triumphed when failure seemed their lot; Waterford failed when a triumph seemed assured. But no Decies follower need recall this wonderful hour with regret, for it was proved without a shadow of a doubt that from the barren years which have yielded only one All-Ireland title, has come a Decies team to take its place among the mightiest in the game.
HOWEVER TOUGH IT was to lose in 1957, in many ways, a harder experience was to come six years later. In 1963, to score 6-8 and still lose remains hard to credit. Eddie Keher scored 11 frees that day and we barely got a free the same day.
I remember Seamus Cleere, who was playing right half-back for Kilkenny, catching the ball three times in the run-up to one point and the ref never pulled him for it. Seán Clohosey was marked by Mick Flannery that day. Clohosey clearly fouled Flan.The referee blew the whistle and signalled a free for Kilkenny. We couldn’t believe it.
Clohosey turned around and said to Flan, ‘We’re after getting something there that we shouldn’t be getting.’ Players always know.
Those two decisions swung it for Kilkenny that day, I think. Ned Power had a very tough day in goal in 1963. Goalkeeper is the least forgiving position on the pitch when things don’t go for you and they certainly didn’t go for Ned against Kilkenny that afternoon. Ned was asked about the 1963 final in an interview he gave entirely as gaeilge in 1994.
‘It was a disastrous day. I remember it well,’ he said.
‘I was injured in the opening minutes. One of my ribs was broken. I wasn’t able to breathe in properly... I couldn’t hit the sliotar out properly. So of course, I couldn’t stop the sliotar properly. We were unlucky in many ways in that match.
‘At the same time, it shows what a powerful team we had when we scored six goals and eight points against Ollie Walsh. Eddie Keher was so sharp that day. He could put the sliotar over the bar without looking. He scored 17 points that day. He also scored a goal. He also gave me a poke in the rib that was broken. I wasn’t too thankful to him.’
Frankie Walsh frequently recalled the events of 1963 at the many functions he attended, when he spoke so well. ‘Percy Flynn came on for Ned in the second- half; we made changes in the backline and the half-forward line. But our full- forward line that day was just superb. Seamus Power scored three goals, and he’d been in bed all week before that with the ’flu.
‘Seamus Cleere won Man of the Match and he deserved it. He’d a great game and that was no surprise as he was a great player.’
Frankie took a slightly different view from myself when it came to that 1957- 63 period. He didn’t see us as underachievers.
‘I wouldn’t think that way at all about that team,’ he insisted. ‘You have to remember there were lots of great teams around at the time... it’s often been said to me by different people from around the country that that Waterford team should have won more, that we should have won three or four All-Irelands. And maybe we should have.
‘I always thought 1957 and ’63 were the ones we should have won. In 1959, I thought we played well in the first match, but didn’t play as well in the replay and won. And when you win an All-Ireland by eight points, I don’t think any of us were about to start complaining about how we’d played. We just had the bit of luck we needed that day to win.
‘We had some great games with Cork and Tipp during those years. Kilkenny and Wexford were very strong... sure Wexford had a great side at the time. The standard was very high across a few counties. Seán Clohosey came down to speak at the team’s 25th anniversary in 1984 and he said had he got the chance to play for any (other) team it would have been the Waterford team of 1959, which was as good a compliment as could be made about that team.’
Tom Cheasty, one of 10 who started both the 1959 and ’63 finals, was as annoyed as any of us for years afterwards about ‘63. Back in 2002, following Waterford’s first Munster senior crown in 39 years, he said, ‘We’d been there three times as winners of the Munster Championship (between 1957 and ’63) and I thought we might need eight, maybe 10 years before we might challenge again.
‘I didn’t think we’d have to wait too long to win a Munster title again. In 1963, we’d won the Munster, we won the league and we’d won the Oireachtas the year before, which was a fairly important competition at the time. We lost the All- Ireland final yet we scored six goals.
‘You have to remember it was only a 60-minute game back then, so to score so well and still lose was disappointing from our point of view.’
AT PADDY BUGGY’S funeral in Slieverue (in 2013), I got talking to Johnny McGovern, one of Paddy’s Kilkenny teammates and a great clubman with Bennettsbridge for many a year, about the 1963 All-Ireland final. ‘If you’d got two more balls that day, Óg, we’d have lost and you’d have two All-Ireland winners’ medals today rather than one,’ he told me.
He maintained that the ball I’d been sending into our forwards was after producing a lot of our scores that day. Eddie Keher got all those frees. Of the 6-8 we scored, only one of ours was from a free, scored by Philly Grimes. Now if you can find a team in the last hundred years or even further back that won an All-Ireland with only one point from a free, good luck to you. Then again, there are probably fewer that scored 6-8 from play in an All-Ireland final that ended up losing the game.
I’m fully convinced that the ref made an absolute hames of the game on us that day. To have one team being awarded multiples of frees and the other team ended up getting just made no sense to me whatsoever. Sure there had to be something wrong there. For me, 1963 really was an All-Ireland that got away from us.
We were more than good enough to win that day. And there’d have been far less talk about 1959 if we had, naturally.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always be proud of what that Waterford team won and I can’t imagine I’d ever grow weary of talking about the great hurlers I soldiered with. But we should have won more.
That, in many ways, is the history of Waterford hurling at inter-county level. But that, in its own way, all these years later, makes 1959 so special. The achievement of winning that All-Ireland title remains something that the few of us still alive who hurled that day take great pride in.
And so we should.
Martin Óg Morrissey’s memoir, ‘Kings for One Day’ is published by Hero Books and is available in all good bookstores (and also on Amazon as an ebook - €9.99, paperback - €20 and hardback - €25)
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