‘The humiliation of Kerry’ – how losing to Clare in 1992 made for a bitter aftermath in the Kingdom

Billy O’Shea was working away in his bar in Killorglin, back sometime around 2012. His pub would be a multi-denominational type of joint. All creeds and colours welcome. On this particular day, there was a Clareman perched on one of the stools and the mood was high.

So much so that O’Shea couldn’t but play along when the chap held out his phone and told the former Kerry full forward that someone wanted to talk to him. Delighted with himself, the Clareman had phoned up Kieran O’Mahony from Doonbeg. Maybe you don’t know immediately who that might be but be assured O’Shea didn’t need a prompt.

It had been a full two decades since O’Mahony had marked him in the 1992 Munster final. A day that had begun with O’Shea scoring the opening point of the game had ended with the most famous win in the history of Clare football. O’Shea hadn’t got another sniff out of O’Mahony for the rest of the game and here he was, 20 years on, being reminded once again that the day never really ended at all.

You know the story of Clare beating Kerry in the 1992 Munster final. You know all about John Maughan’s training and Martin Daly coming off the bench for his goal and Marty Morrissey promising there wouldn’t be a cow milked in Clare for at least a week. It was instant lore, a generational folk tale before it even hit the teatime news.

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Understandably enough, the Kerry side of things is less well aired. In a county with an endless supply of famous teams from down the decades, only a few here and there get burdened with genuine infamy. They tend not to make much of a fuss about it, if they can help it at all. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

“You’re resurrecting bad memories for us, are you?” laughs O’Shea when The Irish Times calls. “Do you think I’d forget it?” asks Stephen Stack later the same day. “‘Tis etched in my memory like the birth of one of my children.”

Anthony Gleeson pulls in off the M25. He sells plant hire in London these days and knows well that his path will cross with a few Clare heads before Sunday and that they’ll be waiting with their holsters unbuttoned. Thirty-two years later, the former Kerry full-back has long given up any notion of trying to escape it.

“I remember getting a phone call in 2017,” Gleeson says. “They were doing some anniversary thing in Clare and they were asking would we come up for a challenge game. And I said, ‘Jesus lads, I’m 25 years trying to get over it!’ So I politely declined.”

As well he might. As well they all might. They are the men of the famine, the lost years between Mick O’Dwyer’s last All-Ireland in 1986 and Páidí Ó Sé's first in 1997. That 11-year stretch is famously the longest Kerry have gone without an All-Ireland since the county won its first in 1903. They were the very definition of a team in transition.

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Bit by bit, the old greats had dropped away. Mikey, Páidí and Ogie after ‘87, Ger Lynch and Ger Power after ‘88, Charlie Nelligan and Pat Spillane at the end of 1991. Bomber Liston wasn’t on the scene at the time, albeit he would return for a last hurrah in 1993. Only Jack O’Shea and Ambrose O’Donovan remained – and this game was the last time either of them played championship for Kerry.

At the other end of the spectrum, the ‘92 final saw a debut for 18-year-old Séamus Moynihan. He hadn’t played so much as a league game yet and couldn’t feature in the earlier rounds because he was in the middle of his Leaving Cert. Peter O’Leary, Billy O’Shea and Karl O’Dwyer were all playing in their first Munster final as well.

“We were really evolving all the time through those years,” says Stack, the only player to feature on both the 1986 and 1997 teams. “Realistically, we continued to evolve right up until ‘96 when Páidí brought the under-21 team through with Darragh Ó Sé and Dara Ó Cinnéide and all the rest of them. We were going from the old to the new the whole time.

“And in fairness to Clare, they were a team of really hardened, experienced players who had been on a good run for over a year. They had won something like 12 of their last 13 games and the All-Ireland B. When it came down to it, they had it and we didn’t. There was no fluke about it or anything like that. We were beaten by the better team. They won by four points and it was a comfortable four points.”

Clare hadn’t won Munster since 1917. Nobody but Kerry and Cork had won it since 1935 and nobody would again until 2020. If Maughan’s side became the most celebrated in the history of Clare football, Mickey Ned O’Sullivan’s immediately found itself in the most miserable Kerry doghouse imaginable.

“I remember the headline in the Kerryman the following Thursday,” says O’Shea. “’The humiliation of Kerry’. That summed it up. There was a lot of anger about the whole thing. Mickey Ned came in for a lot of criticism, the rest of the management too.

“And of course the players came in for a lot of abuse as well afterwards. You’re an embarrassment to this and that and all that kind of jazz. It was a difficult time. It was a difficult one to try and accept.”

Gleeson was living in Dublin at the time, as was wing-back Connie Murphy. After the final whistle, he caught Murphy’s eye and asked what the plan was. “I’m heading straight back to Dublin,” Murphy said. “I am too, so,” Gleeson replied. So while the rest of the Kerry squad headed south to face the music, Gleeson and Murphy made for the capital.

“I didn’t go back home for four or five months I’d say,” Gleeson says now. “I stayed well away from it all. In those days, there was no social media, no mobile phones, none of that. So I was able to avoid it.

“A clubmate of mine, Teddy O’Dowd, used to deliver the Kerryman to Dublin every week. And every Thursday night, he used to meet a bunch of fellas from John Mitchels out in Madigan’s in Rathmines. I often went out and had a few pints with them and Teddy would have a few copies of the Kerryman with him for us to take home.

“You can be sure I didn’t go out there that following Thursday night anyway! No way was I going out there and have everyone reading the paper in front of me and going over every last bit of it again. I left it a few weeks anyway.”

Down in the maw of it in Kerry, the others didn’t have that luxury. Stack remembers heading to the Horseshoe Bar in Listowel the following day, hiding from the world as best he could. The world found him by accident in the end, in the shape of a Clareman at the bar who launched into a soliloquy about how Kerry’s arrogance had cost them the previous day.

Realising that the chap didn’t know who he had in his audience, Stack let him talk away for a good 15 minutes before heading to the gents. While he was away, his friends educated the interloper. “You know that was Stephen Stack?” they said. “He was playing for Kerry yesterday.”

And so that was how Ger Colleran, future editor of the Kerryman and the Irish Star, found himself as the one Clare supporter who owed a Kerryman an apology after the ‘92 Munster final. As Stack came back from the toilet, Colleran was waiting, aghast at his faux pas.

“He had his two hands on his head,” Stack says. “He went, ‘I am so sorry. You would be well entitled to take a swing at me now and drive me into the middle of next week. Nobody else would have listened to the s**t I was going on with for so long as you did.’ Any time I meet him ever since, we choke laughing about it.”

The world turned. Stack and O’Shea were eventually able to take comfort in the fact that they were on the next Kerry team to bring home Sam Maguire. Gleeson played on until 1996 but was gone by ‘97, a combination of living in Dublin and not fully chiming with Páidí Ó Sé ending his Kerry career when he was still only 26.

In the end, Gleeson played in three Munster finals and lost them all. There aren’t very many Kerrymen in history who can say that, fewer still who’d want to. Yet they are the men of that era, that barren time when Kerry fell back into the pack and lived an ordinary life like the rest of the country.

“We gave it everything we could,” Gleeson says. “We didn’t get it over the line. That was our time to play for Kerry. We wore the green and gold jersey and then we handed it on to the next crowd when they came to take it off us. That’s all you can do, pass the baton on.”

They were Kerry footballers too. No shame in that.