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'A modern classic . . . Absolutely riveting and frequently moving' – The Telegraph 'Among the best books ever written on Irish sport' – Sunday Tribune 'Brilliant . . . Stand Up and Fight is the definitive account. It captures the essence of what makes Munster rugby and its provincial team so unique' – Tony Ward, Irish Independent 'A terrific combination of intelligent reportage and open-eyed mythmaking' – Sunday Times 'A seminal account' – New Zealand Herald 'Irresistible' – Guardian 31/10/1978, Thomond Park. On one of the greatest days in rugby history, Munster beat the All Blacks. More than 100,000 people claimed to have watched the game, even though the ground could only hold 12,000. Now, fully updated for the 45th anniversary of the match, Alan English tells the true story.
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Sits comfortably among the best books ever written on Irish sport. Not unlike the classic Seabiscuit in style, it takes the countless threads from the day Munster beat the All Blacks and weaves them together word perfectly.
MALACHY CLERKIN, SUNDAY TRIBUNE
This book allowed me to live the match as it happened. There is all the vulnerability, the doubts, the drive that made that day epic. These feelings still resonate in the Munster of today.
KEITH WOOD
The most engaging book on rugby that I’ve read in many a year – well-researched, splendidly put together with a deft control of narrative. The craft of the novelist with the graft of the hack – it’s a winning formula.
MICK CLEARY, DAILY TELEGRAPH
A modern classic . . . The momentum of the book never slackens. I’m not Irish and I don’t know a great deal about rugby, but I found this book absolutely riveting and frequently moving. 12,000 people attended the match; 100,000 claimed to have been there. Readers of this book will feel that they were . . . The kind of read that you devour in socking great chunks.
ANDREW BAKER, DAILY TELEGRAPH
New Zealand came, saw and were conquered. English’s approach has depth, strength, pace, power and end product.
IRISH INDEPENDENT 50 BEST SPORTS BOOKS
Alan English has assembled his material in such a way as to make the build-up read more like a thriller than history. Expertly marshalling his witnesses – players, officials, supporters – he also manages to convey Munster’s unique, bred-in-the-bone working-class passion for rugby at a time when it was said you had to be a doctor, Protestant or Dubliner to stand much chance of playing for Ireland. Perhaps English’s finest hour, or 80 minutes, is his account of the match itself. The tale of that day and its heroes has often been told, even dramatised, but nobody has told it better, and probably never will.
SIMON REDFERN, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
We were there too: Thomond, Halloween 1978, Munster and the All Blacks. Or at least it feels that way after reading Alan English magnificently convey the lead-up, atmosphere and drama of that game so many wish and claim they were at. But as much as that win was something of a one-off, there was nothing overnight about it.
English brings us through the genesis of a Munster rivalry and fascination with the All Blacks, how rugby captured the heart and imagination of the city and people of Limerick, and the education of a coach in Tom Kiernan, all which culminate in a day of days. Thankfully it is now suitably chronicled in the rugby book of rugby books.
KIERAN SHANNON, IRISH EXAMINER IRELAND’S 40 GREATEST SPORTS BOOKS
The dedication of the amateur players of the time is wonderfully captured in Alan English’s exceptional book.
MATT COOPER, IRISH EXAMINER
A compelling dissection of Munster’s celebrated 1978 win over the All Blacks.
OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR
For those of us centrally involved it drags us back in time as if the intervening 27 years haven’t happened at all. English has left no stone unturned. Brilliant in its portrayal, Stand Up and Fight is the definitive account. It captures the essence of what makes Munster rugby and its provincial team so unique. I highly recommend it and its appeal will extend way beyond the rugby aficionados.
TONY WARD, IRISH INDEPENDENT
The success of the book is the richness of its characters and the tales they have to tell. It is from another life, another era, and the deeper we get into the blandness of the professional era the more we will appreciate how it used to be. This book slaps a preservation order on that time. Read it.
BRENDAN FANNING, SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
It is not so much the game itself but the stories around it that compel. English celebrates the day without sentimentalising it.
OBSERVER SPORT MONTHLY
A terrific combination of intelligent reportage and open-eyed myth-making.
ROBBIE HUDSON, SUNDAY TIMES
The story of the day may be dog-eared but there is nothing jaded about the way English fleshes it out through the reminiscences of many of the principals. An apposite celebration of a great and historic occasion, this is an excellent book, rugby or otherwise.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN, IRISH TIMES
English weaves a rich tapestry . . . The background is deftly stitched in as the book builds up to the day, then the author applies his precision needlepoint to bring together all the leading protagonists. If this book sells as it should, English can add another few hundred thousand claimants to the ‘I was there’ brigade, so skilfully and diligently has this Munsterman recorded the details of that historic day.
DAVID LLEWELLYN, INDEPENDENT
Wonderfully researched and evocative . . . This book is as much a celebration of the All Blacks’ legend and a discourse on Limerick’s socioeconomic and rugby background as anything else.
GERRY THORNLEY, IRISH TIMES
What sets Stand Up and Fight apart from the vast, vast majority of books written about Irish sporting achievement is that it goes far beyond recounting what happens between the white lines during a match. The reader is given an extraordinary feel of what it must have been like to have been present on the day. But be warned: once you pick up Stand Up and Fight you won’t be able to put it down.
COLM KINSELLA, LIMERICK LEADER
A fantastic story . . . those fifteen Munster men, along with coach Tom Kiernan, opened the door of self-belief for a nation and Alan English has captured its full meaning and significance in this book.
JOHN COLLINS, IRISH WORLD
As much a social history as a book about one game, this is sports writing at its finest. More than 100,000 people claimed to have been at 12,000 capacity Thomond Park when Tom Kiernan’s Munster laid low Mourie’s 1978 All Blacks: they’ll all read this to get the real inside story.
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
Alan English conducted more than 150 interviews during his research and the result is a marvellously evocative page-turner.
ALAN PEAREY, RUGBY WORLD BOOK OF THE MONTH
268 pages on ancient Limerick’s most unforgettably florid 80 minutes ever. Irresistible.
FRANK KEATING, GUARDIAN
Enthralling . . . on the way to relating the story of a single match, English segues into moving social and personal histories, uncovers astounding detail and then, finally, offers the chance to relive the action itself through the eyes of the key participants . . . It is a chance to savour the most unique occasion in the history of Irish sport, and because so much has changed, one that will never come again.
DAVE HANNIGAN, EVENING ECHO
Outstandingly researched and written. English weaves into the book the history of Irish and Munster rugby.
JOSEPH ROMANOS, LISTENER (NEW ZEALAND)
A seminal account.
CHRIS BARCLAY, NEW ZEALAND HERALD
Alan English has done a top job outlining the build-up and post-match events as well as the match in such a way that the book will not only appeal to rugby fans but anyone with a soft spot for the Irish.
SHANE HURNDELL, HAWKE’S BAY TODAY
It’s the sort of book that makes you wish you were there . . . Should be on the bookshelf of any Munster fan and deserves a greater audience.
RUGBY TIMES
Excellent . . . captures the intensity of battle; Gerry McLoughlin in particular provides a unique insight into life at the sharp end of top-flight rugby.
PETER SHARKEY, BELFAST TELEGRAPH
A tale that has been recounted on many occasions in the past, yet English still manages to make it seem fresh. Arguably the sports book of the year.
JAMES LAFFEY, WESTERN PEOPLE
This was a sporting shock writ incredibly large and Alan English has done a brilliant job of recording that unbelievable tale in fascinating detail. This is a book that any rugby fan should ‘jackal’ into their grasp by any means necessary, but its appeal should cross all sporting divides.
KENNY ARCHER, IRISH NEWS
English brilliantly captures the atmosphere surrounding the match. He also provides a fascinating socio-economic cameo of the Limerick of that time … A classic in sports writing.
J. ANTHONY GAUGHAN, IRISH CATHOLIC
It’s the sort of book that makes you wish you were there . . . Should be on the bookshelf of any Munster fan and deserves a greater audience.
RUGBY TIMES
Stand Up and Fight was first published in 2005, some 27 years after the match, but it has such an immediacy that it feels like it was written in the dressing room . . . It will stand forever as both testament and a work of literature, one that captures a moment in time but also a universal tale as old as David and Goliath.
DONAL O’DONOGHUE, RTE GUIDE
One of the best five books ever published on rugby. Only 80 minutes of a dull Munster day in 1978, when the local heroes beat New Zealand. But what a literary feast that win gave rise to. This classic re-wrote the manual for rugby books by mocking the drive towards unsatisfying surface rubbish. It is of supreme depth and colour and after reading it you will finally grasp Munster, and working-man rugby passion.
STEPHEN JONES, SUNDAY TIMES
Alan English’s books include Munster: Our Road to Glory and Grand Slam: How Ireland Achieved Rugby Greatness. He was also the ghostwriter of Brian O’Driscoll’s autobiography, The Test, and Paul O’Connell’s memoir, The Battle. As a journalist and editor, he has worked for the Limerick Leader, Sunday Times and Sunday Independent.
STAND UP AND
FIGHT
WHEN MUNSTER BEAT THE ALL BLACKS
ALAN ENGLISH
This edition first published in 2023 by
POLARIS PUBLISHING LTD
c/o Aberdein Considine
2nd Floor, Elder House
Multrees Walk
Edinburgh
EH1 3DX
First published by Yellow Jersey Press in 2005
www.polarispublishing.com
Text copyright © Alan English, 2023
ISBN: 9781915359285
eBook ISBN: 9781915359292
The right of Alan English to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The views expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or policies of Polaris Publishing Ltd (Company No. SC401508) (Polaris), nor those of any persons, organisations or commercial partners connected with the same (Connected Persons). Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers, or other information or content expressed by third parties are not those of Polaris or any Connected Persons but those of the third parties. For the avoidance of doubt, neither Polaris nor any Connected Persons assume any responsibility or duty of care whether contractual, delictual or on any other basis towards any person in respect of any such matter and accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by any such matter in this book.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Anne, Aisling, Holly and Jack.
And in memory of my parents,Tom English and Anne English.
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CAST
PROLOGUE
ONE: The Silent Lambs
TWO: Limerick Rugby Miracle
THREE: All Blacks and Angel Rapers
FOUR: He Was in the World Before
FIVE: Locky the Warrior
SIX: The Politician
SEVEN: London Mauling
EIGHT: Worst Dump in the World
NINE: Brendan Foley’s Story
TEN: Enter the Friendly All Blacks
ELEVEN: Stu Wilson’s Story
TWELVE: Horses for Courses
THIRTEEN: Seamus Dennison’s Story
FOURTEEN: Tickets and Tape
FIFTEEN: Be a Thinker
SIXTEEN: Tony Ward’s Story
SEVENTEEN: The Killaloe Kids
EIGHTEEN: The First Half
NINETEEN: The Second Half
TWENTY: The Immortals
EPILOGUE: Three Stories
AFTERWORD: Ties That Bind
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
APPENDIX III
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Team news: Eddie ‘Hands’ Dunn comes in at out-half in the All Blacks line-up
The original All Blacks: the great New Zealand touring squad of 1905. Manager George Dixon is in the second row.
Bloody hero: Munster’s bandaged prop Mick O’Callaghan moves to block in the titanic 1963 match at Thomond Park
Headquarters: Bill O’Brien’s shop, Munster rugby central for decades
Stout fellows: the Healy brothers, centre stage as usual
Hadah Sweeney’s house, first home of St Mary’s Rugby Club, Limerick
Tom Kiernan: Aged twenty and still uncapped.
The Grey Fox twelve years later.
Shannon boys: Brendan Foley and Gerry McLoughlin
Locky’s warriors: Gerry McLoughlin (in suit) and his CBS Sexton Street rugby team, 1977
Just dandy: Seamus Dennison
The golden boy: Tony Ward
Graham Mourie.
Eddie Dunn.
Brian McKenchie.
Stu Wilson.
Dan Canniffe: immaculate as ever
Double act: coach Jack Gleeson and Mourie test the wind in Swansea, a week before the Munster game
Shooting the breeze: Kiernan (left) with Olan Kelleher, Christy Cantillon and Tony Ward the day before the match
Enter the Eighth All Blacks: arriving at Shannon airport, unbeaten
Munster immortals. Back row: Johnny Cole (touch judge), Gerry McLoughlin, Les White, Moss Keane, Donal Spring, Colm Tucker, Pat Whelan, Brendan Foley, Corris Thomas (referee), Martin Walsh (touch judge). Front row: Tony Ward, Christy Cantillon, Moss Finn, Seamus Dennison, Donal Canniffe, Greg Barrett, Jimmy Bowen, Larry Moloney
Going to war: the packs collide in the lineout
Touchdown: Christy Cantillon hits the line and Thomond Park erupts
Donal Canniffe: ‘We’re forty minutes from immortality’
Stand-off: all eyes on the ball that would soon become part of the story
Gerry McLoughlin: ‘I was making tackles I shouldn’t have been there to make’
Tom Kiernan: ‘We’d seen it go wrong too often. I couldn’t relax’
Best foot forward: Christy Cantillon gets one away
Euphoria
Moss Keane was to the fore on Munster’s most famous day
A distraught-looking Andy Haden walks to the sheds
Triumphant threesome: Brendan Foley, Gerry McLoughlin and Colm Tucker, with admirers
History men: twenty years on, the Munster team celebrate their achievement, lining up as they did back in 1978
THE CAST
The coaches
JACK GLEESON, New Zealand, a publican
TOM KIERNAN, Munster, an accountant
The Munster players
LARRY MOLONEY, full-back, a bank official
MOSS FINN, wing, a student
JIMMY BOWEN, wing, a finance officer
SEAMUS DENNISON, centre, a teacher
GREG BARRETT, centre, a bank official
TONY WARD, out-half, a teacher
DONAL CANNIFFE, scrum-half, an insurance official
GERRY McLOUGHLIN, prop, a teacher
LES WHITE, prop, a purchasing manager
PAT WHELAN, hooker, a builder
BRENDAN FOLEY, lock, a sales rep
MOSS KEANE, lock, an agriculture official
COLM TUCKER, flanker, a sales rep
CHRISTY CANTILLON, flanker, a student
DONAL SPRING, Number 8, a student
The All Blacks
BRIAN McKECHNIE, full-back, an accountant
STU WILSON, wing, a sales clerk
BRYAN WILLIAMS, wing, a lawyer
LYN JAFFRAY, centre, a meat buyer
BRUCE ROBERTSON, centre, a sales rep
BILL OSBORNE, centre, a stock agent
EDDIE DUNN, out-half, a teacher
MARK DONALDSON, scrum-half, a bank clerk
BRAD JOHNSTONE, prop, a builder
GARY KNIGHT, prop, a salesman
JOHN BLACK, hooker, a trainee manager
FRANK OLIVER, lock, a forestry contractor
ANDY HADEN, lock, a property officer
GRAHAM MOURIE, flanker, a farmer
WAYNE GRAHAM, flanker, a stock agent
ASH McGREGOR, Number 8, a farmer
The officials
CORRIS THOMAS, referee, an accountant
JOHNNY COLE, touch judge, a revenue collector
MARTIN WALSH, touch judge, a factory worker
Also
GEORGE DIXON, 1905 All Blacks manager, an accountant
RUSS THOMAS, 1978 All Blacks manager, a grocer
EARLE KIRTON, 1963 All Blacks, a dentist
KEITH MURDOCH, 1972 All Blacks, a lorry driver
STEPHEN HEALY, a plasterer
SEAN HEALY, a plasterer
SUSAN HEALY, a schoolgirl
TERRY McLEAN, a journalist
BILL O’BRIEN, a draper
JOE KENNEDY, a store worker
JIM TURNBULL, a charity executive
HUGH CONDON, a student
PAUL COCHRANE, an All Blacks supporter
DINAH MAXWELL-MULLER, a secretary
JOE McCARTHY, a cameraman
DAN CANNIFFE, an office manager
KIERAN CANNIFFE, an insurance broker
BILL WALSH, a fish merchant
Rugby was life in Limerick. The heroes of Limerick rugby are my heroes. Gladiators, square-jawed warriors who represent us on the battlefield.
Richard Harris
Rugby football was the best of all our pleasures: it was religion and desire and fulfilment all in one. This phenomenon is greatly deprecated by a lot of thinkers who feel that an exaggerated attention to games gives the young a wrong sense of values. This may well be true, and if it is true, the majority of New Zealanders have a wrong sense of values for the whole of their lives.
John Mulgan, Report On Experience
Any game of rugby is confrontational. It’s all about not taking steps backwards, not being seen to be intimidated.
Martin Johnson
PROLOGUE
LOCKY’S STORY
My name is Gerry McLoughlin. I used to be a rugby player. Some called me ‘Locky’, others ‘Ginger’. No one called me a coward. You could say I had my moments. A long time ago I played for Munster against the All Blacks. One hundred thousand people say they were at Thomond Park that day. Ninety thousand of them are liars. They’ve been at it for more than twenty-five years. Imagine lying to your grandchildren about a rugby match. I know why they do it, though. What happened that day can never happen again.
I have the match ball in my attic. I swear to God it’s the actual ball – I defy anyone to go under the lie detector against me. At thirteen minutes past three Tony Ward kicked it over the wall and into my cousin Marge Kenihan’s yard. Her brother Jude was standing on a ladder, watching the match for free, and I gave him £100 for the ball. Some day I’ll auction it for charity. Or if I go broke I might sell it for myself. There are other people claiming they have the ball and the whole bloody lot of them can go and scratch.
I was a prop forward. Loosehead or tighthead, I could play both sides of the scrum. And the front row is where it all happens. Where I’m from, the boys in the front row get respect. Our people like the hard men. Not too many backs ever became legends in Limerick. Tom Clifford, Gordon Wood, Keith Wood, Peter Clohessy – what do they all have in common? They all played in the front row.
Back then, the scrum was the key to winning any match. It was the only chance you had to wear down the opposition pack. It was the be-all and end-all. Without a good scrum, it didn’t matter a damn what else you did on the field.
Whoever said scrummaging is an eight-man effort is a liar. For a start, the hooker doesn’t worry about the props. You should never be hoping for too much from your back row either. You wouldn’t want to rely on them. In the Munster team that day I wouldn’t say Donal Spring ever broke his back with a push, you had Colm Tucker wanting to carry the ball and Christy Cantillon flying off looking for fucking tries. The last thing on their mind was scrummaging. All they wanted to do was get out. So in the Munster pack, in actual fact, you’re not going to get much help from your back row and the hooker’s doing his own thing. You only have one or two friends in there.
If you want to beat the All Blacks, the first thing you’ve got to do is stand up to them, show them you’re not afraid. Some people see fifteen men in black jerseys and they’re beaten before the match even starts. In the front row, it’s all about intimidation. If you allow them to intimidate you, the match is over – I don’t care how good your backs are. Some people said they’d kill us in the rucks, that they’d kick the shit out of us when we went down on the ball. But we were used to getting kicked and raked. The rugby we played was fierce. It was nothing new to us to have to take a shoeing.
At Thomond Park, I was always aware that people who knew about propping were watching me. They’d say, ‘You were in trouble there. This was wrong, that was wrong.’ Nobody told you if you’d played well. So the last thing you wanted to do was go backwards. You just couldn’t let it happen, not in front of your own people. We knew where they lived, where they drank, what they did for a living, where they liked to stand in the ground.
I was up against Gary Knight that day. Two stone heavier than me and three inches taller, but I didn’t fear him. I never feared any prop in my life. He came on the field with a bandage wrapped around his face, but I never gave that a second thought. I found out later that he had herpes. I found out because they told me I had it myself. In all this time I’ve never been able to shake it off. Some souvenir.
I’d never have played for Ireland if it hadn’t been for the All Blacks match. You didn’t get capped out of Limerick. Bias, bias, there was unbelievable bias against us. We knew it. It was a fact of life. We’d been told it as kids. I went to see Munster play the All Blacks in 1963. My father took me, I was twelve. They didn’t win, but they gave as good as they got. The Munster hero that day was the tighthead prop.
‘Who’s the fella covered in blood, Dad?’
‘That’s Mick O’Callaghan. He’s related to you.’
‘But I never saw him before.’
‘He’s a cousin of your mother’s.’
‘Does he play for Ireland?’
‘No. One miserable cap, he got. You see, he plays for Munster and if you come from Munster you have to be twice as good as the fella that plays for Leinster or Ulster.’
‘What about if you come from Limerick?’
‘If you come from Limerick, you have to be three times as good as the fella from Dublin. At least.’
‘What about if you play for Shannon?’
‘If you play for Shannon, it doesn’t matter how good you are.’
I was a Shannon man. My father was a bus driver, seven days a week, all hours. Same as all the lads in Shannon, we were a working-class family. Our kind of people didn’t get on in Irish rugby. One year Shannon were sent up to Dublin to take on the full Irish team in a practice match. First scrum, the push came on and Mick Fitzpatrick, the Irish prop, went up in the air. He had Moss Keane behind him. Noel Ryan put him up in the air, legs split. They only brought us up once. They knew if they’d brought us up again we’d have scrummaged the Irish team off the park. We’d done two hundred scrums a night for the previous seven or eight years. That’s a lot of scrummaging. We knew how to get to a team, how to break them. It wasn’t just a yard of a push, it was two or three yards. After half an hour of that, they’d be exhausted, dead on their feet. We knew the only way of getting on the Irish team was playing in a match where you could put yourself in the limelight.
Three of us got picked for Munster against the All Blacks that day. Ireland were playing them the following Saturday and the selectors didn’t bother waiting for our match. They picked the Irish team three days previous. RTE didn’t bother sending any cameras down to film it – they thought it was a waste of time. Nobody gave us a prayer. Some people were afraid for us. They didn’t think we belonged on the same pitch.
The only man who believed we could win was Tom Kiernan, our coach. They called him the Grey Fox. He could make you believe no team was unbeatable. Not even the All Blacks.
He told us we had to stand up to them. He said, ‘They won’t go round you, they’ll try and go through you.’
No one was going to go through me.
ONE
THE SILENT LAMBS
Limerick, 31 October 1978
It was lunchtime but the hotel restaurant was empty, except for a man in a light grey suit who stood with more than twenty chairs in front of him, waiting for his audience to show up. Tom Kiernan, coach of the Munster rugby team, was thirty-nine years old but hair that had long turned grey made him appear five or six years older. In less than two hours his players were going to face the best team in the world. For six weeks he had lived the match, day and night, over and over. Now he had twenty-five minutes to tell his team how to beat the New Zealand All Blacks – perhaps less, because they were running late and traffic was building outside, where twelve thousand people were making their way to a small ground one mile away on the northern edge of town. Not one of them gave his players a chance.
At another hotel, a short walk away, the All Blacks were preparing to board a coach parked outside on O’Connell Street, the main thoroughfare. Each man wore a black blazer with light grey slacks, a white shirt and a black tie embossed with the team’s emblem, a silver fern. The All Blacks always looked smart: it was expected of them. Lyn Jaffray, selected in the centre against Munster, even insisted to his team-mates that the silver ferns on their cufflinks pointed the same way.
In seventy-three years of trying, no Irish team had ever beaten the All Blacks. Some said none ever would, that the gap would only get wider. More than any other rugby nation, New Zealand knew how to win. Time and again, down the years, they had rescued themselves when defeat seemed certain, driven on by uncommon desire and sometimes by the fear of failure. For no matter how brilliantly a team representing New Zealand might play, the bottom line was that they win.
Every touring side lived in the long shadow cast by the All Blacks of 1905, who came to Britain and Ireland and shook the game there so severely it was as though they had reinvented rugby itself. In beating their colonial masters so devastatingly at their own game, they did more for their country’s self-regard than any group of men before or since. The 1978 touring side, the eighth to leave New Zealand, were fast acquiring the air of invincibility many regarded as the All Blacks’ birthright. On all known form, Munster were facing annihilation. Four games into an eighteen-match tour the New Zealanders had the look of a side that would remain unbeaten. ‘The Eighth All Blacks are cutting through British rugby like an armoured division piercing thin lines of infantry,’ Clem Thomas had written in the Observer three days previously. In the Cork Examiner that morning Dermot Russell had sifted the evidence and found only a glimmer of hope.
The known facts are that Munster have been bad this year and that the All Blacks have mopped up all opposition so far. The imponderable now is the preparation which coach Tom Kiernan has given his charges through sessions at Fermoy and, since Sunday, at Limerick. Has he been able to motivate this ordinary team to the stage where it could be potentially great? Only time will tell.
The chatter of rugby supporters echoed from the lobby, but Kiernan did not hear it. His players began moving towards the restaurant. They had no blazers or ties or cufflinks with the three crowns of Munster: they wore whatever they wished. No coach was parked outside to take them to the ground: there was no money for that; they would have to travel in their own Escorts and Cortinas.
It was a time before replica jerseys, a time when Munster played only a handful of games every year, mostly against the three other Irish provinces – Leinster, Ulster and Connacht – in front of modest, sometimes paltry crowds. The days when Munster supporters would queue all night in heavy rain for tickets were more than twenty years away. Of the six counties that make up the province of Munster, rugby was widely played in only the biggest two – Cork and Limerick. There, the province played second fiddle to dominant clubs like Cork Constitution, Garryowen and Shannon, who contested with a ferocious intensity the Munster Senior Challenge Cup. Every once in a while, however, Australia, South Africa or New Zealand would turn up and a Munster team drawn from these clubs would give them a game. On these rare days, generally years apart, the Munster team and the red jerseys they pulled on came to mean something. The feelings they stirred among their supporters back then were no different from those that would be felt by a future generation, for against the touring teams they played with a fierce passion. But this time, few were expecting much of a match. In their most recent outing of any significance, against Middlesex five weeks before, Munster had been humiliated. They had not won outright the championship contested by the Irish provinces for ten years. If the match had been a prizefight, they would have had the credentials of a bum.
Donal Canniffe, the captain and scrum-half, was first to walk through the restaurant door. Nobody had greater pride in the jersey, but he was a Munster man by cruel accident. The course of his life had changed early one morning in 1951, in Dromod, County Leitrim, where his father was stationed as the local sergeant. Cycling home on her new bicycle, Donal’s mother Maisie was thrown over the handlebars and killed. Her youngest son, Donal, was ten days short of his second birthday. Dan Canniffe moved his seven children south, and Donal was reared in Cork city by his father’s sister, a woman who had once smuggled revolvers past the Black and Tans at South Gate Bridge by concealing them in her underwear.
Kiernan believed he had the right captain. Canniffe stood a fraction over six feet tall; he was like a ninth forward, able to take punishment. He mightn’t have been the slickest or the quickest or have the most natural ability, but he was durable and he could lead men.
The others followed Canniffe in twos and threes. Larry Moloney, the full-back, was with his great friend Seamus Dennison, the outside centre. Moloney was a man bred close to the soil, a butcher’s boy from Bruree in County Limerick, De Valera country. Kiernan reckoned he had a cigarette coming out of his mouth every time you looked at him. He was so laid-back, the coach would say, it was a job just trying to keep him awake. At his club, Garryowen, they called him The Prince, and maybe there was something regal about the way he cruised into the line. There was only eleven and a half stone of him, but he could hit.
As a kid in winter he had pulped turnips by hand every night, enough to feed thirty or forty cattle two buckets each, which was a lot of pulping. In the summertime he saved hay, scoured ditches and cleaned drains. A life on the land was never an option for him, though. ‘There’s four more after you, so you keep going. Go out into the world and make your own way through it,’ Paddy Moloney had said when he reached school-leaving age. He found a job in a bank, behind the counter. As work went, it was easier than saving hay. Just not as satisfying.
Dennison, a schoolteacher, was even smaller, but if anything he hit harder. He was a shopkeeper’s son from Abbeyfeale, on the Limerick–Kerry border. Like his friend he had been sent to boarding school in Limerick city, where they played rugby. He had three international caps, the last of them won three years back. Plenty of people said he should have been given ten times that many, that his lack of size had cost him. Balding and bearded, he didn’t look much like a rugby player, which was why men who didn’t know him were often knocked backwards by the juddering force of his commitment.
Alongside him in the centre was Greg Barrett, a bank official from Cork, six feet two and lightly built, not much of a ball handler but never slow to tackle, which was just as well.
The props, Gerry ‘Locky’ McLoughlin and Les White, had played together only rarely. White was an Englishman. Nobody was quite sure how old he was, but it was plain that he had plenty of miles on the clock. Kiernan had recruited him from London Irish and among the lads the joke was that White’s qualification was down to his mother being seduced by a sailor in Cobh.
The garrulous, ginger-haired Locky was another teacher, but far from the usual wielder of chalk. He would arrive on Monday mornings sporting cuts and scratches from Shannon matches, sometimes a beaten-up nose, or a swollen ear or a black eye and, every so often, all of these at once. Here was vivid proof of his hard-man status, a weekly reminder that of the local warriors who went about their business in the front row, none was more committed than he. He was desperate to beat the All Blacks and he didn’t care who knew it. He felt his chances of ever playing for his country were hanging on this one match.
Colm Tucker, a wing forward, played in the same Shannon pack as Locky. He was a travelling sales rep, the kind of job a rugby man got when his face was his calling card. Tucker was probably the best ball-carrier in Ireland, but the national selectors had ignored him too. Alongside him in the back row Tucker had the mobile Christy Cantillon and a gangling Number 8 from Trinity College in Dublin who could run fast and hard, Donal Spring.
The hooker was Pat Whelan, ruthless and rampaging and capped eleven times. The second-row forwards were also internationals: Moss Keane, from Currow in County Kerry, a great bear of a man, and Brendan Foley, from the heart of working-class Limerick city. On the wings were a pair of twenty-one-year-olds from Cork, Moss Finn and Jimmy Bowen. Kiernan did not expect either to see a lot of ball against the All Blacks. The game plan he had devised would see to that, all going well. More than anything, this strategy depended on Munster’s out-half having one of the games of his life.
Tony Ward was weeks away from being named European Player of the Year. He was like nothing Munster rugby had ever seen: bewitching and glamorous and utterly instinctive, with a jink that left people tackling thin air. When it looked like he had no options open to him, nowhere to run, he would suddenly make something happen.
There was a vulnerability about Ward, a contradiction that few rugby people understood in this, his first year on the major stage. So devastatingly confident with the ball in hand, he was less self-assured off the pitch. Earlier in the year, on the eve of his third international match, against Wales in Dublin, he had been alone in a lift at the Shelbourne hotel when the doors opened and six or seven Welsh players walked in. He didn’t know what to do or where to look, and he didn’t imagine that any of them would recognise him, so he just stared at his shoes and waited for his floor. When the doors opened again he began to walk out and then a voice said, ‘See you tomorrow, Tone,’ and he looked back, incredulous that Gareth Edwards knew his name.
How many of these men might be good enough to make the All Blacks’ best team? Most rugby writers would have made a firm case for Ward, pondered the claims of Keane and Whelan and drawn a line through the rest. But for Kiernan, they were all he had and they would do. They would have to do.
The ferocity of Kiernan’s tongue had once been such that timid young team-mates expecting a lashing would feign injury and wait for the storm to pass, rather than face him at his most fulminating. But during his university years he began to mellow. He became a wiser and more skilful leader. There was something mesmeric about him; an urgency in the eyes, a talent for persuasion.
As a player he had been a general who led from the back and shot from the lip, barking out commands to his backs, focusing on every facet of the game, not just his own part in it. More than any other Munster rugby man, alive or dead, he had been there and done it. Captain of his country, captain of the Lions, ever present in the Ireland team for fourteen years, he had the respect of every man in the room. He rose from his chair and spun it around. He lifted his right foot and rested it on the seat, then moved forward, crouching over the back of the chair, elbow on his knee, right hand under his chin. His eyes met theirs.
They waited for words of inspiration, for assurance that they were not lambs to the slaughter. They wanted to hear him say they could win. They needed to know he believed it, because they still weren’t sure they believed it themselves.
In such moments, when a team faces seemingly impossible odds, the urge to rouse them with emotional rhetoric can be strong. Years later, one of the men in the room would recall the team talk in vivid detail. Kiernan began, he said, by slowly invoking the names of Munster players of the past who had come agonisingly close to beating the All Blacks.
‘Tom Kiernan . . . Jerry Walsh . . . Brian O’Brien . . . Paddy McGrath . . . Mick Lucey . . . Mick O’Callaghan . . . Phil O’Callaghan . . . Jim McCarthy . . . Gordon Wood. What do we all have in common? [Long pause, piercing eye contact].
‘We never did it! We never beat the All Blacks. And you can.’ But, in fact, Kiernan wasn’t nearly so melodramatic. At first, he said nothing at all. Half a minute passed, slowly. Now his head was bowed. They shifted uneasily in their seats, waiting for him to collect his thoughts. Another thirty seconds ticked by. Nothing.
After two minutes, they began to steal glances at one another, all thinking the same things.
‘When’s he going to speak?’
‘What kind of team talk is this supposed to be?’
‘Someone say something, for Christ’s sake.’
Five minutes. Still nothing. They stopped looking around them and withdrew into themselves. They felt isolated, cut adrift from the group. Alone.
Eight minutes. Now no one was moving. Some were breathing so deeply it was as if they were gasping for air. Others felt intimidated, nervous and, in a few cases, frightened.
‘Everyone else is concentrating. What’s wrong with me?’
‘We’ve had enough now.’
‘Jesus Christ, it’s like a boiling kettle in here.’
Ten minutes and still not a word. He just stood there, still crouching, motionless. He had planned the silence, but it was a risk. He couldn’t be sure about how they would react. What if one of them laughed, as one of the lads at Cork Constitution had done when he’d tried the same thing years before? But deep down he knew no one would laugh. They had given too much already for that. He just had to make sure the temperature was right, that they understood what he wanted from them: discipline, alertness, focus. He didn’t want boot, bollock and bite, the traditional virtues of Munster rugby. He didn’t want them to kick it up in the air and charge after it. Down that road was glorious failure and he was sick of that. Too many Munster teams had been acclaimed for effort against the overseas teams, instead of victory. In the end, it amounted to nothing.
What Kiernan knew about winning, he had learned from losing. As a boy in Cork he had kept a scrapbook detailing the near misses by Munster teams of the past. As a player he had faced the All Blacks four times – more than any other Munster man. Every match had been close, never more than a single score in it. He hadn’t won any of them. All he was left with were hard-luck stories he had no mind to tell.
When it was announced that the All Blacks were coming back to play Munster for the sixth time, he had got to thinking. What if you could prepare a team not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, a team that had learned the hard lessons taught to Munster men down the years? Against the All Blacks, there was no margin for error. One bad mistake, one missed tackle and it wouldn’t matter how much they might play above themselves: they would go down in history as gallant losers like all the others. He had come to understand that on days like these you could assume nothing. You covered every angle, anticipated every problem. And then maybe you had a chance.
He wanted his players to visualise the match and their part in it, to imagine it before it had happened. They had to be mentally prepared for whatever was thrown at them and they had to get there themselves, no matter how long it took.
After fifteen minutes he knew they were ready. He had already made sure they were physically fit enough to go eighty hard minutes: now their heads were in the right place. Over the previous six weeks he had brought them closer together than any group of Munster players had ever been. Now there was nothing any of them would not do for the team, nothing they would allow themselves to do that might hurt the team. Kiernan would never know anything of the uncertainty that had pervaded the room, because he was not like them. Focus was not something he switched on and off. Throughout his rugby life it had always been there. But what mattered now was that by isolating them for a short time he had made them stronger.
Finally he moved towards them, only a few inches, but they knew what was coming and they felt a sense of release. He began to speak, and in a few minutes he told them how they might beat the mighty All Blacks. A few minutes for a lesson that was thirty years in the learning.
What they needed to remember, he said, was that four days before the first international of their tour the All Blacks would be playing for a result. They wanted to go out and get it over with, to move on an unbeaten team. But if the match started badly for them, the younger, less-experienced All Blacks would start thinking, ‘What if we lose?’ No matter what anyone said, they were human and they were beatable. Munster weren’t playing for a result. They were playing for glory, for everlasting fame. They were playing, too, for one another.
As the tourists’ bus crossed the Shannon at Sarsfield Bridge and then crawled past the Munster team hotel, nobody on board had any idea that they would soon be facing not just fifteen players motivated like never before, but the force of history, and the driving influence of a man who understood its lessons.
TWO
LIMERICK RUGBY MIRACLE
Munster were always going to beat the All Blacks; it was just a matter of when. People think 1978 was the shock of the century, that it just happened out of the blue, but it was a long time coming. The single biggest reason was Munster’s tradition. We believed we could do it because our predecessors had convinced us it was possible. All you had to do was look at the results. We were the lucky ones because it was Munster’s time, but those guys helped make it happen.
Donal Spring, Munster forward in 1978
Limerick, 1905
Two days after beating Ireland with ease, the All Blacks left Dublin in a private compartment on the three o’clock express, headed south. They had fourteen matches left to play on their tour of Britain and Ireland, but people had already made their minds up: they were the greatest rugby team ever to set foot on a field. Every opposition had been beaten so badly that someone said they should be called by a new name: The Slaughterers.
They had achieved fame they could never have imagined. People stopped and applauded if they saw them in the street. Men would ask to feel their biceps. Sometimes, in the less well-heeled parts of town, women lifted their skirts in invitation. Newspapermen vied with one another to acclaim them as something more than human, masters of a form of rugby unheard of only weeks before. One of their backs was ‘a cross between a greyhound and a flash of lightning’. Their forwards were ‘Trojans of the scrum’. As a team they were ‘as persistent as a lot of wasps; as clever as a lot of monkeys. They work together like the parts of a well-constructed watch.’ It was as if they had come not from a distant land, but from a different planet.
People feared for Munster, their next opponents. The Limerick Leader challenged its readers to nominate the correct score, offering a prize of one guinea for the first correct entry opened. An optimistic soul from the Killeely area of the city guessed the score as Munster 3 All Blacks 0. His was one of six entries that favoured the home team; most of the rest, in enormous numbers, anticipated a massacre. A reader from Roche’s Street was the most scathing about Munster’s chances. His guess was an All Blacks win by fifty-five points to nil.
They had left New Zealand on the SS Rimutaka, twenty-five players, a coach and a manager. Emissaries for the wonderland of the southern seas. ‘The Britishers are panting for those Ashes,’ they were told. ‘Don’t let them get them.’ But few turned up to see them off at Wellington: it was too wet, too cold, too much trouble.
Every day, up on deck, they ran, passed and scrummaged. Other passengers on the Rimutaka asked them if they would be good enough to take on the English and the Welsh, the Scottish and the Irish. They did not know. They hoped they would not let down their families back home, the loved ones who would not see them again for more than seven months. After forty-two days at sea they saw Plymouth Sound in the half-light of early morning. England, the mother country. They started their tour known as the Colonials. Along the way they became the All Blacks, on account of their shirts, shorts and stockings. People said they could hardly be expected to beat Devonshire, the English county champions, in their first match. They won by fifty-five points to four. Newspaper subeditors, convinced the result was wrong, changed it to five to four. They soon learned. In their next ten games the All Blacks scored 353 points and conceded a total of three.
News of every great victory was telegrammed back home by George Dixon, the team manager. In the months they were away, one thousand Russian Jews were murdered in Odessa and the Wright brothers flew for thirty-eight minutes and three seconds, but in New Zealand no story was bigger than the deeds of the All Blacks. With each triumph the nation swelled with pride. The players vowed that, come what may, they would not – could not – lose.
They knew what to expect in Limerick; it was the same mostly everywhere they went. Hundreds, if not thousands, of well-wishers would cheer from the station concourse. A delegation of local nobs would meet them off the train. Young boys hoisted high on the shoulders of their fathers would ask questions . . .
‘Which one’s Wallace?’
‘Which one’s Stead?’
‘Where’s Dave Gallaher?’
. . . but rarely would they receive answers. Even though the men they had come to see were famous, few knew what they looked like. They could be black, brown, white or yellow. The people of Limerick were not to know, for they had never before seen an All Black. ‘Their skins,’ one newspaper reported, ‘are of an equable brownish olive tint.’ But most of those waiting at the station did not read newspapers, or anything else. Newspapers were for the educated and the privileged. So was rugby, by and large.
For Arthur Budd, president of England’s Rugby Football Union a few years before, the game’s problems had begun when the working man took it up. Men like Budd wanted to keep rugby to themselves. They believed it was theirs to keep. And, for the most part, they succeeded. In Ireland the establishment aped the English way – not for the first time, or the last. Yet there was one place on the island where the spirit of rugby triumphed over the men who sought to marginalise it. In Limerick it became the game of the people, all of the people.
The classless rugby city: it has become a cliché now, forever to be wheeled out whenever Limerick’s love for the game is talked about. Dockers and doctors side by side on Saturday afternoons. Old women arguing about loosehead props. The only part of Ireland where it is spoken of on the factory floor. But why?
‘We’ve been hearing the same thing for a hundred years. I’m sick and tired of listening to it,’ said Tom Kiernan, nearly three decades after his Munster team took on the All Blacks at Thomond Park. ‘You ask people why it’s a classless rugby city and they all say, “Because everyone plays it.” As if that explains it. But nobody has a reason for why rugby became so popular there in the first place.’
The reason is because rugby saved Limerick. It lifted the city off its knees. It made its way into the worst of places and offered up a little joy. The love for the game so evident these days, the passion that feeds the legend of Munster and the All Blacks, has its roots in misery. To find out why rugby means so much now, you must discover what the place was like then, just before it fell under rugby’s spell.
The debt Limerick owed the game has been repaid many times over, but few have ever acknowledged that it existed in the first place. Misery has always been a touchy subject there. It gets people’s backs up, puts them on the defensive and into denial. Such was the way back in 1876, the year Limerick’s first rugby club was founded. When a citizen wrote to complain that the streets around him were full of filth, his letter was waved away with contempt. ‘It must have been written by one of the disappointed candidates for the position of second sub-sanitary officer,’ said one of the city worthies, Alderman Zachary Myles.
If you had strayed off the main streets and walked among the labyrinth of tumbledown lanes, it wouldn’t have struck you that a game played by a handful of Protestant college boys was just what the city’s underclass needed in 1876. In a garrison town, where the British Army commanded the open spaces, the have-nots were ‘literally rotting in squalid dens’, Charles Dawson, the High Sheriff Designate, wrote that year. From this desolation, the only escape was alcohol. There were 282 liquor shops, but only two dentists. Children were living under the same roofs as pigs. There were donkeys in back yards flooded with stagnant water and sewage, with barely enough room to move.
Dr O’Connor, from the workhouse fever hospital, believed that Fitzgerald’s Lane was among the worst of all these places. He had fifteen patients from the lane; another had already died. In August 1876 he went to Fitzgerald’s Lane and found a wall with a large hole in it. A man called Michael Kelly, who lived in the lane, told him that the excreta of five families was thrown through the hole and it stayed there for two or three months. The stench was unspeakable. Was it any wonder, Michael Kelly asked, that he had three children sick with fever? The doctor reported his findings to Zachary Myles and his colleagues on the Urban Sanitary Board. A few weeks later, they met to discuss his report.
‘His statement was not proved,’ said John Cronin.
‘A mere statement is no proof,’ said Stephen Hastings.
‘Dr O’Connor has proved his case by evidence which would be believed in any court in the world,’ said Maurice Lenihan, a local newspaper editor. ‘I think we will agree that the state of things which was found to exist in Fitzgerald’s Lane was most disreputable.’
‘No, no,’ said Cronin.
‘You will not agree to that?’
‘Certainly not.’
What John Cronin meant, perhaps, was that the lane was no better or worse than two hundred others.
The biggest problem in the lives of the people, Charles Dawson believed, was ‘the want of a proper means of popular enjoyment . . . the total absence of any rational and harmless amusement’. Dawson could not have realised it then, but this ‘means of popular enjoyment’ was about to arrive. Rugby – introduced by the army and by affluent Protestants who had played it in public schools in Dublin and beyond – may not have been harmless, or even rational, but it was destined to fill the void.
Eighteen days after the meeting of the Urban Sanitary Board, Charles Burton Barrington stepped off the Scythia at the port of Queenstown in Cork, fresh from the Philadelphia Regatta. Within weeks, Barrington and his industrious friend William Stokes had rounded up the local bluebloods and formed Limerick’s first rugby club. Barrington was an old boy of Rugby School in England, birthplace of the game. His grandfather had built a hospital for the city’s swarming poor, constructed of limestone and designed to last centuries. His own contribution to local life appeared, at first, vastly more modest: he had drawn up twenty-three rules for a game nobody played, apart from a handful in his own privileged circle.
For their first fixture, Limerick Football Club travelled to Dublin to take on Wanderers at Clyde Road. They arrived the night before the match and stayed at the Gresham hotel, the finest accommodation Dublin could offer. When they took to the pitch, it was clear to all present that Limerick rugby had arrived. ‘The presence of the Limerick men in their exceedingly neat uniform would alone excite admiration and a finer set of players never did battle for any club,’ enthused the Irish Times. The match was drawn. Afterwards, both teams sat down to dinner at the Arcade hotel and, when it came to the toasts, they joined glasses and drank to the future success of rugby in Limerick among like-minded gentlemen.
Rugby’s rise in the city was a strange kind of miracle.
Barrington was no missionary: he did not venture into the lanes to preach his gospel. Others spread the word in a crumbling city fast being abandoned by the gentry; British Army soldiers, pig buyers who ruled the roost, but who liked to encourage the man on the street. Paddy ‘Whacker’ Casey, who was one of the founders of St Mary’s Rugby Club in 1943, says the game’s appeal in his grandfather’s time was no different from what drew him to rugby as a boy in the twenties.
‘It was all the excitement. Most fellas were showing off how tough they were. And it was a simple game then. Not like now. We played on a small little patch in Johnny Cusack’s field. Rugby back then was street against street, parish against parish. The matches we played were like faction fights – that’s the truth. You’d see eight forwards running up the middle of the field with the ball at their feet and the crowd cheering. Any fella that tried to get in their way deserved a medal for bravery. He mightn’t be able to play no more after that.
‘Before rugby, people had nothing to play at all. They were livin’ in big, high tenement houses and lanes. Limerick was full of lanes. If they had jobs they worked for the big people, all the nobs and the Protestant crowd. If you had one toilet you were lucky and that would be a dry toilet. You know what a dry toilet is? A bucket. They were all slums. You could smell the tar and the lime when you’d goin the door and then the backbone soup and the cabbage. It was a blessing to knock those places down, but some fine men came out of them and rugby gave them something they enjoyed doing.
‘The whole thing derived from the British Army. Back before I was born they took young lads in at twelve and fourteen. People were so poor they were only delighted to see them going in. “Join the army and see the world,” that was the cry then. In peacetime the army played rugby above in the Bombing Field and below in the Island Field. They had regiments all over the city. Other fellas learned it from watching them and kept at it. They played anywhere they could, even in prison. The British were gone from the city by the time I was a boy but rugby was getting more popular all the time. We played hurling in the summer and rugby in the winter, but hurling was expensive at that time. You wouldn’t be able to get a hurley, money wise. Half a crown for a hurley was a lot of money. If you lived in St Mary’s parish, rugby was your game. All you needed was a patch of land and a ball. They’d go round collecting for the ball, going to all the houses in the parish, looking for a penny. Then we’d play away.’