Brothers in Sport (11 page)

‘One of the things we needed to learn at the time was how to win big matches,
’
Mick offers. ‘All the successful teams know how to close out a game once they get on top. It comes with experience. We hadn’t won big games for so long that we didn’t have that knowledge.’ He recounts one very painful experience to illustrate the step Meath needed to take. It happened during the All-Ireland semi-final against the reigning All-Ireland champions, Kerry. The ball had been driven in high from the middle of the field to the edge of the Meath square. ‘It was the sort of ball I would go for instinctively. But this time Joe [
Cassells] and Mickey [
McQuillan, the goalkeeper] decided to go for it too. We crashed into each other and ended up in a heap on the ground. All I remember is being at the bottom of the pile and looking up and seeing Ger
Power with the ball in his hands and no one near him. He just tapped it into the net. I was thinking “how the hell is he not down here in the middle of this pile and not up there looking at us eejits?” You wouldn’t have minded getting hurt so much if you had taken him with you. That was Kerry. And we had to learn that when we got in control of a game we had to kill it. A year later we knew how to do it.’

By the end of a very eventful 1986 Meath had learned some very valuable lessons and were ready to move on to a new level. They were Leinster champions for the first time since 1970; Summerhill won the Meath Championship with Mick, Pádraig as captain and Terry in the team, along with their cousin John. And Mick and Pádraig were selected on the Ireland squad to make a historic first visit to Australia.

* * *

Anything Mick and Pádraig Lyons would have known about the St Colmcille’s GAA club in the east of Meath, and bordering Dublin and Louth, would have been learned from their soulmate in the Meath full back line of the 1980s, Bobby
O’Malley. To this day they are probably unaware that it was an initiative from that club which propelled them to an experience both rate as one of the most memorable of their sporting careers – the first ever visit by an Ireland team to Australia in October 1986 for the second series of international test matches under compromise rules against the biggest stars of the Australian Rules version of football.

The club proposed to the GAA’s annual congress in 1982 that the GAA should examine the possibility of forging a relationship with the Australian Rules Football Association (AFL) ‘in order to establish an international series’. The proposal was passed unanimously and a five-man committee chaired by Gerry Fagan (Armagh) and including
Dan Hanley (Dublin Colleges),
Jimmy Deenihan (Kerry),
John Moloney (Tipperary) and Pat O’Neill (Meath) was formed. A year later an invitation was issued to the AFL to send a team to Ireland in 1984 for the first series of games under negotiated rules.

No one knew quite what to expect when the semi-professional Australians lined out against Ireland for the first time in Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork on 21 October 1984. Mick Lyons was named at full back for Ireland and was already known as a footballer who could look after himself. But no one had reckoned on a massive Australian called Mark Lee. In just one example of the incidents which marred the opening game, Lee made a high challenge on Lyons and ended the Meath man’s participation in the game. ‘I don’t remember a lot about it. What I do remember is waking up in the dressing-room and the roof was spinning above me.’

The Australians won that test and a major talking point was whether or not Mick would line out in the second test the following Sunday in Croke Park. ‘There was never any question about it,’ he recalls. ‘I couldn’t let that incident affect me. I had to go out and prove something to the Australians and to myself. I had to put things right.’ He produced an outstanding display, his high fielding earning him plaudits all over the country and contributing to his status as a national hero.

When
Kevin Heffernan was assembling his squad for the return tour in 1986 one of the first players named in his squad was Mick Lyons. Soon after, Pádraig earned his selection. Assembling at Dublin airport in October 1986 for the flight to Perth, the Lyons brothers were joined by their father, Paddy, for the historic month-long tour that would take in Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.

‘The day I heard that
Kevin Heffernan had picked me on the squad for Australia was one of the best of my life,’ admits Pádraig. ‘I regarded then and still do
Kevin as one of the greatest managers of them all and for him to recognise me as a footballer was a great honour for me. I didn’t really expect it at the time and that made it all the better.
’
There would be drama before departure. Pádraig picked up an injury in the county final and had to pass a medical before travelling. He got the go-ahead, but the injury limited his involvement on the tour.

‘It was a massive thing for all of us,’ says Mick. ‘Growing up you dreamed of playing for your club and you hoped that you would get the chance to play for your county. But you were conditioned that you could not play for your country because there was no outlet. Here was the opportunity that we never expected and it meant an awful lot. To have the chance to go to Australia just added to it. It gave us some idea what it was like to play sport full-time and I loved it.

‘Any sportsman will tell you he would love to have a chance to play full-time. For four weeks in Australia we did nothing but train, rest and play, and it was fantastic. To be able to get up in the morning and go out and do something you loved, to be looked after the way we were and to play big matches was just pure pleasure. In that four weeks we were so much fitter just because all we were concentrating on was our football.’

They loved the company of other players –
Jack
O’Shea, Mick
Holden, Joe
McNally, Brian
McGilligan, Greg
Blaney, Damien
O’Hagan and Pat O’Byrne among them. There were others with whom Mick and Pádraig would become very familiar in the years to come, including the Cork pair
Jimmy Kerrigan and
John O’Driscoll. ‘For four weeks we had the lifestyle of professional sportsmen and I will always treasure that,’ Mick adds. It opened his eyes to new forms of preparation and to how players should be treated.

‘We can never have a professional game here because the country couldn’t afford it. But that doesn’t mean that players shouldn’t be treated properly.
Seán Boylan changed all that in Meath back in the 1980s, but too many County Boards were slow to move with the times. Players were being asked to give more and more of their time but they were getting nothing back. They weren’t getting proper meals or gear or anything like that.

‘Players should get jobs; if they can be provided with a car and all that sort of thing, then great. The problem with professionalism is the impact it would have on the clubs. The clubs need money all the time. It gets harder and harder to keep going, especially with all the teams that every club is running now. A professional game would soak up a lot of that money and that would be disastrous for the club. The club is where the player starts. Without the club, you would not have the player to play for the county. The club is already paying the price for putting out a county player because that player is as good as gone from the club for the best part of ten years and those are the best years of his playing life. He comes back to the club then with the best taken out of him.’

Despite further outbreaks of violence in Perth and Melbourne, Ireland proved too strong for the Australians in the three-test series. Victory was secured on a stormy night in Adelaide when Ireland won by fifty-five points to thirty-two. Mick also played for Ireland in the 1987 series. He is, however, worried about the future relationship between the two sports. ‘The differences between the two games are just too much. When they catch a high ball, they retreat from it. In Gaelic we don’t. It’s hard to adapt when you only play every couple of years. And there is a cultural difference. They’re professionals, they don’t respect amateurism. It’s not bad manners, it’s just the natural order. And they could not afford to let amateurs beat them and that is why there were some of the problems every time the teams met. I know the crowds are great all the time here, but you wonder if it is doing anything now for football. Back then we did learn a lot from the way they trained and organised themselves and parts of their game have influenced ours. But I don’t know if there is much more to be gained from it.’

With his brother Mick on his left flank, Pádraig Lyons collects the Meath senior championship trophy on behalf of the Summerhill club from County Chairman Fintan Ginnity.
© John Quirke Photography

* * *

Mick Lyons had new responsibilities when he returned to training with Meath for 1987. The quiet, almost shy, lad who liked to keep to himself in the corner of the room was appointed captain of the Meath team. The honour fell his way because Summerhill were the reigning county champions. The manager was happy because he knew Lyons had grown into a leader and the captaincy would help him express himself more in the dressing-room. ‘To be honest I would rather not have been captain. But it was a big thing for the club and I was glad of that. But the reality is that it didn’t affect me all that much because we had so many leaders in the dressing-room. And on the big days I had plenty to keep me busy. Marking lads like Christy Ryan or Dave
Barry you didn’t have much time to be worrying about making speeches.’

He would have to make a few speeches during that year, the two most important from the steps of the Hogan Stand as Meath retained the Leinster title and then beat Cork in the All-Ireland final to secure their first All-Ireland title since the team of 1967 that contained so many of the heroes of the Lyons brothers’ childhoods. Mick not only provided leadership, but produced one of the most memorable moments of the year with a full-stretch block on a shot by
Jimmy Kerrigan that prevented an almost certain goal in the All-Ireland final. Cork were four points ahead at the time. ‘I knew a goal would make it very difficult for us. I watched Jimmy coming through and I knew he wouldn’t try to go around me that he would shoot. I just had to time it right. Luckily it worked out.
’
The next score was a Meath goal by
Colm
O’Rourke. Meath ended up comfortable winners, 1–14 to 0–11.

That final was also the start of a rivalry with Cork that would become bitter over the next four years, resulting in players being sent off and off-the-field problems between the two groups. ‘I don’t know to this day why it became so bitter. Maybe it was that it was so tense. If we hadn’t been around they might have won four All-Irelands and vice versa. Also, they had just come out of the long shadow of Kerry and we had come out from behind Dublin. There was an awful lot at stake. You had two groups of very determined people and we were in each other’s way. It was a pity. But we are all friends now.’

Mick had a reputation for being a tough full back and he took as much punishment as he gave. ‘Was I a hard man? I don’t think so,’ he says quietly. ‘God, there were some very hard men around at the time, much harder than me. I would give a belt and take one, that’s the way football is. It’s a tough game but there’s a line you don’t cross. A lad might do something wrong from time to time but there’s rarely anything malicious about it.’

He had a good relationship with referees, even if he incurred their displeasure from time to time. ‘I always reckoned you’d know what line not to cross with a referee. He has a very hard job to do on such a big pitch. I never argued with a referee because there’s no point. They’re not going to change their mind. Have you ever seen a decision changed because a player argued with the referee? And if you accept his decision you might get a break later on.’

The rivalry with Dublin was different. ‘When
Seán was putting us through torture on the hills or on the beaches on wet, cold and windy winter evenings, the one thing that kept you going, that made all that pain worthwhile, was the thought of a Sunday in July playing Dublin in front of 70,000 people in Croke Park. The build-up to those games was fantastic. The supporters in both counties loved it and there was always a very special atmosphere around the place. Beating Dublin in a Leinster final was just as big as winning an All-Ireland. For lots of supporters it was more important.’

Pádraig agrees: ‘There was always a great buzz about the place when you were getting ready to play Dublin in those big games. They were just as special as the All-Ireland finals. There was a different atmosphere about them. We would knock lumps out of each other for seventy minutes and then go off and have a few drinks together. I always thought that side of football was important.’