Latest news with #HellforLeather–TheStoryofGaelicFootball
RTÉ News
17-06-2025
- Sport
- RTÉ News
'Gaelic football owes a debt of gratitude to Kerry'
Analysis: No Kerry team has ever taken the field without belief in its ability, which is why the county has been so successful By Diarmuid O'Donovan One of my favourite stories about Kerry GAA comes from 1911. In March that year, Dr Crokes of Killarney met Mitchels of Tralee in a delayed championship game from the previous year. The game was intense and the scores were close. A dispute arose between the teams during the second half. Crokes and Kerry star, Dick Fitzgerald, led his Crokes team off the field. This turned out to be a grave error. The GAA's Central Council had recently ruled that "any team that walks off the field will forfeit the game and be subject to an automatic six-month suspension from all competition". The reality of the situation did not dawn on Crokes until it was too late. The new rule meant that Crokes would miss the 1911 County Championship, and the Crokes players, including Dick Fitzgerald, could not play for Kerry. In an effort to retrieve the situation, Fitzgerald attended a subsequent meeting of the Kerry Board where the draws for the 1911 County Championship were taking place. He pleaded for leniency and managed to persuade the Board to agree to include Crokes in the championship draw, and that they would not play their first round until late September, when the suspension had been served. To quote Fitzgerald's biographer, Tom Looney, this was "a Kerry solution to a Kerry problem!" From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, retired Dublin footballer Robbie Kelleher and historian Mark Duncan discuss the Hell for Leather – The Story of Gaelic Football series Cork became the short-term beneficiaries of all this. Waterford defeated Kerry in the Munster Championship. Cork then defeated Waterford and went on to win the All-Ireland title. It was short-term because it would be another 32 years before Cork would defeat Kerry in senior football, and 34 years before Cork won another All-Ireland title. This story sums up everything that is tangible and visible about Kerry football. It has fierce and bitter local rivalries, stubbornness, guile, cunning, a drive to never, ever make the same mistake twice and, most of all, an innate ability to overcome any difficulty or situation for the sake of football. Kerry football was slow off the mark in terms of winning All-Ireland titles. The All-Ireland Championships began in 1887, but Kerry won only one Munster Championship (1892) before the turn of the 20th century. The first All-Ireland came in 1903. That win rooted Gaelic football in the Kerry psyche, and 38 All-Ireland titles have been won since then, an average of a title almost every three years. A little more than a decade after the "Fitzgerald Solution", Kerry became the scene of some of the bitterest fighting and atrocities of the Civil War. Yet, the scars of this dark time were never allowed to intrude on the Kerry senior football team. In his book In the Name of the Game, J.J. Barrett tells the story of how Free State soldiers such as Con Brosnan and Johnny Walsh played side by side with Anti-Treaty soldiers such as John Joe Sheehy and Joe Barrett. Brosnan was an army officer and organised a pass between noon and 6.00pm on Sundays to allow Sheehy, Barrett and others to play football. This does not mean that there were not strong differences of political opinion between these men (there certainly were). What it does show is that their desire to play for Kerry could overcome these differences. Barrett captained Kerry to the 1929 All-Ireland final. When the captaincy came his way again in 1931, he organised, in the face of fierce opposition from republican elements across the county, that the captaincy would be given to his old adversary and football colleague, Brosnan. Barrett was captain again in 1932 when Kerry won its fourth consecutive title. During that time and throughout the 1930s, Kerry used their fame to tour the United States and raise funds for the building of Austin Stack Park in Tralee and Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney (named after the Dick Fitzgerald from earlier). Kerry were fortunate to have Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan in charge of the Kerry teams from the1920s to the 1960s. He is regarded as the developer of modern team management in the GAA. His innovations, such as collective training and tactical awareness, were often the decisive contribution to Kerry All-Ireland wins. By the 1940s, Cork football was sufficiently organised to stymie Kerry's annual run through the Munster Championship. Cork won Munster titles in 1943, '45, '49, '52, '56 and '57, unprecedented success by Cork standards. Kerry's response was to win eight successive Munster championships and two All-Ireland titles between 1958 and 1965. During that run a new threat emerged for Kerry, namely Ulster football. Kerry did defeat Armagh in the 1953 All-Ireland final but lost to Derry in 1958 (semi-final) and the subsequence emergence of Down in the 1960s posed a new problem. Down beat Kerry, not just once, but in the 1960 final, the 1961 semi-final and again in the 1968 final (to this day, Kerry have never beaten Down in their five championship meetings). From RTÉ News, Michael Ryan reports from Tralee as Kerry bring Sam Maguire back to the Kingdom in 1985 The Ulster question went away for the remainder of the 20th century and Kerry tacked on 11 more All-Ireland titles between 1969 and 1999. This included the four-in-a-row between 1978 to 1981 and a controversial loss to Offaly in 1982. Ulster teams have re-emerged this century however, in the form of Armagh (who beat Kerry in the 2002 final), Tyrone (beginning in 2003 semi-final and several more times since), and Donegal (2012 QF). The restructuring of the All-Ireland championships since 2001 and the introduction of various forms of All-Ireland qualifiers has meant Kerry are no longer subject to a knockout blow from Cork, or the occasional ambush from Waterford or Tipperary, as happened in 1911, 1928 or 1957. This has helped rather than hindered the Kerry insatiable quest for All-Ireland titles. Kerry have lifted the Sam Maguire cup seven times since 2000. That's an average of one every 3.5 years; a rate almost as good as the success rate since the first title in 1903. It is a success rate achieved in spite of ongoing issues with Ulster football, and Dublin's nine All-Ireland titles between 2011 and 2023 (Kerry lost to Dublin in four of these finals). From RTÉ Archives, a 1984 edition of The Sunday Game looks at Kerry football dominance including two four in a row All Ireland title wins from 1929 to 1932 and 1978 to 1982 Gaelic football owes a debt of gratitude to Kerry. The county had shown the ability to surmount civil unrest, economic depression, emigration, the intense rivalry of its internal inter-club competitions and the intense efforts of almost every other county to defeat them. No Kerry team has ever taken the field without belief in its ability, and the intention to do everything possible to win the game. That is ultimately why Kerry has been so successful. That is why, as a football fan I love them and, as a Corkman, I have very mixed emotions.
RTÉ News
09-06-2025
- Sport
- RTÉ News
The fascinating story of Gaelic football's historic roots
Analysis: Right at its core, Gaelic football is a mirror to Irish society and to the nature of that society at any given time By UCD Before January 17th, 1885, there was no such thing as Gaelic football. What there was, though, was centuries of folk football played across Ireland in every corner, recorded in legal texts, in poetry, in newspaper accounts, in travellers' records. You'd games played between parishes, villages, groups of friends, two people kicking a ball to each other and presumably one person kicking a ball to him or herself. The tradition of kicking a ball is universal. It's the same type of game that was played across England or in the mining villages of Wales or across Scotland. You can go to China on the one side and there are records of people kicking a ball in sport. Spin right the way round to the far side of the globe to Mesoamerica, and you get exactly the same thing. From RTÉ, trailer for new series Hell for Leather – The Story of Gaelic Football This shared human experience is remade in Ireland by Irish geography, by Irish people, by the peculiarities of life on a small island off the edge of Europe, where it developed its own traditions, its own forms, its own lore. You can see it in the statute of Galway written down from 1527. You see it in the school constructed by Hugh Montgomery in Newcastle in Co Down when he laid out a playing ground for football for his students in 1620. You see it in the matches played in the Curragh of Kildare or in the fields around Drumcondra in Dublin. It's a game which created heroes who were recorded in poetry. It is a game which created violence, which made its way to the courts, which saw army and police brought to suppress riots at football matches in Drumcondra in the 1770s. From the 18th century, there is also talk about a football match played out of Parsons Castle in Parsons Town, now Birr in the south of Offaly where bachelors played married men in a game near the castle and cheered the king after the game and came back and drank barrels of beer in celebration. It's formal and it's informal. It's not reckless and it can be reckless. It's not violent and it's very violent and it's wrapped through communities and traditions. It's not recorded with the same fervor as hurling, not presented in the same thrilling, exciting manner as hurling not seen to be something that reaches that incredible crescendo that hurling reached through those centuries. But it's there all the time, and it's there everywhere. From RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany, Paul Rouse reads A Christmas Ball about the first Gaelic football match ever played in Wexford The context for the arrival of Gaelic football is the existence of soccer and rugby on the island by the early 1880s and these games beginning to spread around the island. One of the people who helped spread those games was Michael Cusack, a devoted rugby player who described himself as a sterling lover of the game. A man then who turned away from the sports of empire, in founding the GAA with Maurice Davin and set upon putting together their own version of football. Partly because Davin despised rugby and thought it was a brutalising game, unfit to be played because people just got injured. Those two men knew the rules about soccer and rugby. When they founded the GAA, they set out to invent a Gaelic football, a football game that would stand against the games of the empire. They drew on the rules of soccer and rugby in constructing those broad rules that Davin wrote up. He was well placed to draw up rules because he was methodical and these rules were clearly influenced by the other games that were in existence. The first match was held on the green in Callan between a team from Kilkenny and the team from Callan. It was a remarkable game in that there was no score by the time they finished. The game was intense and physical, but you could only score a goal. There were no points, there were no points posts. They quickly understood that there were going to be very few scores if they left it like this, particularly when the initial rules permitted 21 aside. From RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Sport, GAA president Jarlath Burns on his hope that the "basic principles" of Gaelic football can again flourish following rule changes to the game The context for the arrival of Gaelic football is the existence of soccer and rugby on the island by the early 1880s and these games beginning to spread around the island. One of the people who helped spread those games was Michael Cusack, a devoted rugby player who described himself as a sterling lover of the game. A man then who turned away from the sports of empire, in founding the GAA with Maurice Davin and set upon putting together their own version of football. Partly because Davin despised rugby and thought it was a brutalising game, unfit to be played because people just got injured. Those two men knew the rules about soccer and rugby. When they founded the GAA, they set out to invent a Gaelic football, a football game that would stand against the games of the empire. They drew on the rules of soccer and rugby in constructing those broad rules that Davin wrote up. He was well placed to draw up rules because he was methodical and these rules were clearly influenced by the other games that were in existence. The first match was held on the green in Callan between a team from Kilkenny and the team from Callan. It was a remarkable game in that there was no score by the time they finished. The game was intense and physical, but you could only score a goal. There were no points, there were no points posts. They quickly understood that there were going to be very few scores if they left it like this, particularly when the initial rules permitted 21 aside. The late great Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh in one of his final television interviews explaining the origins of Gaelic Football ☘️❤️ #HellForLeather | Monday at 9.35pm — RTÉ One (@RTEOne) June 5, 2025 By 1886, there was a GAA club playing Gaelic football in every province and multiple teams in many counties playing against each other. Cusack wrote repeatedly in the newspapers, praising the discipline and good temper of these players who now began to spread the game. But all across the country, there was mayhem around these matches. All around the place, there was this idea of a deep physicality in the games. Of course, there were loads of matches conducted in good spirit and, and in flying discipline. But a match in Kilkenny in early 1887 between Ballyhale and Slieverue went out of control and the two teams forgot about the ball and ripped into each other. The county board officials who were there couldn't get them to stop and the only way they could do so was to pull up the goalposts. Down in Tralee, there was a match between Castleisland and Tralee. Rev John P Davan wrote a reminiscence of that match about 50 years later. He'd no idea who won the match and all he could remember was a fella from Castleisland called Foxy Tom, who threw three fellows out over the rope on the sideline as this expression of manhood. It reached the point where it could only be a contest which inspired something like that if it had meaning - and the meaning was that you represented where you were from. It was a stroke of genius - a lucky stroke in many respects - to make the organisation parish-based. You played for where you were from on a parish basis. Contests then began to take off, particularly after the establishment of the All Ireland and local county championships from the beginning of 1887. We often talk about the GAA in a local context and this idea of local people competing against each other. It's the engine which drives it, and you cannot beat a bit of local bitterness to draw a crowd and give something more meaning. From The Irish Examiner in 2023, how to make an All Ireland winning team? But it also mattered because it had a national framework and you could be the All Ireland champions if you were properly put together and you progressed. If you won your county championship, you earned the right at this point to represent your county in an All Ireland championship and become the All Ireland champions no matter what county you were in. Sport always reflects the society in which it is played and the times in which it is played. Because it is so popular and so intrinsic to so many people in so many different areas, Gaelic football is a mirror to Irish society and to the nature of society at any given time. Just as the informal games of the years before the founding of the GAA reflected that world and just as the pre-television era reflected that world, our game now reflects the modern world. It's hugely organised, driven by data, obsessed with trying to find an edge in fitness and trying always to be on the cusp of the next great thing in that search to be better. But right at the core, it's still the love of play, the love of the ball, the love of kicking the ball, the love of the challenge of taking on another person and the desire to win.
