CASEY: BARRY HELPED ME COPE
CULLEN MOTIVATED BY THE FLAK
LIMERICK’S Peter Casey has credited teammate
Barry Murphy for helping to drive him back to full fitness.
Casey (below) was hurling up a storm in last year’s AllIreland final win over Cork, having scored 0-5 in the opening 25 minutes, when he ruptured his cruciate ligament.
Murphy came on later in the game to see out the rout but weeks later suffered the same injury while in action for Doon.
They both returned to full training as this year’s championship came to a head, with Casey coming off the bench in the semifinal and final wins over Galway and Kilkenny respectively.
He explained: “Myself and Barry Murphy were on the exact same timescale with the cruciate and we had plenty of low days, but it was great I had Barry and Barry had me. We were able to count on each other.
“There was loads of times when me and Barry were doing loads of runs on our own. I can only think if I’d been by myself, then it would have been 10 times worse.
“To have Barry going through the whole thing made it so much easier, especially in the gym and in the runs back in Rathkeale in the winter. It made it a whole lot easier.”
He added: “I had two holidays before Christmas that got me away from it.
“Around Christmas, it was tough, but getting back in among the lads, the weeks fly by.
“It’s days like this when you’re in the gym that you’re hoping to get back, so it’s absolutely fantastic to be back and to be part of it.”
And he revealed: “To make a contribution is unreal as well.”
Setbacks
Casey’s brother Mike suffered a similar injury before the 2020 championship and then a number of setbacks subsequently, which meant that he couldn’t re-establish himself until this year’s championship.
When it came to winning All-Irelands together, the siblings were like ships in the night.
“Would you believe, out of the four All-Irelands it was the first time that we were both still on the pitch together at the end,” said Peter.
“He was off in 2018 and he wasn’t around the last two times with injuries, that was just another great part of winning this year’s All-Ireland.
“It was great that the two of us were on the pitch together at the end.
“I’d say my mother didn’t thank us too much because her heart would have been all over the place I’d say, but it was brilliant to have the two of us on the field at the finish.”
FOR years, Finbarr Cullen was at the subject of sneers about his dedication to the Offaly football cause.
The decline following the All-Ireland win of 1982 had been sharp and, by the mid-90s, Offaly were an established Division Four team. Cullen’s first three summers as an Offaly footballer ended with heavy defeats to Dublin, Meath and Kildare.
An unheralded Wexford team beat them in Tullamore in 1994, they failed to score in the second half of another Meath trouncing the following year and Louth scored their first victory over them in 32 years in 1996.
Any rebuttal that the Edenderry man countered the jibes with would have been completely undermined by the evidence on the field. They were going nowhere, yet he retained belief.
“I would have played with some of the ’82 team,” he notes. “Like, when I started my career Padraig Dunne was still playing, Brendan Lowry was still playing, Mick Lowry was playing.
Effort
“I grew up with that so, in my head, whereas maybe the rest of the country didn’t look at Offaly seriously, I looked at Offaly as a team that it’s only a matter of time before they come back to win Leinsters.
“People would say, ‘Why are you putting in so much effort? You’re not going to win anything. You’re not going to go any further’.
“So that belief, that sneering, that kind of attitude would be the driving force.
“It pushed me on to try and improve — first of all as a club player and then as a county player.”
After managing Kilmacud Crokes to the All-Ireland club title in 1995, Offaly appointed Tommy Lyons in the autumn of the following year and progress finally became apparent. Rapid progress, as it turned out.
“He was an outsider with no agenda,” notes Cullen, who Lyons retained as captain. “I’m not saying the guys previously had any agenda but he just came in with an iron fist.
“It was either his way or the highway whereas the previous management, maybe if a guy was indecisive about coming in he’d be encouraged to come in.
“That didn’t happen in the first year under Tommy Lyons. If you weren’t playing you were just dropped.”
The regime was unforgiving, with Lyons later remarking that the players “had to get fit to train”. Their fitness soared as the weight fell off them; Tom Coffey alone lost as much as two stone.
To a man, Lyons included, they bought into the Nutron diet, which established what players should consume based on blood testing and was de rigueur for a few years afterwards.
“Look, in hindsight the Nutron diet was a gimmick,” says Cullen. “It was a basic diet and it wasn’t rocket science but at the time it got a lot of hype and the players needed something to focus.
Focus
“For Division Four footballers, which we were at the time, we needed something to focus on so the team bought into it and stuck to it religiously.
“I was lucky, I was living at home at the time and I had a mother who lived for GAA as well.
“Everything was laid out for me, so soya milk and all the yoghurt, everything was there for me, I didn’t have to lift a finger.”
They cruised out of Division Four and negotiated a very manageable draw in Leinster, albeit not without a severe scare from Westmeath, to