Passing of Tom Lynch severs another link with 1960s football glory days

Cavanman's Diary

There was shock and sadness last week when the word began to filter out that another of the great Cavan footballers, Tom Lynch, had gone to his eternal reward.

The previous afternoon, a group of football comrades had met up in Bailieborough. They meet regularly, for golf or lunch, and Monday was no different. We can only imagine the shock when the news broke the following evening that one of their number had passed away.

Tom’s first call-up to the Cavan senior football team was in 1959 but his connection with it ran deeper. In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, the Cavan-Meath border was the epicentre of Gaelic football’s greatest contemporary rivalry and he grew up in the middle of it, forged by its heat.

“Growing up at that time, going to school in Meath, it was intense,” he told me when I sat down in his living room for an interview in 2014.

“Cavan and Meath were the two top teams in the country. Meath surprised Cavan in 49, Cavan were going for three in a row. They brought back Jim Kearney of Oldcastle. I was going to school in Oldcastle, it was later on but I knew all of this. This all happened in our locality.

“Jesus, it was fierce, the pressure going to school at the time. But then when Cavan won the All-Ireland in 52,that was a turnaround for us. It was deadly. It was alive with football, you couldn't miss it. We lived for football, that was the way it was.”

Connie Kelly, a Mountnugent man who switched allegiance and won an All-Ireland with the Royals, was a neighbour; as a child, Lynch would see him cycling to matches, his football boots strapped to the handlebars.

After winning a Junior Championship with Castlerahan in 1959, he was called into the county team. Not long afterwards, he joined the Gardaí and playing with the likes of Offaly’s Greg Hughes and Cork’s Paddy Harrington (father of Padraig) brought him on hugely.

He starred on the Cavan Junior team – he and Charlie Gallagher, although senior regulars, were eligible as they had been suspended the year before – who won Ulster in 1962 and was promoted to the senior side immediately afterwards, winning the first of four Ulster SFC medals that summer at midfield against a Down side who hadn’t been beaten in championship football since the 1959 All-Ireland semi-final.

Cavan and Down shared all of the Ulster Championships between them in the 1960s, Cavan also beating the Mourne men in provincial finals in ’64, ’67 and ’69 – but Down mined three All-Irelands in the decade while Cavan came up short in All-Ireland semi-finals. It remained a source of regret for Tom long into his retirement.

“You can raise your game for one game and then you move on to the semi-final of the All-Ireland and it was like you were nearly ill-prepared for that; we never really re-produced it. If we could have played in Croke Park the way we did in Casement or in Clones, we would have won All-Irelands,” he said.

Cavan would tear into Down – “they came breathing fire,” said Colm McAlarney – but struggled in All-Ireland semi-finals, although they probably should have won at least two.

“Oh yeah,” Tom told me, “I remember Sean O’Neill telling me one time that they learned a lot from us in the physical end of things, that we brought them on a lot. They were a bit naive in the beginning but we hardened them up.”

Cavan football boasted a colourful cast of characters at the time, on and off the field. The chairman was TP O’Reilly, a hero of the Polo Grounds and a fanatical Cavan football man.

“I had great time for TP. He wore his heart on his sleeve,” Tom told me.

“We beat Down in Casement Park one time. They were always favourites to beat us, we were always the underdogs but we beat them this day. It was a real hot day and TP took off his shirt and he had a t-shirt underneath.

“JD Hickey was writing for the Independent at the time and he was above in the press box in the stand. TP had the cup and he was shaking it and saying, ‘come down Hickey’. And he was the chairman of the county board!

“He was a great man at the back of it all, looking after players. I went into the depot (Garda depot) around December 1959 and then we were in the National League final.

“And whatever happened, when the teams came out in the paper – I didn’t expect to be playing because the team was playing well, they beat Dublin, and I was happy enough to be on the panel – but didn’t they leave me out of the list in the paper.

“So I rang [county secretary] Hughie Smyth or someone to see was I playing or what happened. Anyway, TP was in the Four Courts at some case and I was working in Kevin St and he came out to the station to explain it and to say that I definitely had to be in Croke Park. There are not too many who would do that.

“Greg Hughes was there with me and he said ‘who’s that?’ and I said ‘that’s the chairman of the Cavan county board’ and he was very impressed. These are things that you wouldn’t forget, little touches like that.”

The fairytale run came to an end in 1969 – 45 years ago this very week, in fact. Again, Cavan were underdogs in the Ulster final against All-Ireland holders Down, and again Cavan blew them away. The All-Ireland was within their grasp but the dream died in the semi-final, after a replay.

“We beat them again in ’69 and we drew with Offaly when we should have beaten them. Miceál Greenan missed a late free the first day, but I wouldn't blame him because he was only brought in off the line, a young fella. It was a wet cold day. He shouldn't have been asked to take the free. They had taken Charlie off, he was on the sideline. And they beat us in the replay. And that was it.

“We took that defeat very badly. It was the end of the road. It was like a morgue in Croke Park. Before that it wasn’t as bad [when they lost] but after that replay... To be beaten by not as good a team. Fellas were crying in the dressing-room. It was going to be very hard to pick it up.”

The team soon broke up. Gabriel Kelly and Gallagher retired and Lynch went to Canada, winning a Toronto championship with Garryowen and sometimes flying down to moonlight with the Cavan team in New York. In 1971, Tom returned for a few matches in the league – Gabriel was now the team manager – but decided to leave it at that. It was, he said, “a good old innings”.

Tom later was a selector with the Cavan senior team and manager of the minors. He was a noted competitor on the golf course, winning the Captain’s Prize at Virginia a couple of times, and great company. One member of the golf club told me last week that paired with Lynch in a competition, he knew that when things got tight, Tom would produce the goods.

My favourite story he told me was about a brawl between Cavan and Donegal in a league play-off in Carrick-On-Shannon in March, 1968, which journalist Mick Dunne described as “an appalling travesty of sport”. I heard it when interviewing Tom and Gabriel in 2019.

“Donegal and Cavan used to have it fairly rough at the time. There were several little schemozzles this day,” recalled Tom.

“Two boys were at it anyway and Gabriel was in between them trying to split them apart. And I came up behind and threw a fist.”

Kelly: “I saw a fist coming over my shoulder and whack yer man!”

Lynch: “Later on that evening, the two teams ended up in the one hotel and I was in the toilet and yer man comes in with a black eye. I said, ‘Jaysus, what happened you?’ He says, ‘Some hoor hit me a belt!’ “‘Did you not see him?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I didn’t’. ‘Jaysus,’ I said, ‘that’s a terror...’”

And they all laughed – the great stories are the ones you tell over and over. Tom Lynch may be gone but those stories remain. A good old innings is right. May he rest in peace.