When Dublin and Pairc Ui Chaoimh is discussed, it’s invariably accompanied by cheerful nostalgia about 1983 and all that went with it.
But you won’t hear much about the 1999 League final.
Admittedly, Cork folk don’t look back on it with great fondness either, despite their two-point victory in what was a poor game played on a rotten day in front of a small crowd. The official attendance was 10,000 but it may have been significantly less and very much dwarfed by the turnout of close to 30,000 when Cork and Kerry played a League final at the same venue two years earlier.
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How did it come to be on Leeside anyway? When agreeing to play the infamous 1987 League quarter-final at Croke Park, when Cork got the train home rather than play extra time, their county secretary Frank Murphy insisted that the next knockout game they played against Dublin in the competition would revert to Cork.
That agreement wasn’t held to when the counties met in the 1989 ‘home’ final as Croke Park was designated as the venue in advance of the pairing, but Murphy wasn’t going to be hoodwinked again 10 years later.
Cork had already made jaunts to the capital for their quarter-final and semi-finals wins over Derry and Meath respectively.
“Maybe in Frank’s head, the cost of all that at the time came into it too,” says Joe Kavanagh, centre-forward for Cork at the time.
“You’re going up the night before, staying in hotels. You get fed up of that too so we were only too happy to play at home.
“To go to Dublin, you were always getting a half one/two o’clock train up to Dublin and you were gone from 12 o’clock on a Saturday and you weren’t back until Sunday night so the fact that it was down in Cork, you met at one o’clock in a hotel inside and had a pre-match meal and a bit of a chat and down the road to your own stadium.”
For Dublin, it was the first full year of Tommy Carr’s management and they were going through a transitional phase which, it turned out, still had quite a way to go. Their performance thay day suggested as much.
Jason Sherlock was sent off with 12 minutes to go but, despite relying on Kevin O’Dwyer to make three first half saves from Brian Stynes, Declan Darcy and Dessie Farrell, Cork were comfortably the better team and five up late on when Darren Homan’s goal supplemented the measly seven points that Dublin had managed up to then.
With Keith Barr having played his final game for the county in the previous year’s Championship defeat to Kildare, Paul Curran had been shifted into centre-back from the wing.
“He was looking for somebody to fill that position,” Curran recalls. “It wasn’t my natural position. I think Johnny Magee came along shortly after that and filled it for a few years, but I didn’t mind playing it now.
“The thing about centre-back, you’re always going to come up against one of your opponents’ better players and Joe certainly fitted that description so I think we had a decent enough battle on the day.”
Reaching that League final perhaps gave something of a false reading as to where Dublin stood nationally. They limped into a Leinster final having been somewhat fortunate to get over Laois after a replay, but the season ended abruptly for them against Meath.
“I missed the Leinster final with a shoulder injury and we ended getting a right good ould beating. We were in transition, we had a few new players coming through,” adds Curran, who pointed to how competitive the inter-county scene was back then.
“I don’t think we’ll have another decade like the ‘90s, ever. Eight different teams won All-Irelands in that decade. You’ll never see that again.
“The provincial championships were competitive, all of them. Meath were strong, Kildare came a year after that as well. There was good teams around that time in the ‘90s, even in the late ‘90s.
“The turn of the century you had other teams coming good like Tyrone and Armagh and one or two others. It wasn’t easy.”
Cork kicked on and the League final experience stood to them when they beat Kerry in the Munster final at the Pairc on another soaking day, and only lost the All-Ireland final by three points to Meath.
But perhaps the string of victories prior to that was somewhat misleading too as they achieved them without Nemo Rangers pair Colin Corkey and Steven O’Brien, with manager Larry Tompkins resisting calls to recall them.
“The Saturday before the All-Ireland final, they went up with Nemo to play Vincent’s and the two boys were the star of the show and that was the question - ‘How come they’re not playing tomorrow?’” Kavanagh recalls.
“There were a few young fellas coming through so that was possibly Tompkins and the management’s thinking at the time - this is a young bunch and they’ll work hard for us, we don’t need Corkery, we don’t need O’Brien and it was working.
“We had a great League run and in the Championship which vindicated them because we were winning but that experience would have been worth a couple of scores, O’Brien and Corkery.”
It would be a further 11 years before Cork won their next All-Ireland and Dublin didn’t get back on top until the year after. The counties went in opposite directions thereafter but will meet in Division Two for the first time since 1988 tomorrow as Dublin make their debut at the new Pairc Ui Chaoimh, having not won by the Lee since 1990.
“If you look at the front six against Limerick,” says Curran, “it’s still a fairly strong forward line with a lot of established players so I think Dessie realised he has to find a couple of backs.
“I don’t know if you’d class it as experimenting - they just aren’t there and he needs to find them.”
No more than 1999, the venue won’t be packed and both Curran and Kavanagh agree that the surface will likely suit Dublin more.
Taking a longer-term view towards competing in the biggest games at Croke Park in years to come, Kavanagh believes that playing at Pairc Ui Chaoimh rather than Pairc Ui Rinn will stand to Cork. But it doesn’t lend itself to an ambush so much.
“That’s possibly why the few goal chances came as well against Meath because of the bigger spaces and Dublin might have that Sunday because they’re well used to Croke Park.
“I’d put the new Pairc Ui Chaoimh akin to Croke Park now. Even the surrounds, but the pitch itself is immaculate.
“It lends itself to good fast football and Newbridge possibly suited Cork, if you know what I mean.”
“The good thing that’s going for Dublin for this one is the big pitch, great surface, they’ll be able to play a bit of ball so it’s not like the old Pairc Ui Chaoimh,” says Curran. “It’s a bit like going into Croke Park with the surface so I would expect Dublin to carry on winning and probably put Cork under pressure for the rest of it.”
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