A melancholy Derry air for Davis’s otherwise happy football life and times

It isn’t quite 30 years ago, but nearly. The last — and only previous — time Cork faced Derry in the football championship was the All-Ireland of 1993. Anthony Davis remembers it well but is curious as to why he has been inundated with media requests.

“We should focus on the team that’s there,” he vainly tries to explain. Already he’s slightly bewildered by the new championship and its fixtures being flicked out like a Vegas dealer’s cards.

Called early in the week, closer to the county’s thrilling win over Roscommon than the gravity of Sunday’s All-Ireland quarter-final against Derry, he muses: “I was wondering whether we were reviewing or previewing with the lads hardly out of the ice bath.”

Davis mainstay

Go back to mid-September 1993. Cork already have won two All-Irelands out of four in the previous six years. Davis was a mainstay on all of them, a clever corner back with the gas to play on the wing as he later did — injury did keep him out of the most famous one, the 1990 completion of the Cork double.

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Anyway, he’s back three years later and the team is playing Derry. It’s a novel final but the counties have been slugging it out at under-age for over a decade. And club — for a prelude, Davis’s O’Donovan Rossa Skibbereen have won the 1993 All-Ireland after a replay with Carlow’s Éire Óg.

“That was the highlight of my career! We won our first county that season and went on to win the All-Ireland. We’d never even won a county before, let alone an All-Ireland. I really enjoyed that.”

To get that far, the club had to go up to Derry to play 1991 champions Lavey in an All-Ireland semi-final. The ensuing mayhem caused the concept of home county to be dropped from club semi-finals.

“They must have thought that we’d lie down and die. We had it tough growing up in Skibereen, when playing the likes of Castlehaven! We were no soft touches and we half enjoyed it. Quite a few of us had played with Cork. I was in the minor final in 1981 when we beat Derry and there were under-21 finals in the 1980s as well and we beat them.

“We’d played up there and none of this was a surprise to us. We were well able. Only for the referee, Séamus Prior, there’d have been an absolute riot. He was magnificent, down the line very fair and honest and anyone he caught, they were gone.”

Then, in September he lined out in a fourth senior All-Ireland, together with his brother Don. It all started brilliantly for Cork. Joe Kavanagh got in for an early goal and points followed but Derry recovered.

The root of Anthony Davis’s problem was that team-mate Niall Cahalane decided to box Enda Gormley after about half an hour. Two things happened. Gormley woke up and went on the have a stormer and referee Tommy Howard, who booked Cahalane, was left with a nagging suspicion that he had been too lenient.

Derry manager Eamonn Coleman had entered the pitch to have words with the referee. Tension was heightened and into this maelstrom came Davis with a mistimed shoulder on Dermot Heaney.

“I said I’ll shoulder him over the side-line and mistimed it a bit, not by much. I was expecting a booking but I got sent off and we lost the game. That’s it. I’ve never gone back and watched it.”

The commentary team of Ger Canning and Colm O’Rourke described it as “harsh” and openly wondered had it been a reaction triggered by the Cahalane incident.

“I don’t like going on about this. The main thing was that my team-mates didn’t win an All-Ireland and my brother didn’t win an All-Ireland. I also don’t want to in any way take from Derry’s first All-Ireland.”

McCarthy death

In June, Cork GAA was shocked by the sudden death of Teddy McCarthy. He was the fourth football team-mate of Davis to die prematurely.

The one that impacted closest to home was the 1993 All-Ireland captain Mick McCarthy from Skibbereen, who died in a car crash five years later in February 1998.

“It impacted a whole region and town. Mick was a home bird. When the rest of us left to go to work or college, he stayed put. He just loved Skibbereen. He saved that club final for us. In the drawn match in Croke Park, Mick put on the performance of a lifetime and that was the only reason we weren’t beaten. Single-handedly, he got all the scores to pull us back. He was magnificent.”

Anthony Davis’s second act in intercounty football was as a pundit on the Sunday Game, an involvement that began when he was asked out of the blue to do analysis on the 1994 All-Ireland semi-final between Dublin and Leitrim.

“On the same day, it was Jason Sherlock’s team playing in the minor at corner forward and I remember looking down and thinking, ‘oh my God! Who’s that! He was electric.’ I went from that to the All-Ireland and although it was kind of accidental — certainly not by design — I stayed for the next 19 years. What I loved was being part of the big occasions. Eventually, though I fell out of love with it. When the buzz goes, it becomes work and I had enough work to be doing.

“What I most enjoyed was the individual players: the Maurice Fitzgerald’s, Peter Canavan’s — I was privileged to have a ringside seat. I don’t go to a game to see how someone sets up their defence or how long they hold possession. I want to see David Clifford or Shane Walsh. I want to see Shane McGuigan or the young Canavan’s — creating and expressing.”

Even club football is affected.

“In the club, now, the first thing you have is a lad with a clipboard: possession, turnovers, kick-outs, the whole lot. A lot of people of my generation who retired and went training teams got caught out by science and stats because it moved on so quickly. It’s more scientific, data-driven, sports psychology. We’d be more boot, bite and bollock!”