CONNACHT SENIOR FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP FIRST ROUND:His mother was a Ward from Ballinasloe, and Joe Kernan couldn't refuse the call of Galway football, writes KEITH DUGGAN

JOE KERNAN spent last night on a cruise taking a slow route down the Hudson river. He was there along with one thousand other people in what was an imaginative and lavish fund-raiser for Galway football. The tinkling of glasses and the glittering canopy of Manhattan was all very well but, inevitably, his mind drifted elsewhere. He had several roles to fill – ambassador for Galway football, manager of the team and guardian of the players, who were mingling with the guests. All the temptations of the city were there but the instructions were explicit: home early.

He is jovial and good company and, on some level, he enjoyed the experience. It was different. Friday nights before the championship were never like this in Armagh. But it was also almost impossible to believe this is how his championship journey with Galway was starting out. As his group stood on deck and the boat moved on to the water, Kernan looked above the buildings and scanned the sky.

“I just hope any planes don’t have to land,” he laughed.

Big Joe. He was feted as a player in the vivid orange of Armagh but it is as a manager that he became a national face and name in Irish sport, first with his home town of Crossmaglen and most famously when he guided Armagh to their only All-Ireland in his very first season. Who can forget that moment; the big fists clenched, the half-genuflection to the Hogan Stand and the tight embrace with Kieran McGeeney?

Armagh were never the most fashionable and never the most popular but they were always their own people and they changed the way other football men thought about football. That was eight years ago. There might have been more All-Irelands but that never happened and when Kernan took his leave in 2008, his legacy was assured.

He told himself he was going to give all his energies to his business now he was out of football. He had built a successful auctioneering business in Cross’ but an idle realisation often bugged him.

“If I gave as much time to my work as I gave to the GAA, I’d be off living in Florida or somewhere by now.”

Why is he back? Why does he find himself driving the brand new motorway from Galway to Dublin long after midnight and the road so empty that he could be the only living soul? Why does he want to go prove he could do things in a different football culture?

When he finished with Armagh, he swore publicly and privately he wouldn’t manage another county.

“I had it written in stone that Joe Kernan wouldn’t go anywhere else,” he admits.

He had three approaches before Galway. He declines to say who. Just out of respect. But there was something about the maroon. Something of his childhood in that bold colour.

His mother was Joan Ward from Ballinasloe. His father stayed in the family guest house when the Kernans came down trading horses during the fair. In the mid- 1960s, when the Galway football team was the epitome of flair, he learned that the Donnellans were relations. Third cousins on his mother’s side and cousins he never even got to meet. But the connection was important.

He has a distinct recollection of kicking ball on the street in Crossmaglen and hearing Micheál O’Hehir call a Galway match on the radio. He won his first trophy around then: a Cross’ street league. “I’d say it’s worth 10 pence but I still have it in the house.”

But it mattered to him to think that these relatives were down playing in Croke Park.

Football also mattered deeply – quietly – in Armagh. In 1929, his uncle Jamesie died from a football injury. It was preventable: Jamesie got a knee in the stomach, waved off the pain and suggestions he visit the hospital. He had ruptured his spleen, poisoned himself and died during the night.

Football ceased in the town for a year, out of respect, until one day his grandfather threw a ball out the front door to announce the mourning period was over. Frank Kernan, a cousin of Joe’s, played in the minor final of 1949 and the senior final of 1953. Joe played at all grades with his cousin Hank. Joe scored two goals against Dublin in the All-Ireland final defeat in 1977, played in All-Ireland semi-finals in 1980 and 1982, winning two All Stars before retiring in 1987. He took Crossmaglen from nowhere to winning three All-Ireland titles in four years and then guided the county to their first All-Ireland title in 2002. Now he has four sons on the Armagh squad.

So maroon is all very well but that face and silver hair will always be associated with orange. So what brought him back?

Kernan laughs as he recalls the details. This is in a hotel on the outskirts of Galway and Joe drinks green tea. He had met John Joe Halloran, the maker of Galway football, at his request in Mullingar. He told Halloran from the outset it was a pointless exercise.

Kernan had met persuasive men before, men who just smiled when told “no” and then kept on coming back. But Halloran wouldn’t stop. He liked him. He heard what he had to say. He looked at the brochure for the training arena in Loughgeorge. It had the sheen of ambition. He was drawn in.

“Talk to your family before you say no,” Halloran counselled. “Just see what they say.”

“When I got home, the boys had my mind made up for me. Patricia too. They told me there is no other county that you would go to than Galway. So that helped. And my mother had died the year before. I think that had a big, big part to play in my decision.

“Because I have no doubt it would have made her very proud to think I was doing this. I knew the Galway football tradition. So whatever happens, I know she will be happy.”

Committing to Galway also confirmed to him what he knew deep down: he would never manage Armagh again.

“Because I have sons playing,” he explains. “There is an unwritten rule in the GAA that you are not allowed to manage your sons.

“It seems to create jealousies and bitterness and it’s sad. I remember looking at Cheltenham and seeing Katie Walsh and the Carberrys and all these family successes and it was wonderful. But that is not accepted in the GAA. You see it so often and in so many counties. I find it sad. It is not hard for me to watch the boys playing for Armagh now that I am finished. It was hard when I managed because there was things going on that were not right. It was gutless and cowardice and it wasn’t right.

“It was people who wanted to have a go at me but because of what I did with Armagh and with Cross, they could not. So they had a go at the boys. It was disappointing. And people have short memories. My sons have become stronger because of it. My wife said to me long ago: the people you meet on the way up are always the people you meet on the way down. So you treat everyone the same. I like to think I do that. I haven’t changed in 30 years. We are only here on this wee place for a short while and how you treat people is everything.”

And so Joe Kernan and Galway, the most intriguing combination to develop on the Gaelic football scene for many years, came about. The assumptions were obvious. The west of Ireland team would be converted into another version of Armagh, where the famous defensive blanket was originally woven. There was precious little evidence of it in the first league match however, when Mayo handed Galway an absolute trimming in Castlebar.

This was a departure from the script. When Kernan attended the county final, he found himself whisked out of his seat and paraded before the crowd. John Joe Halloran was somewhere nearby, a whirling dervish of activity. The crowd started applauding. This was Tuam Stadium. The Home of Football! Kernan was honoured and embarrassed. He turned to whoever was standing nearby. “Just hope they are doing this next year.”

There was no applause that day in Mayo. Nothing to applaud. Nobody panicked. They don’t pay much heed to the league in Galway. Nor do they spit and shine Connacht medals very often. Bluntly put, Kernan was invited to Galway to try and bring an All-Ireland to the county. He accepts this is the task and he believes he can do it without abandoning Galway’s reputation as a ball-playing county.

“Have we been less attack-minded?” he challenges. We were just behind Cork in scoring in the league. Our intake at the back was poor. I am not here to take away from Galway’s attacking game. I want to see 1-20 on the scoreboard every Sunday. But I don’t want to see 2-14 at the other end. You know, I insulted Mattie Clancy last week, I said he was 29. He is only 27. I remember him scoring that goal against Derry back in 2001. He is around a long time. So is Joe Bergin. A lot of these boys are around a long time. And there is so much talent here.

“I only found out since I came here Gareth Bradshaw is one of the best footballers in the country. But getting the belief; that is half the battle with these boys. More teams now are thinking more technically than flair. They are putting a system in place. The training is faster, it is tailored. Of course I want Galway to win an All-Ireland. We have to make sure all is working.

“After that Mayo game, I sat down and knew there was a lot of work to do. Natural ability will only take a team so far. The game has changed so much over the last 10 years – good football alone won’t win it anymore. Kerry have realised that. Whether they like it or not, Kerry play a good defensive game now. Galway have to adapt to that. We can be attack-minded. Some people call it a blanket defence. I call it working hard to get the ball back.”

Up and down the motorway has been his winter and his spring. Early starts and late home. Kernan enjoys driving. It gives him a chance to think. This, too, has changed. He recalls one night coming home in the bad old days and being tailed by a car long enough to make him concerned. Crossmaglen and Armagh remained steadfastly apolitical through the worst of the Troubles. The game was a diversion and a response. It was probably no coincidence that Armagh and then Tyrone won All-Irelands after the ceasefire in the North. When he was with Armagh, they worked ferociously hard.

It came from them as much as from him. One night Diarmuid Marsden, one of Kernan’s favourites because he was classy and quiet and just did whatever he was asked, started going head to head with McGeeney.

“Holy shit. I mean, the place was shaking. I had to tell them to back off a wee bit. But they wouldn’t. And they carried that into matches.”

A general fascination with Armagh bloomed. They hit hard and pumped steel and they were confrontational and because of that, they got miserable press and the intelligence and skill of their football was often overlooked. Big Joe flinging his All-Ireland runner’s-up plaque across the dressingroom during the half-time talk of the All-Ireland final against Kerry has become the stuff of myth. Those years passed quickly. Before he knew it, he had retired. McGeeney was roaming the sideline with Kildare. His boys were coming through as senior footballers.

Joe and Patricia had six sons. Joseph, the oldest boy, died when he was just a week old. “He was born in March and would have been in his 30s now,” Joe says quietly.

He never talks long about football without referring to family. His father died when Joe was just 11 and a few years later his sisters and brother moved to Australia. He could have done the same. His fare was paid. He liked the sound of it. In the end, he decided against it because he was afraid he would like it too much, afraid he might abandon football.

So he stayed, opened a bar and has helped shaped Armagh football in the decades that followed. His family travelled back for Armagh’s fabled days. They were in Croke Park when it mattered. And anyhow, his sisters have that Irish gift of making the world seem like a village. They have a talent for the telephone. “They could tell me things that happened up the road from me that I don’t know.” But the funny thing is Joe has yet to go to Australia. He keeps putting it off. He has unfinished business to take care of first.

After he retired as Armagh manager and the phone stopped ringing 50 times a day with enquires from journalists or football details, he enjoyed the quietness until the day came he realised he hated it. He felt hellish.

“I went to my doctor and he said: ‘You have to understand, your mind has been going a hundred miles an hour for the last 15 years and then it stopped.’ I went down to Seán Boylan. He said: ‘I was expecting your call.’

“It is the same as when you stop playing. You know, bye-bye, close the gate behind you. There was an emptiness that I found hard to fill and hard to accept.

“Because my mind was used to being far more active. That is why I think for players, too, reunions are important. Rekindle old fires. There is life after quitting, for sure. But the show is over as far as you are concerned and I think that can be very tough for players – and managers – to deal with.”

So here he is. Big Joe. Back in the thick of it. If he has one football wish, it is that Armagh and Galway don’t meet this summer. If that happens, he will deal with it.

Tomorrow, Galway and New York will open the All-Ireland football championship 3000 miles away. The big man’s voice will carry over Gaelic Park and the Bronx: passionate, clear and full of belief. It won’t be a surprise if Joe Kernan does something special with his mother’s county. It somehow fits, Kernan and Galway. “Behind football, there is family and life,” he says. “Things have to go on.”

New York v Galway

ALTHOUGH NEWLY appointed captain Michael Meehan, who scored 2-2 on his last visit to Gaelic Park, isn’t available because of injury for a few weeks, this once-in-five years combination of training trip and championship opener won’t be much of a hurdle for Galway as they try to reclaim the Connacht title.

The feeling after a mixed NFL is that Joe Kernan still has work to do to fashion a convincing championship line-up for the big prospective semi-final against Sligo or Mayo but that’s nearly two months away.

In the meantime Séamus Sweeney’s team will provide the warm-up and whereas their recent challenge form doesn’t appear to have been hugely impressive the anticipated hot weather is likely to put Galway through their paces.

Galway: E O Conghaile; K Fitzgerald, F Hanley, A Burke; D Meehan, G O’Donnell, D Burke; B Cullinane, N Coleman; G Sice, F Breathnach, J Bergin; E Concannon, P Joyce, N Joyce.

– Seán Moran