Joyce one of the true greats

FRANK FARRAGHER

PADRAIC Joyce vividly remembers the Saturday night before the 1998 All-Ireland final against Kildare. They were staying in the Berkeley Court Hotel in Dublin and the later part of the evening was being spent watching Match of the Day. Strange as it may seem, Alan Shearer was about to have an influence on the following day’s All-Ireland.

Shearer was facing into a ‘one to one’ with the opposing ‘keeper but instead of trying to blast the ball past him, the Newcastle United centre forward, did a little sidestep and calmly slotted the ball into an empty net.

“I’ll never forget Michael Donnellan saying to me that if he set me up with a goal chance the following day in the All-Ireland final, to think of Shearer’s sidestep and the way he took his goal.

“The thought did stick in my mind, and indeed ever since. As chance would have it, the goal chance came my way, I went for the sidestep and tapped the ball into the net. So Alan Shearer, Michael Donnellan and that All-Ireland win over Kildare will always be a special memory for me,” Joyce recalls this week.

The Killererin man, from the townland of Lissavalley, always had a great natural footballing telepathy with Donnellan, since their early days in St. Jarlath’s College back in the late 1980s. Instinctively they seemed to know where the other was on the pitch, and the pinpoint pass would normally follow.

“Back in those days football was massive in St. Jarlath’s, with the late Fr. Ollie Hughes and Joe Long heavily involved. We had Fr. Ollie as juvenile coach in the College at the time, and he would always stress that unless you had the basics of the game perfect, like the catch, the kick and the pick-up, you were going nowhere. He couldn’t bear to see a slobbery effort at a pick-up,” Joyce remembers.

As a young lad growing up in Barnaderg, football was never far from the conversation when the Joyces sat down for dinner. His father Paddy, a fanatical football fan, lined out for Killererin while his uncle Billy went on to play for Galway through the ‘70s and ‘80s, as Padraic honed his skills at the local national school under Sylvester Cassidy.

His first outing with Killererin was as an under-14, but he remembers that the numbers were very small, and the club always had a numerical difficulty in finding 15 players to fill out the team sheet. But the group was so small and tight, that they had to be loyal to one other . . . there was no other way for them to survive as a team. Therein lay the heart of the Killererin spirit for many years into the future.

“Most players will start and finish with their clubs and it’s no secret that I put in a big effort with Killererin over the years. We had many great days together and for a parish of our size to win four county titles during my playing days, is always something that I’ll be proud of, although I do regret missing out on a Connacht title, a couple of years back, when St. Brigids equalised in Tuam with a goal from the last kick of the match and went on to win in extra-time.”

Winning and losing is all part of the sporting package and Padraic Joyce’s first experience with Galway was a positive one with Connacht Tedd Webb under-16 success under the guidance of Tuam’s Mickey Byrne.

The same man was in charge of the minors in 1994 and 1995 but here Joyce got his first taste of real disappointment when losing the ’94 final to Kerry and the ’95 semi-final to Derry, after the northern side scored a last minute goal. As he moved on to under-21, Kerry defeated them in an All-Ireland semi-final in Ennis, but better times were on the way.

“I remember in early September of 1997, a brown envelope came in the door at home from John O’Mahony, informing me that I had been selected as a member of the Galway senior football panel. It was a big thrill for me, and the new manager called a meeting in the Sacre Coeur Hotel in Salthill, where he outlined his plans for the season ahead. He was always very well organised.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.