All-Ireland SHC Quarter-finals: Tom Humphries meets Cork coach John Allen, who, when not cycling to Santiago or trekking in Cambodia, plots All-Ireland glory as Gaeilge.
The bus is steamy and sturdy and a bit of a rattler but at five o'clock on a Thursday evening in Hanoi it gives way to the oozing current of pushbikes and motorcycles.
The man alights at a familiar spot and waits. He is white and in the evening sun the curves of his silhouette present an instant credit rating. He has the little slackness of a small gut out front and the burden of a backpack behind. In other words, he is a market. He is a customer. He is carrying.
What's more he is happy to be seen that way. He waits for the hawkers and the peddlers to slowly engulf him with their quiet entreaties to buy this or to buy that. They have something he needs.
He has met two men from Australia, both of them Vietnam veterans, and they have told him that he must go to Cambodia, to Angkor Wat. Sometimes he likes to open his wings and let himself be carried by such breezes, so he will spend tonight alone in an internet café, rearranging flights and buses and visas. First, though, he needs a Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia.
Strangely, for once, nobody appears. He stands like a man with a handful of breadcrumbs in a world suddenly missing its pigeons. Nobody approaches to sell their wares. No souvenirs, no trinkets, no postcards, no maps, no guides.
Nothing. It is as if, by doubling back, he has taken Hanoi by surprise. The vendors are resting up, perhaps. So he begins to walk through the soupy evening air, his tall frame making him a moving landmark on the teeming streets.
Finally a man with poor English and a portable bookshop steps out in front of him. His shop is the familiar display, an open concertina of books and maps and postcards running down the length of his right arm, from near his shoulder to his hand.
The exchange is brief.
"Lonely Planet? Cambodia?" "No. Have not." So they negotiate. A photocopied replica of the guidebook can be had within minutes. A price is agreed as the two men stand there in the traffic. Then a surprising thing happens. One man hands the other his entire livelihood. The vendor removes his stock from his arm and hands it to the customer. He gestures for the customer to wait. And as swiftly as he appeared, he now disappears.
So our man stands in the swell of a Hanoi rush hour with a display of guide books and post cards and maps running down the length of his arm. He's thinking of the lovely trusting innocence of what has just happened when it begins. Tourists approach him.
"You sell?" The slowness and the loudness being for his benefit.
"YOU SELL?" And he grins and thinks of the camera in his pocket and how he might fish it out to get a photo. It's a Thursday evening in Hanoi in the month of August in the year of 2003 and John Allen is working the evening traffic. Cork and Waterford, the Munster final, happened the previous Sunday.
Ten minutes later Allen's friend reappears with the Lonely Planet guide. They make the exchange. Paper for paper.
Allen puts the the experience in the bank. Moves on to Angkor Wat. The following Tuesday he is back at intercounty training in Páirc Uí Chaoimh
The South Mall is sun-dappled and this morning it has succumbed to a slow, Mediterranean air. John Allen separates his molecules from those of the bike which has brought him in from Togher. He says happy hellos to the hefty portion of the café clientele who have greeted him. He sits finally and orders.
A scone and a latté. Tradition with a twist. As a rule he doesn't drink coffee but once a month or so he feels the need of its comfort. Talking to a journalist brings on a caffeine craving. He orders a latté and half an hour later he unintentionally orders a cappuccino, which comes in a cup large enough to bathe small children in.
"Hmm. Meant to order another latté," he says with a shrug as he lifts the great vessel towards him.
He tells you about his accidental life. He moves about without apparent use of motor or rudder. His mind is an open sail and he's interested in just about anywhere that the winds take him. He says that he has spent the last 30 years standing in the same room. Almost literally this is true but everything else he says makes you think how wondrous it must be to share that little classroom in Togher with him.
"Thirty years," he says with a sigh, "only the audience changes." Which isn't true at all but which is the sort of thing John Allen says. It's the sort of thing, too, perhaps that might make people underestimate him. He's changed all right, always one step ahead of the audience. He's off this afternoon to buy some additional hard drive for his PC. He's negotiated Cambodian visa requirements from internet cafes in Vietnam.
He refers to the last edition of PlayStation as PS2. Sure, he's drinking a latté and it's far from lattés he was reared.
Maybe audiences change and John Allen evolves. He has an existential passiveness about him. Life washes over him and he serenely absorbs from it what interests him, what he needs, what challenges him.
Take the tale of The Accidental Manager: In the 90s Allen did a ki-massage course. He came up to Dublin every weekend to learn with Tony Quinn. Six months and no objective really but the eternal limbering of his mind. He'd done courses in just about everything from spoken Spanish to French polishing.
But then the Cork minors took him along because he knew massage and he knew hurling. They won an All-Ireland and soon every team wanted a masseur. He was conscripted to the under-21s. That went well. Then he was drafted on to Jimmy Barry-Murphy's ticket in 1999. They plundered an All-Ireland and probably it was time for any man with ambitions to be thinking of the road ahead, the path to the top.
For Allen the road he was thinking of was in Spain. Himself and his youngest son, Niall, liked to pass a little of every summer in joint adventure. Once it was trains through Germany and Eastern Europe. Another time it was the Edinburgh Festival, a little Celtic FC and a bus to London. And then just as Allen was getting established in the bootrooms of Cork senior hurling he took a year out because in the summer he wanted to ride a bike along the 600-kilometre Camino de Santiago in Spain.
So while Cork toiled and headed for hurling's first modern industrial action, John and Niall Allen cycled the pilgrims' way through the broiling sun. Ruthless!
That winter was the winter of discontent in Cork hurling. Allen had heard the boys talking about having masseurs at every session and when he allowed himself to entertain the possibility that he might have a hurling life after the revolution he thought he might swing it that he could organise the roster of masseurs for training sessions so he could come and go and take it handy and read books and do a little study. If they wanted him at all, that was.
But Donal O'Grady rang and asked if he might call. Next Allen was the selector, the massage man and the unofficial link between players and mentors. They won an All-Ireland in the regime's second year and then, as he had said he would do, O'Grady just resigned. Nobody really thought he would, but he did.
So Allen shrugged and thought to himself that all good things end. He no more intended to be Cork county manager than he intended taking up vending maps and guides to tourists in Hanoi. The papers tagged his name on to their shortlists behind luminaries such as Gerald McCarthy, Tomás Mulcahy and Seánie Leary. He was amused and a little flattered.
And then it became clear the county board were looking at continuity rather than upheaval. Seamlessness was the watchword. And even though Leary was out of the country at the time Allen knew from dead conversations Seánie had no interest in the job. Which left . . .
And in the weeks afterwards people, friends, would call him up and say, "Hey, are you sure this is right for you? You can't beat Donal O'Grady's last year in charge, the best you can do iswhat he did in his last year."
By then Allen was thinking of how he could hold the backroom team together. There were no easy answers to anyone's questions, least of all his own. They played Kilkenny in the league and after 20 minutes they were 10 points down and hadn't scored and he felt a shudder of loneliness there on the sideline.
Since then it's all been good.
His story has certain novelistic touches, which prompt you to yearn for a happy ending.
Once upon a time in the village of Aghabullogue Allen lived in a house across from the school and the school field.
His uncle Donal had hurled with the village club in the '50s, a time when that was still something to boast about. Donal would take John to the field and poc with him. The rudiments of touch arrived.
By the time Allen was eight he was turning out for under-14 sides. The vices of football and television had barely impacted in Aghabullogue. He had more traditional diversions. Worship was the Cork side of 1966. The magic of Gerald and Justin and Charlie. Distant deities for a rural clubman.
First, though, there were the Noonans. Seven boys. Enough to have a rattling game up the road every day. Enough noise from them to make any kid in Aghabullogue wish he was a Noonan brother. Then, later in the little field beside the school there were epic matches of white hot intensity and indeterminate duration. Boys from the ages of 10 to 35 hurled away, evening after evening, summer after summer. Paradise.
Accidents of life kept happening. In the mid-70s Aghabullogue were reopening their pitch in Coachford. For some interesting flavour Seánie Noonan and Allen were asked to play for Cork that night, just to have two local boys on as a token for the club. That was the introduction to playing with the likes of Gerald and Justin and Charlie.
"I was living in the country playing with a rural team. I wouldn't have seen these fellas in the flesh much. That was such a thrill."
Two choices stand out among all the happenstance of a life. First, he chose the North Mon and the epic trek in every day.
"My father drove the local CIÉ bus. It meant going to Rylane early in the morning for the start of the bus route. That bus left at five to eight. I'd go with him on the bus to Washington Street and walk the mile and a bit up to the Mon. There was no bus to Aghabullogue except on a Thursday morning. It's still that way."
And when the school and underage days were over and his family had moved to Togher he lamented that Aghabullogue had no senior team. He switched and played for the Barrs from 1977 onwards. He took flak. He persevered.
Other than that life just happened. His Harty Cup experiences are a slim folder. A loss to Farranferris one year.
A legendary game with St Colman's out in Midleton the following year. Some sledging, some low blades. The Mon lost and objected.
The pair of the them were thrown out. Finito.
He played a little football with the Cork minors in 1973. He'd started getting a fix of football with Macroom. They beat Kerry but he broke his hand after the Munster final. He played in the replayed semi-final against Tyrone. Lost.
They lost to Tipp in the first round of the minor hurling. That was 1973. In 1972 and 1974 Cork went to All-Ireland finals in minor hurling and football.
And he'd won an under-21 All-Ireland in 1976 against Kilkenny when this happened: he had a friend home from the Institute of Education up in Marino, where he'd studied teaching. They and their dates were going out for the weekend and taking Allen's Morris 1100 to Limerick on Sunday to see Cork play Tipp.
He got home on Saturday night and his uncle Donal, who ran the post office next door, had got a phone call. The Allens had no phone. Donal left a note in. John Allen was wanted by the Cork seniors for a match in Limerick the next day.
Championship.
In his innocence, he got up as early as his head would allow and contacted the county board and explained about the Morris 1100 and the pal and the girlfriends and the planned trip to Limerick and they said, "Sure, sure, go ahead and drive up, we'll see you there." He'd played four senior matches in his life and he could understand why they were so casual. He was a number. A surplus number.
Some way into second half they stuck him on at midfield. Against Tipp. Championship.
"I couldn't believe it. I wasn't even on the programme. They were calling me Seán Lucey on the radio. That's what it said in the programme. We won anyway.
"I just felt so proud to have been in there with so many fellas I looked up to. That was where my career started."
The adventure rolled on. He came on as a sub in the 1978 final, replacing his old schoolmate Tom Cashman. He was on the football side which played the epic draw and replay against the Dubs in 1983.
"During one league I played at centre back. We lost the league semi-final to Wexford in a double-header down in Thurles.
"Everything went wrong and centre back is a hell of a place to be when everything is going wrong. People streaming through everywhere. I was scapegoated. I could feel the glares from the sidelines. Next day out, I could feel it again. My star was dropping."
Then himself and Jo, his wife and confederate in all things, just upped and went off to San Francisco for a year, where he played no hurling or football at all.
He worked the roads. He remembers a July day in California with a jackhammer shaking his bones and the sun slowly roasting him and wondering if home might be better. Than he finagled a way into painting and decorating, wangled it so that although he had no working permit he had a contractor's licence which allowed him to tender to paint anything from the State Capitol to the Golden Gate Bridge.
You can take the man out of Cork . . .
Cork bate and the hay saved, they used to say. The radical traditionalist that is John Allen came off the field in Páirc Uí Chaoimh after the Munster final and noted that Cork had Tipp bate and he had The Da Vinci Code read. "Not bad for one week."
He managed in the end to hold on to the pieces of O'Grady's regime he needed. The drills, the training, the logistics haven't changed. And as an expression of his own nature he has continued to bond them together tightly.
"Within any group you have different personalities. The stronger personalities are all very professional as regards what they do in their hurling. In my job I'll always see one or two fellas in a class setting the dynamic of the class. It's the same within the team: the strong characters in this team are very professional. They set the tone for the unity of the team."
For his own part, his instincts serve him well. He enjoys people and he makes it a point to be interested in players as people, not just as numbers.
"Just treat people properly and there's a good chance that people will treat you properly in return."
Before the league he had a little idea about wristbands. The team got their own red wristbands made up. None were made available anywhere outside the team. For the championship they were renewed with a different slogan, Self-Control, only in Irish, Féin Smacht.
"We just felt that at the beginning of the year it would be nice to have something that distinguishes this elite group from anybody else. We had one for the league. One for the championship. It signifies unity. It's a symbol of being part of a group. No other deeper, mystical significance."
The use of Irish is a tradition within squads going back to Teddy Owens's time in the late '90s. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred Allen and his team captain, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, will speak to each other in Irish. Donal Óg Cusack and Diarmuid O'Sullivan will always be willing and ready to speak Irish. Joe O'Leary and Allen switch about 50-50 between Irish and English.
The counting of stretches is done in Irish. The sub Ronán McGregor speaks Irish all the time.
"We'd be a very pro-Irish group. I'd always have something in Irish on a team list. Headings in Irish, that sort of thing. The message on my phone is in Irish and a lot of people make an effort to answer my message in Irish. Donal O'Grady and myself would always have spoken to each other in Irish. It's another thread of what we are as a group."
Tomorrow , he notes with some bemusement, his group starts the summer proper. He is disappointed slightly with the current structures of the championship. Cork made a huge effort to win the Munster title. Tomorrow, Waterford, Clare and Tipperary are on precisely the same starting line as Cork. He doesn't know if the effort would be worth it every year.
Besides that he is happy. Life unfolds as ever. Jimmy McEvoy, the logistics man, will make sure that Sunday in Croker brings no surprises. No incidental pressures will drop.
"I'm happy that I've done what I can reasonably do. It's a different game as manager. You come off the field and you are trying to analyse a game for the media within two minutes. The match is over. You haven't seen the game that everyone else has seen. You are looking for who is going well and who isn't going well. I find that a pressure, just having to come up with some comments. I ask Joe O'Leary to tell me who has scored what for us and against us so at least I know something when I'm talking."
If Cork have a frailty, and the evidence against Tipp was that they have one or two, it is an apparent lack of killer instinct.
Allen remembers a league game against Clare in Ennis this year and Cork slacked off drastically in the second half. So much so that Anthony Daly, passing him on the touchline, paused to ask with a grin, "Well, John, what did you say to them at half-time?"
"We go like that sometimes. Nothing intentional."
He has no plans for next week. Once after a game he flew to Paris and took the night train to Venice. Other times he has just gone to Lahinch and locked himself in a room with some cryptic crosswords. The mind needs its rinses.
And this business of being the accidental manager, of being public property, it hasn't wholly sunk in yet either.
" I was there yesterday in my T-shirt and my shorts and I took a dander out. The sun was shining and it was a perfect day and I tell you I was happy out.
"Then somebody I didn't know saluted me and said something about the match and I remembered it. I'm the Cork manager. I'd better put that face on."
And he did but from the outside anyway it was no different, no less open than the face John Allen has worn every day of his life from Aghabullogue to Hanoi and back. Rebel discipline for the Rebel traditionalist.
