Wimps, brawls and diplomacy - Ireland's Oz tour of 86

The tentative murmurings about the possible resurrection of the international rules series have garnered a fairly cool reception at best.

GAA people who understandably resent their game becoming a feeder code for the vulture-like AFL franchises want the association to give the Aussies as wide a berth as is possible for the foreseeable.

In Kerry, feelings are running so high that they can't be far off calling for a full boycott of Neighbours and Home and Away.

Reviving the compromised rules game - which could be haphazard and chaotic at the best of times - is the very last thing we need to be doing in the circumstances, so the argument goes.

So many women Gaelic footballers are playing Down Under that the Irish women recently played the Australians in an international match under full Aussie Rules.

Forty years have passed since the Ireland compromised rules' team's first tour of Australia.

Reeling in the Years' typically jaunty summation of the tour was 'Ireland beat Australia... (and Australia beat Ireland)' over footage of a particularly frenzied brawl from the first test (in which the Irish players gave as good as they got, really).

Diplomatic relations between the two codes became fairly frayed that month. In the course of an explosive rant which made big headlines in Ireland, furious Australian coach John Todd roared that the Irish "wimps" wouldn't be "tough enough" to survive in Aussie Rules.

Four decades on, Gaelic football supporters might be nostalgic for the days when this was still the consensus Down Under.

Scenes from the infamous 2006 match

'They can play a brand of football we never saw before'

The idea for a composite game had been hatched 19 years earlier when Harry Beitzel - Aussie Rules media personality, former VFL umpire, future prisoner - paused to relax after doing a spot of gardening in his home in Melbourne.

Flicking on the small telly in his shed, he chanced upon footage of the previous year's All-Ireland final between Galway and Meath, which for some reason was being replayed on one of the Australian channels.

Beitzel was immediately struck by the similarities between this game being played in Dublin and his beloved Australian football. Always a dynamic, entrepreneurial sort, he set about assembling a crack team of Aussie Rules hot-shots, with the intention of touring Ireland that October.

As with every other Antipodean national team, the team were given an animal-related nickname, being dubbed 'the Galahs' on account of the faintly ridiculous plumed hat-wear they donned in a Melbourne parade prior to the trip.

First, they played the Civil Service club in Dublin and then, the following day, they took on All-Ireland champions Meath in Croke Park, five weeks after the All-Ireland final. The rules in '67 were basically Gaelic football except the Aussies were allowed to pick the ball clean off the ground and bounce it consecutively as many times as they wished.

The outcome was traumatising to the elders of Gaelic football.

Harry Beitzel pictured in 1987

Legendary full-back Jack Quinn protested to this writer several years later that Meath were unusually ill-prepared for the game due to a deadly combination of complacency regarding the Aussies' ability with the round ball and their own post-All-Ireland final regimen of heavy drinking.

The Irish Times' Paddy Downey wrote in slightly besotted tones about the tourists, waxing lyrical about the "bronzed Aussie giants in their sleeveless jerseys looking like a line-up for a Mr Universe contest. Meath were mere Lilliputians compared to the muscular Gullivers of the Antipodes".

Downey had seen enough to declare that Essendon's Barry Davis was one of the finest full-backs he had ever seen in Croke Park.

There was much shocked introspection afterwards, with the star-struck Dublin county board chairman Tom Loftus (a Roscommon man) sounding like Bobby Jones when he witnessed Jack Nicklaus winning his first Masters, when he observed: "They can play a brand of football we never saw before."

Kevin Heffernan

Meath were invited over to Melbourne the following spring and duly restored their honour, winning five from five in matches played in Perth, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne (twice). RTÉ even dispatched Micheál O'Hehir to cover the games and McDermott later wrote an account of the trip called 'Gaels in the Sun'.

It would be another 17 years before a full-on international series was organised, which coincided with the GAA's centenary. The Australians won the inaugural series 2-1, which was marred by a violent first test in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The latter two tests in Croke Park were far more exciting and thought to have redeemed the enterprise.

A return tour to Australia in 1986 had already been pencilled in.

'It was like the entire class being hauled up in front of the worst headmaster imaginable'

The long lead-in to the tour had kicked off on a controversial note when Kevin Heffernan was selected as manager ahead of Mick O'Dwyer at the end of 1985.

There was much dismay and annoyance in Kerry at the choice. O'Dwyer's side had just defeated Heffo's Dubs in the All-Ireland final for the second year in succession. Unlike the 1970s epics, neither of the mid-80s deciders have entered the canon of famous All-Ireland finals.

Coincidentally - or perhaps not - the same week that Heffo was appointed Ireland manager, it was reported that Kerry had escaped with a warning for their famous Bendix washing machine sponsorship stunt, which had appeared in a Sunday newspaper on the day of the '85 All-Ireland final. Whether Micko's snubbing related to his flouting of the GAA's draconian sponsorship restrictions has never been made clear.

In his late 90s autobiography, 'Shooting from the Hip', Pat Spillane recalled that the decision "caused much resentment within the Kerry squad."

Spillane wrote that Eoin 'the Bomber' Liston, who was regarded as well suited to the hybrid game, cried off in protest. Mikey Sheehy also gave it a miss, though this may have had as much to do with his disdain of the game generally.

In the end, the Spillanes, Pat and Tom, and Jack O'Shea were the only Kerry players to feature in the tests.

Jacko was universally accepted as THE star in Gaelic football at the time. Some of the golden years legends may have been slowing down but O'Shea was still at the peak of his powers and his fame by the mid-80s.

Not only did O'Shea play, he was appointed captain and later extolled Heffernan's managerial abilities. Spillane, indiscreet as ever, wrote in his book that this irked people in the Kingdom and remarked that O'Shea's "relationship with O'Dwyer was never quite the same afterwards."

Heffo made Jack O'Shea his captain in Australia

It was assumed that Heffernan would juggle the Ireland job with inter-county management but he abruptly quit as Dublin boss in January '86, reportedly due to differences with the incoming county board chairman.

He'd also taken early retirement as industrial relations manager with ESB, while it was a few years before Bertie Ahern appointed him chairman of the Labour Court.

He was free to devote his attention to the compromised rules job. Regardless of the mixed attitudes towards the enterprise in general, Heffernan was extremely anxious that he return from Australia as a winning Ireland manager.

Certainly, no one has ever looked more like an illustrious Gaelic football manager than Heffernan at this point. With his white hair, big 1980s glasses and light blue coat, he was as he looked in the banner unveiled on the Hill in the year of his death - an image as evocative in its way as Tom Landry in his fedora hat was to American Football.

The Kerry trio found that his managerial style differed sharply from the more avuncular O'Dwyer.

"I respected O'Dwyer but I never feared him. I feared Heffernan," Spillane wrote.

The early hopes of some of the tourists that it might double as a lads' holiday, a la the All-Stars tours, were quickly dashed.

After a trial game in Bunbury, near Perth, arranged for the players to adjust to the new rules, the Irish team lost and went out on the tear afterwards.

"It was like the entire class being hauled up before the worst headmaster imaginable," Spillane wrote. "By the time he finished castigating us for our behaviour, we were as quiet as mice."

Heffernan's 28-man squad was regarded as fairly idiosyncratic at the time, the manager prioritising players he thought more suited to the hybrid game rather than relying on star power. Wicklow's Pat O'Byrne and Westmeath's Mick 'Spike' Fagan were selected. A relative unknown from Derry called Brian McGilligan was called up.

Mick Holden, a favourite of the manager's and a hero of the infamous 1983 All-Ireland final, was picked despite losing his place for the Dubs that summer.

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The manager's cerebral and analysis-heavy approach (by mid-1980s standards) was a novel experience for most of the players.

"It was probably the first time that I went into long team meetings that could go on for an hour and a half," Niall Cahalane told Tomás Ó Sé on the latter's podcast two years ago.

"You'd be going great inside at these until he [Heffernan] asked you a question and f**k it, you had lost your train of thought altogether, you didn't know where you were."

Spillane's recall was that some of them dragged on for three hours: "Quite frankly I felt they were far too long."

The Australians picked an All-Star outfit with Hall of Famers like Gary Buckenara, Maurice Rioli and Dermot Brereton.

By far their most famous player - in Ireland, at any rate - was that year's Brownlow Medallist, Robert Dipierdomenico of Hawthorn, a bulky Italian-Australian with a magnificent handlebar moustache who was more or less universally known by his nickname, 'The Dipper'.

One indication of his sudden status as a household name in Ireland came seven months later when Neil Francis inexplicably cut his sleeves for his international debut at the Rugby World Cup and was immediately christened 'The Dipper' by the rest of the squad.

"These guys were professionals. And they were big earners at the time," Cahalane remarked to Ó Sé.

"You were looking at these fellas lined up across the way from you and, of course, to make it better, they had no sleeves on the jerseys. They had the vests and these big bulging arms.

"Then we had our ones, as pale as ghosts with maybe a bit of burn from the sun and what have you."

Robert Dipierdomenico emerged as the most household name in Ireland from the Australian code

One of their key mantras was that they would be 'one-in, all-in' when it came to brawls, which they (correctly) assumed would be fairly frequent.

Spillane recalled that they adopted the term 'Fior Gael!' as a war-cry, which he said sounded like 'Fine Gael' when shouted in Dermot McNicholl's Derry accent.

The first test generated a not unfamiliar storm of controversy.

Ireland lost the match, despite scoring five goals compared to the Australians' one (a fairly consistent trend which would ultimately swing the tour in Ireland's favour).

Whatever the outcome and the fallout from Ireland's woeful first quarter, both the coverage and the aftermath of the game was dominated by talk of on-field violence.

The Irish team picked up their first broken nose of the series when O'Byrne was caught by a "backward blow" by the Dipper, sparking a spectacular melee in the opening quarter.

"It's more than a scuffle, this is an international incident!" cried the Australian commentator.

When the slugging was brought to a halt, two grey-haired members of either backroom team had joined in and were grappling with one another and four players were sent off - Dipierdomenico and Gary Pert for Australia, O'Byrne and Tom Spillane for Ireland.

The general consensus was that the Australians were the big villians.

Ger Canning and Micheál Ó Mhuirceartaigh on RTÉ and Eugene McGee on Channel 7 spent much of the test warning their colleagues that they wouldn't think much of these scenes back home.

The Aussie commentators on both stations sounded like the embarrassed parents of the schoolyard bully. They struck a deferential tone and made little attempt to contradict all the Irish tut-tutting in the booth beside them.

Ireland were beaten in the first test in the WACA

Spillane, for his part, thought the Irish media reaction to the first test was far too one-eyed and he stressed the men in green were active participants in it all.

Perhaps the worst incident was when Australia's keeper Gary McIntosh poleaxed MacNicholl with an elbow to the jaw, the kind of goalkeeper-on-outfielder assault that Harold Schumacher would have regarded as too much to have on his conscience.

McIntosh, who looked like a member of one of the Aussie biker gangs, was unrepentant in the aftermath. As MacNicholl lay prone on the ground, he gleefully squared up every Irish player who arrived in to 'remonstrate'.

Quite how MacNicholl's jaw survived the incident intact was a mystery even to the player himself, as he told the Derry Journal years later.

Heffo, who in his pristine green Ireland team blazer, resembled an aged former Masters champion, watched on anxiously from the sideline. It was perhaps the only time he looked really concerned for the welfare of one of his players.

The reaction back home was predictable.

In the Irish Press, Michael Fortune delivered a particularly scathing verdict: "There is no point in lashing the GAA for their decision to go ahead with the 'The Great Australian Junket'. It is more relevant to ask why the Irish footballers are not already winging their way back to safety and sanity in Ireland....

"If Liam Mulvihill, Mick Loftus, Frank Murphy and company really believe this is a suitable marriage of sports then I feel they have a warped sense of humour.

"The actions of one particular Aussie player would have been more appropriate in the Colosseum of ancient Rome," he added.

In the Irish Times, Downey suggested the scenes might have been a suitable subject for an anti-war lament.

"If he were watching, Eric Bogle might have been moved to write an anti-war ballad about the first test match between Ireland and Australian in Perth last Saturday night."

Mick Lyons draws a kick at the ball in the first test

The GAA President Loftus saw fit to issue a warning: "If what we saw on Saturday is the price we have to pay for an international competition, we in the GAA can do without it."

Within the Irish camp, there was more annoyance with the officiating than the violence.

Spillane wrote that while Paddy Collins sought to be impartial, "the Aussie official, Rowan Sawers, was so blinkered it was embarrassing".

In briefings given to the Irish press, Sawers was accused of making 60 incorrect calls, which favoured the Australians at a ratio of 10 to one.

Things got so serious that on the eve of the second test, there were reports that Heffernan had threatened to pull his team from the series if the refereering performance was repeated - though this was later denied.

'I'm sick and tired of you people telling us we're to blame all the time'

After the first test, Heffo doubled down on his approach of paying little heed to star power. The policy was clear - hard chaws over big names.

The manager had a chat with Spillane over a glass of orange, during which he coaxed out of the Kerry great the admission that he "wasn't into the physical stuff", which essentially gave him permission to drop him.

His future RTÉ compadre Colm O'Rourke, who'd set up a goal for Joe McNally, also played no more minutes after the first test.

In came the likes of Tyrone's Damien O'Hagan, Galway's Seamus McHugh and Clare's Noel Roche.

If diplomatic relations were frayed after the first test, then they came close to breaking down entirely after the second.

The rematch was played in impossibly gusty conditions in Melbourne's VFL Park. The decent crowd in Perth gave way to a poor-ish attendance of 11,000 or so in the home of Aussie Rules, which was blamed on the bad weather.

Most of the 10,000 or spectators were on the camera side of the pitch. On the opposite side were rows of slate grey vacant benches.

(On the youtube video of the full match, the top comment reads, "How bad is the crowd? Why they brought it back in 1999 to replace AFL State of Origin is beyond me?"

Ireland had gotted off to a deplorabe start in Perth, where they actually outscored the hosts over the final three quarters.

This was remedied in the second test and emphatically so. Ireland led 14-8 after the first 20 minutes, despite playing into a gale. With the wind at their backs, they buried three goals in the second quarter to essentially seal the win by half-time.

The Cork duo of John O'Driscoll and Jimmy Kerrigan - the former being the breakout star of the tour - fired home the first two. The third came when Roche sent in a swirling high ball and O'Hagan flicked it onwards to the net with deft punch.

With the game basically gone, the Aussies took the gloves off after the interval. The hosts had been scandalised by Joe McNally throwing a kick at Mike Richardson in the course of a run-of-the-mill off the ball slugging match.

The Aussies operated a moral code whereby throwing any number of punches was fair game but drawing a boot in someone's direction was outrageous conduct.

In the second half, O'Shea had to come off with a broken nose after being caught by Buckenara from behind. Dale 'the Flea' Weightman swung punches at both Cahalane and Gerry Hargan.

A chastened Sawers corrected course to such an extent that some reporters felt he favoured the tourists in Melbourne.

There was little danger that Ireland wouldn't win the game and the game finished 62-46, with the tourists tying up the series.

John Todd being inducted into the Australian Rules Hall of Fame with John Platten, Wayne Richardson and Jim Stynes

There was much relief from the organisers that the third test in Adelaide would not be a dead rubber. But within the Australian camp, pent-up frustration after a week of Irish complaints was about to explode.

Speaking to reporters from the dressing room, Australian manager Todd unleashed a broadside which travelled around the world.

The Irish team, he announced, were "a crowd of bloody wimps".

The Australian players, he stressed, had "copped a few whacks" but none of them lay on the ground, "stage-acting".

In the sorest cut of all, Todd said of the Irish opposition that "they'd make great soccer players. But wouldn't have a hope of making the grade in Australian rules. They're not tough enough to handle a real game".

Regarding McNally's fly-kick in Richardson's direction, he declared, "that kind of foul is not acceptable in this country and I'm sick and tired of you people telling us we're to blame all the time. We're fed up with Irish excuses.

"The Irish are always negative, never positive, about this new game. You want to play the game all your way. We go on and make the best of it. If we could sort out our problems, we could have a great game of football and we've got to compromise.

"With the round ball, the Irish have 75% of the advantage. Put our oval ball in and see if you can adapt to it, as we do to yours."

While the fusilade generated outrage and headlines at home, the reaction of the Irish players was one of amusement. Apparently, 'wimp' was not a word in wide circulation in Ireland in 1986.

"The Irish are always negative, never positive, about this new game. You want to play the game all your way. We go on and make the best of it."

One of the Irish reporters had asked Todd what it meant and was told to consult a dictionary. According to Downey in the Irish Times, a few of the Irish players had "sidled into bookshops" and done just that and discovered that it meant a 'weak, timorous, ineffectual person'.

On Raidio na Gaeltachta, Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh translated the word as 'cnáimhseálaí', which can variously mean "complainer", "moaner", "whinger", "nit-picker", "martyr" and "sourpuss".

In the flush of victory, Heffernan chose to remain above the fray. "I have no intention of trading rude words with Mr Todd," he replied, high-mindedly.

In his column, Downey was drawing analogies with contemporary politics, writing that "compared with Heffernan and Todd, Gerry Adams and Iain Paisley, or Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, are slobbering soul-mates."

Back home, there was much trepidation about what lay in store for the third test. In the Irish Independent, Mikey Sheehy castigated the Aussies for their "disgraceful attempts to intimidate" and said that the number of head-high tackles had convinced him "there is no future for this series."

Mayo manager Liam O'Neill said that an Irish player could be "seriously injured" and "the Irish have shown up their [Australia's] limitations as footballers and they cannot take it.

"The manager, John Todd, does not want to be seen as a failure in the eyes of his own people. There is too much at stake and that's why Friday's game is a most dangerous prospect."

'The worst we had was three broken noses - that's not bad'

Those dire warnings did not come to pass.

Despite the media hand-wringing, there was considerable interest among the public back home by now. The third test took place on Friday morning. Those of school age at the time talk of TVs being wheeled into classrooms to watch the decider.

It's debatable whether this enthusiasm was matched Down Under. The city centre in Adelaide was hosting the finale of the Formula 1 World Championship the same weekend, with Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet all vying for the title. Organisers warned this might depress attendance for the third test, which hit about 10,000 in the end.

O'Shea was available for selection despite a broken nose, while John O'Leary was in goal after breaking a bone in his hand. "Not bad for wimps," McGee sighed on the Australian TV coverage.

The wind was even stronger than it had been in Melbourne. Ireland opted to play into it once more in the opening quarter and scored a tremendously ugly goal in the first couple of minutes.

Kerrigan skied a shot into the square, which O'Driscoll rose to contest. O'Hagan arrived onto the break, looked to try and grab the ball but it skittered off his knee and into the corner of the net.

Greg Blaney and Kerrigan added further goals and Ireland 29-26 entering the final quarter. The assumption on the TV coverage was that the Aussies' professional stamina would tell in the last 20 minutes.

This analysis overlooked the fact that Ireland had a gale at their back so strong, it could have had its own name.

Teddy McCarthy at a moment of high tension

There was time for more wild anarchy. After kicking the first over of the final quarter, Teddy McCarthy got involved in a scrap on the ground with Bolton.

Aussie official Sawers rushed to the scene and proceeded to send off McCarthy and not his sparring partner.

The Cork player took a while to leave the field and was captured roaring in Sawers' face nearly a minute later, as selector Liam Sammon dragged him away.

McCarthy was aiming V-signs back at the pitch as he tried to wrench himself free of Sammon's grasp. Just as they thought they'd calmed him, he made another bolt in the direction of the pitch again, spoiling for a fight.

On the TV footage, it briefly appears that he's squaring up to the cameraman, like a celebrity objecting to the paparazzi getting stuck in his face. The scene was a touch reminiscent of Didier Drogba roaring into the lens at Stamford Bridge after a Chelsea Champions League exit many years later.

Eventually, they got hold of him again. McNally, wearing a dark green dressing gown, brought him over to the bench a good distance from the sideline and sat him down, speaking to him urgently like a boxer's corner man.

The Cork legend finished his career as the only man to win Liam MacCarthy and Sam Maguire in the same year - but also had the singular distinction of being sent off on three continents, having also been given his marching orders in an All-Star tour of Canada.

Back to more sedate on-field matters, the game had swung heavily in Ireland's direction. O'Driscoll ran riot in the full-forward berth and racked up 16 points in the fourth quarter alone.

He fired over two overs in quick succession to push Ireland's lead out to 12 in no time.

The Aussies had gone very ragged by now. Peter Wilson sliced one kick so badly in the wind, it actually travelled backwards and dropped into O'Shea's clutches.

Jack O'Shea

Then, the rampant O'Driscoll was deemed to have been tackled high by McIntosh and drop-kicked home the penalty himself.

He was hoisted into the air by his teammate Kerrigan. It was Ireland's 12th goal of the series compared to two for the Aussies and it sealed the win.

At the final siren, Heffo's mask of watchfulness gave way to a joyous smile as he was mobbed by the visiting party of officials. The manager was chaired onto the pitch like a TD who'd exceeded the quota.

His captain Jacko was the first player he embraced, the ultimate sign of the Dublin-Kerry rapprochement in the national interest. Elsewhere, McNally and Lyons were hugging.

This being 1986, there was a priest loitering about among the visiting party, dispensing back-slaps.

McGee noted that there were "handshakes all around from the Australian players. It's important to say that".

Todd was a different man from the one who lambasted his opponents six days earlier. He hailed the Irish wimps as "magnificent". After taking charge for the first two series, he stepped down as Australian manager, remarking that they yet had yet to "master the art" of scoring goals.

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"From the very beginning of the Australian tour, it was plain to see from a footballing point of view the Irish side was a superior force," wrote Donal Keenan in the Irish Independent.

"The problem lay in the fact that they got little opportunity to show it because of the tactics adopted by John Todd's Australians."

For the Irish squad, it was time to party. Heffernan went from disciplinarian to night owl. By 1am, he was banging on the door of a sleeping Gerry Hargan and ordering him to come down for more drink.

The Ireland manager was emollient after the series and far less moralistic than the gentlemen of the press.

On being greeted by a raucous crowd in the arrivals lounge of Dublin after their marathon flight, Heffo was asked again about the Aussies' "rough-house tactics".

"Ah, well, I don't like to be as stark as that about it. The Australians play football in a certain way. It's more difficult for them to restrain their tackles than it is for our fellas.

"Admittedly in some of the games, there were head-high tackles that there shouldn't have been. But overall, in the end of the day, we had no injuries that we wouldn't have playing three very hard matches at home.

"The worst we had was three broken noses and, like, that's not bad."

Cahalane's overall summation of the tour: "We had a fabulous time in fairness."

The concept may have had its day but it had a hell of an impact in more ways than one.