‘Please give us five minutes more…’

By Cian Murphy

Did you ever hear the story about the fella in the British army who went missing to listen to an All-Ireland final and ended up playing in one?

We cannot let the week of a Kerry-Cavan championship match go by without paying homage to two of the all-time classic GAA anecdotes.

As luck would have it, both of them relate to the All-Ireland football final of 1947 played at the Polo Grounds in New York where the Breffni Blues met the Kingdom.

William ‘Bill’ Doonan was on the first ever Cavan team to win an All-Ireland minor football title in 1938, played in an All-Ireland junior final and won an Ulster senior medal in 1942. His taste for adventure took him away from home, first to the Irish Army and then in the British Army as a radio operator and in 1943 he was involved in the Battle for Monte Casino in Italy.

One Sunday in September of that year, and in a brief lull in the fighting, Doonan was reported missing, presumed dead. However, a search party would later find him up a tree and apparently in a trance like state with his radio pressed to his ear as he tuned for a signal coming from Radio Éireann at Croke Park on the day of the Roscommon-Cavan football final of 1943.

There was to be disappointment for Cavan in 43, losing to the Rossies in an infamously physical replay, but that’s not where the Doonan tale ends. A talented soccer player, who after the war played briefly with Lincoln City, he returned to Ireland and to Cavan Slashers and was corner back on the Breffni team that won that famous Polo Grounds final and defended the Sam Maguire at Croke Park a year later. You can read more about his remarkable life in the Dictionary of Irish Biography - Doonan, William (‘Willie’; ‘Bill’) | Dictionary of Irish Biography

The Cavan-Kerry final in New York still stands apart as the only All-Ireland final to be played abroad. The decision to play the game there was taken to mark the centenary of the height of An Górta Mór and would tap into the massive Irish population in the city.

It also ranks as one of the boldest administrative moves ever undertaken by the GAA. The first foreign expedition by the GAA in 1888 ended in disaster and almost killed it off with a debt of £450. A promotional tour with 45 of its best players was a financial catastrophe and almost half the players brought over decided that having reached the US, they were going to stay there. 1888 still stands as the only year where the Championships were unfinished and no All-Ireland finals were played.

The logistics of playing a match of this importance outside of Ireland in 1947 were considerable. Even the goal nets had to be shipped – brand new nets which had just been bought for St Brendan’s Park in Birr. Birr, of course having been the town where the first ever All-Ireland hurling final was played – but that’s for another day…

The choice of travel was either a 29-hour flight drawn out by refuelling, or a five day sea voyage.

The world’s first telecommunications satellite didn’t happen until it was launched by the Americans in 1962 – the same year that Radio Telefís Éireann was born.

In 1947 the GAA through Director General Padraig Ó Chaoimh booked and paid for the phone line that would bring the radio commentary of the match back to Ireland, the five-hour time difference between Ireland and the US meaning that this would be the latest All-Ireland final in history.

Micheal Ó Hehir, the original ‘Voice of the GAA’, had been broadcasting on radio since he was 18 and would commentate 99 All-Ireland senior finals across radio and TV until ill-health cut his career short in 1985.

The Croke Park media centre is named in his honour and on the walkway to the lift that takes journalists and broadcasters up to the Level 7 crow’s nest is an immortal line from Ó Hehir at the Polo Grounds: “and if there is anyone listening in along the way, can you please give us five minutes more…”

With 10 minutes to go in the match and the game in the balance Ó Hehir had realised to his horror that the lines back to Ireland were scheduled to end in five minutes and that there was every chance they would be cut off before reporting back on who had captured Sam Maguire in the Big Apple.

And so, punctuated between his trademark excited and high-pitched descriptions of the blow by blow battle, were his pleas into the ether hoping someone, somewhere didn’t pull out a plug when the clock struck 5pm.

Recalling the event, years later, Ó Hehir said: “We booked the lines until 5 o’clock and that gave us, we thought, about half an hour’s leeway so we could wrap up and have the presentation, and all the rest. But on the day of the game, between Bishops and Mayors and Commissioners and President’s and what have you and being introduced to the teams and introduced to the crowd, things ran late.

“As we approached five minutes to five, I looked at my watch and discovered there was about 10 minutes left in the game and there was every possibility, and every justification, for somebody somewhere along the line with a piece of paper in front of them saying disconnect Polo Grounds at 5 o’clock – every indication that he might just pull out the plug and cut the broadcast short five minutes before the end.

“I began, quite innocently, saying: ‘if there is anybody along the way there listening in, just give us five minutes more,’ and I kept begging for this five minutes more. There was a song at the time called Give Me Five Minutes More. I kept begging for this and whether it was somebody along the way heard the appeal, I don’t know, but the five minutes was left on, and the entire All-Ireland final from the Polo Grounds was heard here in Ireland.”

What the people in New York saw and the people in Ireland heard was that Cavan, led by the gallant John Joe Reilly, were winners by 2-11 to 2-7. The GAA commissioned a film of the day which was shown in cinemas a week later.

There have been several incarnations of a field called the Polo Grounds in New York at different locations. Gaelic games have travelled too since the days of Celtic Park in a place called Coogan’s Hollow to where they now reside near the Brox in Gaelic Park. The site of the playing field of 1947 has been swallowed up and a high rise building now stands on the spot – however it has a plaque on the wall outside recording its GAA significance.

On the 50^th anniversary of the Polo Grounds final and with Kerry and Cavan both playing in Division 1of the league – their league game was staged in New York in October that year – in keeping with the old tradition of starting league matches in October.

Kerry, managed by the late Paidí Ó Sé were newly crowned All-Ireland champions, a first Sam in 11 years, and had beaten Ulster champs Cavan led by Donegal all-star Martin McHugh in the semi-final. The New York rematch was moved to Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island on the outskirts of the city, and a place with its own sporting history having been the venue for US trials and where Jesse Owens was selected to run in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. After illuminating the 97 final with nine points, Kerry’s Maurice Fitzgerald lit up the New York sky with an even greater one-man performance.

It's about time these two wrote a fresh chapter in their Gaelic football history.