Tom Ryan says he got no support from the main local paper:
I had a word with the then editor of the 'Limerick Leader', Brendan Halligan. Coming to the end of my term he printed in his editorial something like ‘When Tom Ryan resigns as Limerick manager . . .’ I rang him and f***ed him and asked him when I was resigning, and asked him where he got his information. ‘Oh, I kind of understood it,’he said. ‘Did you ever speak to me?’ I said. ‘Did any of your reporters ever speak to me?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I heard it.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘is it kind of guess work?’ I f***ed him from a pinnacle, and I f***ing called him everything. And then what did he do then, he started to engage with me, and the more he spoke, the more he released information. ‘We were always supportive of you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want any support from you,’ said I. ‘It would be a sad day for me, the day I went looking for support from you. What the f*** did you do to support me? . . . He listened from start to finish, instead of saying, ‘I am the Editor. I will write what I like and this is my opinion.’ All that sort of stuff was going on behind the scenes.
Reflecting on his time in charge, Ryan regrets not being able to establish a consistent forward line:
Our forwards were never great. It was the one area that tormented me the most. You were depending on Kirby and the free taking. Damien Quigley was prone to injury and T. J. [Ryan] was only coming and going. Frankie [Carroll] was in and out and not consistent, though he was a great hurler, but I found it hard to get the best out of him. When things went right for him he was a dinger, but when things went wrong it was a different story. He was an unbelievable hurler as well.The All-Ireland finals didn’t go well for him but he gave an exhibition against Antrim. In the drawn game with Tipperary in 1996 he got two great scores when we really needed them.
I was disappointed with Shane O’Neill, he had been a successful under-21 player. We invested a lot of time in him, showed patience, but he never made the grade fully despite playing a lot of championship. Brian Tobin had excellent skills but he found the rigours of championship hurling difficult. David Hennessy broke my f***ing heart to make a county player out of him,because he wouldn’t f***ing mix it. I tried everything with him, holding challenge matches, bringing the full squad to try one player.
I always had Mark Foley pencilled in as a centre-forward, when his time would come. I had had him on the training panel since 1994 and it was as a forward he played in 1995 as a sub against Tipperary in the championship. If I had the luxury of playing him there always he would have been an excellent forward, but I had to move him to the backs in the absence of John Flavin. The first day I played Mark Foley in the League they booed him above in the stand. He fell all over the place. In Limerick you have a demanding following that expect instant success. A lot of these f***ers who want instant success forget that we haven’t won a Munster championship for years, we haven’t won anAll-Ireland since 1973.
Success under Tom Ryan was won through commitment, hard work and a no-nonsense regime:
In all that time I missed no training session. Not one night. That was the level of commitment. There were no holidays.
Another severe rule was that once you got injured, you went off the panel. You got the best of treatment; there was never a question mark over that, every injured player was always well looked after. But he was off the panel while he was injured, and a young fellow brought in straight away to keep the numbers up in training. When the player was back fit he had his chance to come back, but in the meantime there were other players trying to take the place from him. It cured a lot of injuries, I’ll tell you that. It was better than any f***ing doctor, it was a kind of a miracle treatment.
Because of that rule you didn’t have that many fellows missing. They knew because of the rule that whoever was coming in had a chance. When any fella came into the panel it was explained to him that there was no such thing as being thrown in at the deep end. We tried them out, we coached them, we encouraged them, and every aspect of their fitness was looked at and they were put through it. The speed of their striking and the speed of the game we played was always being worked on. Because of that I had no hesitation in calling a fella off the bench. I am of the strong opinion that the mental strength, the mental readiness is as important as anything. Because in fairness they can all hurl.
And so the Tom Ryan era came to an end. Even though he delivered three trophies in four years – a feat yet to be repeated – he became known as the man who lost two All-Irelands. Some would have preferred if Tom Ryan had failed,as it would have made it easier to remove him, but ultimately it mattered little because he was ousted with the shine still on the League trophy. Would Tom Ryan’s success have continued had he stayed? We will never know. But what we do know is that he delivered for Limerick hurling two Munster titles and a National League. No one can ever take that away from him.
