Interview: The journey, the craic, the medals -  Graeme Mulcahy on Limerick's gold rush

After being on the road longer than anyone else on the panel, Graeme Mulcahy’s journey to, and with, Limerick is over.

And he’s fine with that. He’s 34 now, married with two kids, holder of five All-Ireland medals, seven Munster championships, three national leagues. What’s there to complain about?

“I’m definitely happy with the decision,” he explains over a cappuccino in the River Lee Hotel, just a few pucks of a ball away from his alma mater, University College Cork, and a couple of miles from the house Laura and himself own in Ballyphehane.

“I was in a pretty privileged position to be able to call it myself. Not everyone gets that opportunity. The time was right. I suppose the last two seasons my game-time had become limited. I started the (2023) Munster final but this past season then didn’t feature in some games. And I felt it was just too big a commitment, especially travelling from Cork, to continue any longer.”

He’s just relieved and grateful that it didn’t finish considerably sooner than that. He thinks back to where he and Limerick were in years like 2016, 2017: Peripheral players. By then he was already a veteran, having made his debut as far back as 2009. And a disillusioned one at that.

“I was a year or two working in Cork, going up and down the road with Richie McCarthy. And there’d have been plenty of conversations in which we’d have said to each other, ‘God, we can’t be doing this for too much longer.’”

That summer of 2017, Limerick played just two games, losing both. Against Clare in Thurles, Mulcahy was taken off at half-time. Against Kilkenny in Nowlan Park he was brought on with just three minutes left.

By then John Kiely was over the team, surrounded by operators like

Paul Kinnerk, Joe O’Connor, and Caroline Currid. Yet Mulcahy, at the time, couldn’t say or see that they were like nothing he had encountered before; sure results were telling everyone that Limerick were still the same as before. It was only in the aftermath of that season when they helped encourage and facilitate him to be the change he wanted in the world that he realised everything was at another level: Kiely and his team of experts, Limerick themselves, Mulcahy himself.

“John sat down with me and told me I had a lot of work to do in terms of getting fit and clearing up the injuries to give myself the best chance to feature in 2018. I’d say he had a lot of honest conversations like that across the panel that winter.”

For the previous two years Mulcahy had tried dealing with a groin and abdomen injury by playing through it; in trying to keep his place on the team he had only jeopardised it. “It was something as the group matured, people got better and quicker at. Putting up the hand to the doctor and physios, and saying, ‘I’m not fully right here.’”

Although Mulcahy finished 2018 as Limerick’s sole All-Star forward, he played no part in them achieving their most immediate and primary goal of the year: Finally escaping from Division 1B. Instead he spent that entire promotion campaign focusing solely on a rehab and strength-and-
conditioning programme overseen by O’Connor and the medical team.

He only returned for the league semi-final when a Tipperary side that had been the standout team in Munster for a decade were taken into extra time and Kiely brought Mulcahy on to score a goal. When the counties met again in the opening round of the Munster Championship, Limerick threw Tipp aside with Mulcahy the match’s leading scorer from play with 0-4. Every aspect of their prep had been elevated and with it every part of Mulcahy’s game.

By his own admission, he hadn’t bought enough into Currid and the psychology piece in 2017. In 2018 he found from confiding in her he could better handle stress, both at work, as a project manager with Arup, and at hurling with Limerick.

The system of play Kinnerk was coaching was tailor-made for Mulcahy; instead of having to repeatedly fight for high ball as Limerick’s traditional direct style dictated, the ball being delivered in now was more precise.

And yet if anything he was expected to fight even harder than before. The KPIs the team set demanded a higher tackle count from all forwards. Through his extra dedication to the gym that season, he was suitably equipped to hit his target — and opponent. In the All-Ireland final against Galway, Mulcahy not only scored more from play than anyone else with 1-2; he also made the most tackles, with an astonishing personal tally of 16.

To win what they did, they had to change who they were and how they were perceived. Mulcahy for years was seen as a dainty hurler who could do with more steel. As for his team and county the stereotype was the opposite: They maybe had the heart and physique to compete with most but ultimately not enough hurlers or hurling to win the big prizes.

Mulcahy and his team-mates were not even conscious of the theory, let alone subscribers to it. Partly because many of them had come through an underage academy dedicated to eliminating the prospect of any technical inferiority. But mostly from how the group drove themselves whenever they’d assemble in Rathkeale or the Gaelic Grounds.

“We didn’t set out to challenge that (perception of Limerick); We never really thought that deeply about it. The challenge simply came from within the group and from Paul and John. They wanted an environment where if training started at seven o’clock, fellas would be on the field at half-six, practising their shooting. And if they could be let out earlier, some lads would be there at six o’clock.

“We definitely went after it, more than we would have (in the mid-2010s). I’d always look to get in 30, 40 shots before training from different angles and positions of the field. Often it might be with Cian (Lynch) or Séamus Flanagan. Just popping each other a ball, or maybe hitting it along the ground, and then put each other under pressure, making you have to work left and right to get your shot off from say 45 yards out, trying to replicate what a game would be like.

“The actual training sessions themselves were great but even though there’d be some shooting in them, you’d still never get the necessary number of reps in solely from them. But if you were to do 30 or 40 shots each night before or after training, well, that adds up to over 100 shots a week.”

Mulcahy had always been a sniper but a few years ago when asked to contribute to the book The Players’ Advice, he confided that if he were 12 again he would work harder on striking off his right side. In his late 20s he finally grasped that nettle.

“I won’t say I slowed down over the last five years but I definitely didn’t have the same speed or nimbleness to evade a defender and always get on my left side. I needed to have something else.

“I remember we played Tipp and I got a ball between the 45 and 65. Some of their defenders were roaring, ‘Left! All left, all left!’ And I thought, ‘OK, I’m being forced now, I have to go right.’ So I went right and struck it over. That gave me huge confidence in that shot.”

By the 2020 Munster Championship, Mulcahy was at the apex of his powers. In a relatively low-scoring Munster final, by Limerick standards, he notched four points from play. It meant that dating back to the opening game of the 2018 championship he had scored from play in 15 of his 17 subsequent championship games, and in 14 of those had registered at least two points.

He would score only a further six championship points in his career. He literally never had his eye in the same way.

The next day out in an empty Croke Park he had snared Galway’s goalkeeper Éanna Murphy coming out with the ball. “Usually I would have just picked up the ball and be gone with it and it’d have been an easy goal. But I missed the pickup. It was like I couldn’t see the ball. And that played on my mind for a while. I went and got my eyes tested and all the checkups said my vision was fine. But deep down I knew something was wrong.”

He still started the 2020 final. In 2021, Mulcahy responded to being a sub for most of the year with Limerick by winning his third county title with Kilmallock, scoring seven points from play in the final against Patrickswell. In 2022 he won back his spot on the Limerick first 15, starting all but two of their championship games, including both matches in Croke Park.

“Then,” he says, “it all came to a head.

“We were playing Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and near the end I had a chance to level it. I was going through on my left, about 25 yards out, the kind of shot I’d always put over. But I threw up the ball and I couldn’t see it properly. It went out of my vision for that split second, so I just swung somewhere near where it should be and the ball ended up hitting the post.”

He tracked down a specialist in Cork who sent him to another in Dublin. This time they identified he was suffering from fourth nerve palsy, a condition in which you experience blurred or double vision.

“For me it was like a squint, and something congenital. They told me I’d need surgery to correct it, that they’d fit me in September. I told them that’d be a bit late for what I had in mind for the year.”

Through persuasion and some fortune, a slot on March 8 opened up. Perfect. The day prior to that the team would be returning from a warm training camp in Portugal. The recovery time was an estimated two months. By the third game of the Munster Championship, he was back coming off the bench. By the Munster final against Clare in the Gaelic Grounds, he was starting. “I’d put it down as one of the greatest achievements of my career.”

Mulcahy’s resilience would have been tested and cultivated from the start of that career. In 2010 any proven Limerick player had either been cut by Justin McCarthy or refused to play for him in support of the culled. Mulcahy, a debutant in 2009, was one of only a handful of outgoing panel members who remained on.

“I was keen to just keep playing. I wanted to use the season as an opportunity to get more experience in the Limerick jersey. It was a difficult year. It was nearly assumed going out every day you were going to get beaten and we took some heavy beatings. But there was never any pressure put on me by not to play, no one ever approached me.”

About the biggest wrench he felt that season was when he chose to go to a training session the same day the local soccer club, Kilmallock United, that he captained were playing an FA Youth Cup semi-final at home against Cork City.

“Management knew about the soccer game so the fear was that if I chose the soccer it might have been my season over. But I remember my cousin Brian O’Sullivan, who was captain of Limerick that year, collecting me that morning and me being in knots in the car, heading into training.

“You can imagine: A small town like ours making it all the way to an FAI Cup semi-final. It’s about the only regret I’ve had in my career. Maybe if I had played the soccer, my hurling career might have turned out differently. But I had grown up with those lads and I should have played that match with them.”

By 2013 Limerick had recovered enough to win a Munster title, the county’s first in 17 years, but the good of it was nearly erased by the manner of their All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Clare. That hurt though would instruct 2018.

“We didn’t handle it well. You had all the hype in the build-up and then we travelled up the night before and stayed out near Portmarnock. There was just a giddiness there from not having any experience of doing that before and on the day itself then the required energy just wasn’t there.”

It wasn’t a case of anyone being wrong: Manager John Allen had won All-Irelands with Cork teams who used to go up on the train the day before. It just wasn’t right for Limerick. They weren’t accustomed to going up the day before. It was a deviation from their routine.

For Caroline Currid, routine was king. “She told us, ‘For every other match you stay in your bed and stay at home with your family so why would you change for this one?’” 

And so Mulcahy devised and stuck to his own routine. On the Saturday he would go into Cork City to have some breakfast with Laura, then go for a walk on the beach in Fountainstown, then that night sleep in his own bed. It meant an early start on Sundays, leaving Cork to get to Limerick to get the train with the team to Dublin. But it was worth it. Some of his fondest memories are of those journeys.

“It was great because we could all just sit together. You’d rarely be on your phone. There’d be great interaction, having a chat and the craic, playing a board game or something. The logistics guys, Conor McCarthy and Eibhear O’Dea, would bring along a box of different games — Connect Four, Scrabble, cards, chess — and we’d play them all. Dan Morrissey was an Irish champion in chess. Richie McCarthy was very good as well. I would have played them up and down.”

Those board games weren’t just a bit of craic or a diversion either; they were fiercely competitive. Like about everything they did.

“Even in training, if the orange bibs beat the blue bibs they’d be rubbing it in your face coming off the field. Hegarty would have been particularly bad. Cian Lynch and Kyle Hayes as well. Crowing, slagging. No matter what it was we were doing, lads wanted to win. I remember games of soccer in training camps in Portugal and they’d be as intense as any training game we’d have had.”

Next year Mulcahy won’t be on that train with them, he won’t be on that training field. But again he’s totally at peace with that. He’ll still have the game and the club and a reason to bring little Róise and Aislinn down to Kilmallock to see their grandparents. 

He looks forward to having the time now to maybe take in a Cork City game in Turner’s Cross just around the corner from his new home. And he leaves sensing his old team-mates are in a good place to reclaim their belt.

When Jackie Tyrrell rang Brian Cody to tell him he was retiring, the conversation was respectful but brief. When Mulcahy rang Kiely to inform him of his decision, their chat lasted nearly two hours.

“I guess we reminisced a lot. Laughed a lot. The one that springs to mind is when a few of us went over to New York after winning the All-Ireland in ’18. We actually brought the cup to the UN headquarters where a Limerick man worked, then retired to a bar in midtown Manhattan: Myself, John, Paul (Kinnerk), Seán Finn. 

"By the time we came out of it a couple of hours later to head to a function in Yonkers, the place was covered in snow. Out of nowhere the city had been blitzed by a blizzard.

“Now we had to get to this function. People were coming from all over America, not just New York, to be at it. People were coming over from Limerick. The streets were choc-a-bloc with yellow cabs so we started walking. Went around Times Square, singing Walking In Memphis, in the middle of the pouring snow. Went down into the subway, but lost John.

“When we came out of the subway the place was in 2ft of snow. We thumbed down this yellow bus. Later we were told that we were taking our lives in our hands doing that but the bus driver was a real gent from Costa Rica. Dropped us all the way to the door of where the event was.

“We must have been half an hour late yet we were among the first ones there. People were stranded in taxis for up to six hours trying to get to it.”

Yet who was there when Mulcahy and his team-mates arrived, safe and sound? Kiely, laughing, just like he was recalling it the other week. No better man or men to get to a destination. But the glory was in the struggle and the craic along the way.