Carbury's Ollie Crinnigan on being Kildare's first ever All-Star

To the unfamiliar, Ollie Crinnigan is a quiet and unassuming figure. You would never guess from his humility that he was Kildare’s first ever All-Star and would be well up in conversations for the title of our county’s finest goalkeeper. Ollie missed zero Championship matches for The Lilywhites between his debut and his retirement, a span of 15 years.

That journey at Senior level would start in 1965 for both club and county, which followed (and ran alongside) success at minor level. That same year, the 18 year-old won the All-Ireland U21 Football Championship and his first Senior title with his club.

Ollie also played in the Leinster Minor, Leinster U21 and Leinster Senior Football Championship in one particular year and regularly pulled double duty on some days.

“I never missed a Championship game. I got great pride pulling on a white jersey. When we were going to school in Edenderry, a few of us were Kildare mad. We would be somewhere trying to imitate Pa Connolly or someone and then a couple of years later we were playing them. I always wanted to wear a white jersey and when I finally did get to play with them the goalkeeper jersey was changed to red,” Ollie laughed.

“1965 was my first year in goals for Kildare (having done so in school and for his club). I was still only a minor at that stage. In the first round, we played Wicklow in Carlow with the Minors and then I finished that, got changed and went back out to play with the Seniors. It was a horrible day for it, a downpour during the game, but anyways we won the two of them and I did the same thing in the next round.”

Kildare’s U21 title win would be there only at that grade until 2018, the first year in which the competition was made U20s. Ollie and one of the most talented Lilywhite underrage sides ever beat Cork 2-11 to 1-7 in Croke Park on October 3.

“It was some day and then great celebrations after. There were some great games along the way too, that Leinster final in Newbridge was really special,” Ollie recalled.

That year was of course the year of Carbury’s fifth Senior Football Championship win, when they beat Moorefield 3-13 to 1-9 in the final. The club would go on to win six more SFC’s during Ollie’s career alongside the likes of Pat Nally, Kevin Kelly and Pat Mangan from that famous U21 side.

“I remember it well because Moorefield would have been favourites to win at that time because we were a young team only coming on and they had won it in ‘62. That year Raheens were the favourites after winning it the year before and Moorefield put them out,” Ollie explained.

“It was back to the wall stuff early on, we were defending for our lives. Moorefield got a couple of frees and missed them, it was very unusual. We broke away from one of them and Pat Mangan got a great goal after a brilliant move up the field. He took one solo and buried it, we never looked back then. Up to that point, we had been struggling and somewhat of a golden era took off after that.”

After going back-to-back with another SFC win in ‘66 against Raheens this time, Ollie and his side lost the next two county finals before one of the finest runs in Kildare club football history. Carbury won four of the next six Senior titles between 1969 and ‘74.

“I was captain in ‘71 and ‘74 luckily enough. It was a boom period for us. We had a great run, but lost a few too,” Ollie said.

“They are great memories and we had all come up through the underrage together. We won three Minor Championships in a row (‘61-’63) and that was most of the senior team then for the next few years. Carbury had good people there already too with Noel Ryan and Pat Moore, lads like that.”

One of the more incredible feats for that historic Carbury team came at the back end of the careers of many of the greats. Having not won a Senior title since 1974, the group wanted to take a strong run at the 1984 Championship in the GAA’s centenary year.

“We won the special Centenary Championship that was held and all the teams from every level around the county were in it. There were a lot of matches and we put an awful lot into trying to win both of them,” Ollie said.

“We beat St Laurences in the Centenary final down in Clane and then got beaten by Clane (1-9 to 0-10) in the SFC final. We were hot, hot favourites, but Clane were a bogey team for us down the years. In ‘67, when we were going for three in-a-row, Clane beat us and then that one in ’84, but did beat them in the ‘69 final at least.

“We were bitterly disappointed and there were a few lads set to retire, but we all kind of regrouped again for ‘85 to give it one last go. We wanted to win it big time in ‘85 because Carbury were after putting up the Dermot Bourke Cup for the Championship.”

The then 38 year-old Ollie, 20 years on from his first, won his seventh Kildare Senior Football Championship title when Carbury beat Raheens 1-9 to 0-5 in the final.

It would indeed be the last stand for many of the club greats, and they had plenty to show for it. Of course during the midst of all this Carbury dominance was county action and in 1978 Ollie Crinnigan became Kildare’s first ever All-Star.

“We were training one day in Newbridge, Eamonn Donoghue was over us at the time and he called me to one side and said that I got an All-Star. The All-Stars were picked and then a team would go to America to play the All-Ireland Champions, but the five or six champions that got All-Stars would be replaced by other lads to fill out the team. We would only ever be hoping to get a replacement spot,” Ollie explained.

“Donoghue told me I had an All-Star and I just said it couldn’t have been, must be a replacement one. He was adamant it was the real thing and I was absolutely shocked. I had to keep it quiet then so I only told my wife, my best friend at the time and my mother and father. They were (beaming), my father was delighted because he was a massive follower of the team. It was surreal.”

The most Ollie’s humility would allow him to concede about his performances in ‘78 was that he’d had “a reasonably good year.” Ollie’s GAA title wins weren’t limited to Irish soil either, the Carbury stopper won a New York Senior Football Championship with a Sligo team.

“I got a call to go to New York because teams out there could bring over a certain number of players, emigration was lower and they wanted to keep the game ticking over out there. Sligo were looking for a goalkeeper and all the Kildare lads that were going played with Sligo. They were trying to get PJ Smyth from Galway initially, but he was coming back from an All-Star tour and he was about to get married so I got in with them,” Ollie recalled.

“We got on great out there and we won a New York Championship medal. I got a clean sheet in all the games that year which helped me too. I stayed with Pat Cummins, a Carbury man over there. One year the Carbury lads lost in the first round of the Championship and Pat said that we should all go out to New York. He said, ‘Just get out here and we’ll sort it for you after that’ and we had a great time. It was incredible to be out there and play in Gaelic Park.”

In 2019, Ollie Crinnigan was inducted into the Leinster GAA Hall Of Fame as he received acknowledgement for his incredible career and contribution to the game.