The Club

by Christy O'Connor

  ‘John has managed a team to a county title and he knows what it takes,’ said Patsy. ‘But I need an outsider. I know some of ye very well, maybe too well that I might be too nice to ye at times and let ye away with things when I shouldn’t. John isn’t close with anyone here and he will nip any of that stuff in the bud. I couldn’t say it at the AGM but he is really coming on board in a managerial capacity. He will be the manager of this team.’

  Before he concluded, Patsy said that eight players had contacted him with legitimate excuses for not attending tonight, and he also addressed the issue surrounding the possible retirement of two of our biggest names – Seánie McMahon and Davy Hoey. Seánie hadn’t made any decision yet but was contemplating coming back for one more season, while Patsy obviously hadn’t spoken with Davy yet about hurling but said he was ‘hopeful’ that he would return.

  In any case, we needed to drive on with what we had. Last year, we began training on 16 January, so we were already a month behind to prepare for a championship that was going to close in fast. With the Clare senior hurlers not playing in the championship until 21 June, the two championship matches provisionally fixed for May would definitely be going ahead.

  ‘We need to hit the ground running,’ Patsy said. ‘We need to get those two wins in the bag. If we do, then we can ease off the gas a bit and build it right back up again when we need to. But we’re really going for this. The club needs a massive lift this season. Everybody in the parish needs it. And our ultimate goal is to win the Canon Hamilton [Trophy] so we can finally put smiles back on people’s faces in October.’

  Patsy then handed the floor over to Carmody, who proposed a minute’s silence for Ger. You could have heard a pin drop in the room during the 60 seconds. Given the poignancy and heartbreak of the previous few weeks, Carmody’s gesture was a very simple but hugely positive start.

  Then Carmody addressed the group. ‘When Patsy contacted me and asked me to get involved, he told me to take a few days to think about it. I got back to him the following evening and said I would do it. There were two reasons. The first was Ciaran O’Neill. That man gave me and Kilmaley everything and I felt that I owed it, not to Ciaran O’Neill, but to St Joseph’s to give something back now in return.

  ‘Secondly, my wife is from this parish and so is my uncle, and I have massive respect for this club. I would have always seen ye as nearly the top club in this county, definitely one of the best. Most people in this county would nearly feel that whoever finishes ahead of Joseph’s every year will win the county title. In Kilmaley anyway, we would have always seen ye as one of our main threats to winning a county title.

  ‘That’s how highly ye are rated from the outside – and make no mistake about the talent that’s here. I know some of the older lads from coming up against ye, and ye are still some of the top players in this county. There is great talent among the younger players as well. I know ye only have one player on the Clare senior panel, but I really believe that there are about five or six of ye just one step away from making that panel.

  ‘What we’re looking for now is to merge all of that experience and talent together and to create a real team, a real panel. I will be going to games at every level – minor, Under-21, junior – and everyone will get an opportunity to play. If you get a jersey in the Clare Cup [league], hold on to it. I don’t care what age a player is, if you’re good enough, you’ll play. If guys of 17 and 18 haven’t the ambition to play senior hurling, you’re going nowhere. And if some guys on the senior panel think they are above playing junior, think again. We can only play 20 in a Clare Cup game so you need to be showing us something to get a chance.

  ‘We will need every man available. We will need 26 for every championship game – ten defenders, ten forwards, four midfielders and two goalkeepers. The challenge for everyone is to get on that first 26. The crowd who won it last year [Clonlara] did it with only about 19 or 20 players. But those 19 or 20 would have gone through a wall. We need guys like that, players who will just refuse to be beaten.

  ‘Talk is cheap but we need guys who are just prepared to go that extra mile. Look, lads, I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t think ye could win a county title. Patsy wants to train ye to a senior championship and I want to help ye to achieve that goal as well. And I can promise ye one thing: I’m a Kilmaley man, but I’ll be more of a St Joseph’s man than some of ye by the end of the year. There’s a great history of managers in this club, from Kevin Kennedy to Michael Clohessy, so I have a serious standard to upkeep. And I have absolutely no intention of dropping those standards.’

  Patsy’s and Carmody’s words hit the mark. There was no need for table-thumping or firing out expletives to try and motivate players. It was still only springtime and everybody wanted the same thing: to end the year with silverware, and the feeling that success was the start of even greater things for the club. But deep down, we didn’t need to be told that this season was about more than just that now. Before Carmody finished, he touched on the subject that Tommy Duggan initially raised.

  ‘Lads, we all know what Ger Hoey gave to the St Joseph’s jersey,’ he said. ‘And all I’ll ask is that ye give the jersey what Ger would have given it.’

  There was no need to say any more.

  At our first training the following Tuesday night, the conditions were perfect. The temperature was 2°C, the air was fresh, the numbers were high and the vibes were good. There’s always a sense of trepidation on the first night back, caused primarily by the dread of the projected traditional slog and its finger-drumming monotony; but it came less of a shock to the system than expected.

  Maybe that was because some guys had gym work done or because the pack was loaded with young gazelles from the U-21 squad who were bounding over the patch of soft ground behind the goals, sparsely lit from the dim lamps positioned high on two poles. Or maybe it was just because the session lasted only 50 minutes under Brian O’Reilly.

  Everyone pushed himself hard – stamina runs, sprints, push-ups, sit-ups, star-jumps – an easy evocation of hurling’s toil. It’s hard to imagine the long evenings of summer in the dark of winter, but that’s what always keeps you going: the stretched evenings when the hurling goes on and on and on. The nights that capture the lovely madness of hurling and feeling part of a group sharing the same goal.

  Sport at its most moving and visceral doesn’t have to involve cups or medals. It has to do with a group coming together and sharing experiences until such time as those shared experiences turn them into something else. We want this year to be special, and tonight you can feel that desire to make it happen.

  Every club, though, has more immediate aims, and there is no getting away from the knowledge that just keeping the show on the road is an arduous business. After training finished, and after I’d washed the sweat off my body, I made my way into the small anteroom off dressing room number two. Most players have no interest in the affairs of committee rooms, but the club executive had their first meeting of the year and, as vice-chairman, this was the world that I now had to enter.

  Nine people squeezed into the small room, no bigger than a small utility room and warmed by a small heater.

  What goes on at these meetings? The chairman began by offering sympathies to recently bereaved families. Then the secretary, Dan O’Connor, read out recent correspondence, which ranged from a concrete company in Limerick advertising their rates on the construction of affordable hurling walls, to the upcoming U-21 hurling championship draw, to a race-night to generate funds. The secretary also read out a directive from Croke Park, whereby clubs claiming physiotherapy costs from Croke Park’s injury scheme could now claim only for using chartered physiotherapists. That was a huge financial blow to many clubs who were using physical therapists. Our physio, Eugene Moynihan, was a physical therapist; he was also a recent European Masters cross-country champion, and was excellent at his job.

  Being a dual senior club, with 50 teams at all levels in hurling, football, camogie and l
adies, requires huge financial planning, but the club is in a pretty good place, particularly when compared to other clubs. In 2000 the club bought land in Gurteen on the Quin road and turned a stretch of lunar surface into one of the most impressive grounds in the county. The money was borrowed from the bank, but the scheme was primarily powered from a fund-raising drive in which club members and people around the parish signed up to five-year direct-debit commitments. Some members paid €5,000 over the five years.

  Our original home was in Roslevan, which the club decided to sell in 2005 after an Extraordinary General Meeting in the old clubhouse. It was a modest ground, with just one pitch, a small warm-up area behind the goal, two dressing rooms and a small clubhouse. The reason the land was initially bought in Gurteen was because the club had just outgrown Roslevan and couldn’t cater any longer for its huge needs. There was nowhere left for expansion because housing estates were sprouting up to the east and south of the ground, and then a huge shopping centre was built in front of the grounds in 2004, which gobbled up whatever car-parking space was available.

  The other problem the club now had was that it was becoming impossible to police the place. With so many new housing estates recently constructed, the stand had become a meeting place for young people and was a hive of night-time activity. Beer cans were often strewn across the pitch and used condoms regularly littered the stand. Fires were often lit under a large beech tree at the north-west end of the ground, and the chief groundsman and the club’s trustees were at their wits’ ends. If a serious incident or injury took place on the grounds, the club would have been liable, which was a huge concern.

  Apart from the historical tug, another major difficulty with deciding to sell was that Roslevan had been re-zoned as a second town centre for Ennis, and the area now had a huge population. Selling up and moving out would remove the club’s presence in the very area that was likely to be producing the most new players. But the €2 million the club received from the sale would enable them to turn Gurteen into a state-of-the-art ground, and the vote was decisive.

  Now, we’ve got two pitches the size of Croke Park’s, two underage pitches, four dressing rooms, a stand, a ball wall, and an AstroTurf facility that is rented out to platoons of five-a-side soccer teams, generating huge funds to assist the running of the club. At the start of next year, the construction of the new clubhouse, with a full-size basketball court, will begin. That will exhaust the last of the money left from the sale of our old ground.

  It costs in the region of €80,000 to run a club of our size, and tonight’s meeting broadened into a discussion on how to save money on the upkeep of the grounds, and how to generate further funds to keep the wheels oiled. The cost of sanding and spiking the main pitches was discussed, as was the potential purchase of a new scoreboard. New goalposts for the underage pitches were priced at a cost of €1,650. The club also required new flagpoles, and it was agreed to do a deal with a local welder to manufacture them.

  Then a debate arose about enclosing the fields with some form of fencing, which might facilitate the club’s chances of hosting senior club championship games, and consequently generating more revenue. We have the pitches and the car-parking facilities, but not having the pitch properly cordoned off for supporters has definitely impacted on our chances of getting big games; we hosted only one senior championship game last season.

  Another concern was that the place was being used by some people as a park. Walkers (and dog-walkers) frequently used the path around the pitches, and Dan O’Connor reckoned that between 10 and 15 joggers were using the venue as a personal training track. And two weeks earlier, three cars had pulled into the car park and unloaded some electronically controlled aeroplanes, before guiding them around our airspace for the afternoon. All of this activity posed a big liability issue for the club.

  It was argued that the club had spent too much money on the facilities to make them available as a public amenity and that if people wanted to use them they’d have to become members. Yet would that mean that someone from the club would have to be around to chase joggers and ask them for a membership fee? Did we really want that kind of hassle? And where do you draw the line between community spirit and reality, particularly when the club had asked so many people in the parish to contribute financially to the facilities? In the end, it was decided that a sign would be erected at the front gate, stating that dogs were not allowed inside the four walls.

  What goes on at these meetings? Now I know.

  The season has begun positively for us. Training has gone really well, the effort has been excellent and the numbers have remained very steady. The only downside is the progress of our U-21s. They’ve been doing most of their training with the senior panel, but the turnout, attitude and application so far has been abysmal.

  The U-21s have drawn Inagh-Kilnamona – one of the best teams in the competition – in the first round, and the players seem to have already made up their minds on their chances. All panels have continued to train together and on Thursday evening, 12 March, five days before their game against Inagh-Kilnamona, I took the stretch and warm-up. Just before we began the session, I called everyone into a huddle.

  ‘I’m only going to talk for 30 seconds, lads,’ I said. ‘The effort has been great so far and let’s keep it up. But as far as I’m concerned, the priority now is the Under-21s. There’s a lot of talk going around the place that Inagh-Kilnamona are going to wipe us out. Well, this club doesn’t back down from anybody, so get that into yere heads now. I want to see the Under-21s setting the agenda tonight. I want to see ye driving the session and setting the standard for the rest of us to follow.’

  To be honest, I felt hollow saying it. I counted only eight U-21s in the pack and the writing was on the wall. A couple of weeks ago, a challenge game organized against Corofin had to be cancelled on the day when only seven showed up. Patsy went wild afterwards but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference.

  ‘We just can’t get them out,’ Vinny Sheedy, who is also part of the U-21 management, said to me during a water-break. ‘It’s the same seven or eight lads who are training the whole time. There’s nothing we can do. We can’t force them to train if they don’t want to.’

  During one of the drills, I had a quick chat with Declan Meehan, one of the most committed U-21 players.

  ‘What’s the story, Deccie, where the hell are guys five days before the championship?’

  ‘There’s just no effort being made,’ he said. ‘Lads are making no effort to come home from college to make training.’

  At times, it’s easy to feel that St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield are a big club only in name. Most of us would like to believe that we stand for respect, pride and honour, and yet it seems to be getting harder and harder to transmit that code to some young players.

  In the last ten years, the club has won just one U-21 championship match, and there has definitely been a correlation between our demise as a real force at senior level and our terrible record at U-21 level.

  The championship traditionally begins on St Patrick’s Day and concludes at the end of April or early May. Getting beaten consistently so early in the competition seems to have provided a sense of finality to some young players; many go back to college, cut their links with the club until the exams are over, and then seem to feel that it’s too late to resume playing with a team they have little or no connection with. Others just head off travelling for the summer and won’t pick up a hurley again until the U-21 championship rolls around again next season. Their hurling development is consequently stunted, which leaves many of them with little or no chance of becoming senior hurlers. When that reality hits home, it’s always easier to go off playing football.

  Although Doora won a senior football championship in 1898, and Faughs (an amalgamation between Éire Óg and St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield) won a senior title in 1994, the club has always been dominated by hurling. But the excellent work at underage level in the last decade has seen us become
a real force at football. Last year, the club won the U-21A title for the first time, beating the powerhouse of Clare football, Kilmurry-Ibrickane, who were going for six titles in a row.

  Most of the best young hurlers are also the best footballers, and the club has had a huge presence on Clare U-21 football squads over the last few years. Last year, we had five guys starting on the team. That is a huge honour for the club, but the real difficulty it annually presents is that the Munster U-21 football championship always runs at the same time as the domestic U-21 hurling championship. Which means that our best U-21 hurlers rarely train with the team.

  Last year was a huge disappointment for our U-21s. I was manager and we had an excellent backroom team in place – Seánie McMahon, Ken Kennedy, Fergal O’Sullivan and Mikey Cullinan – all senior players, who were 100 per cent committed to getting the most out of the group. I had previously been manager of the same group at minor level when they were narrowly beaten in a semi-final by Clooney-Quin, and it was obvious that the talent was there to go places. More importantly, we saw the group as the future St Joseph’s senior team.

  We began training in December, but our first real problem arose when we discovered that the first round of the championship was fixed two days after the Munster U-21 football quarter-final against Tipperary. We felt that was unfair – almost akin to being punished for providing players for the county. The previous year, when the same club management had been in place, four of our U-21 hurlers trained hard with the Clare U-21 footballers, just two days before our first-round U-21 hurling defeat to Crusheen-Tubber, and it definitely had an impact on the performance of some of those players on the day.

  After our request to have the game brought forward a week was granted, the five Clare U-21 footballers requested a meeting with management. A couple of them were unhappy because they had a training weekend planned that weekend and were concerned that it was impacting on their preparation for their game against Tipperary. They said it wasn’t fair on them; we said that the other option wasn’t fair on the other 20 players who had been training since December.