The Club

by Christy O'Connor

  We subsequently hammered Éire Óg in the championship – our first win in the competition since 2000 – but we never saw our five Clare U-21 footballers until a couple of days before the quarter-final. All five were playing in central positions, but their lack of hurling since the first match clearly told. It just wasn’t possible for them to be up to hurling-speed or to have the sharpness required for a sticky pitch in March. We lost by three points.

  This year’s U-21 side face more or less the same difficulties. We have three guys starting on the Clare U-21 football team that is due to play Limerick next week. All three are probably our best hurlers but they’ve been able to attend only a handful of hurling sessions. Moreover, two of those three are selected to play with the Clare seniors in the national football league on Sunday against Kilkenny, just two days before the U-21 hurling game.

  ‘We haven’t seen the footballers at all in the last few weeks and we won’t see them now until the day of the game,’ said Patsy after training. ‘No disrespect to Kilkenny, but one of our boys will probably be marking the bus driver. He’ll probably end up marking J. J. Kavanagh [the bus operator].’

  Last year, the club supported a motion to play the U-21 club championship later in the year, so as to allow the Clare minors and U-21s in both codes to prepare properly for their championships. Yet the motion was defeated at a county board meeting. If anything, that highlighted how the county is divided in terms of promoting and facilitating each code. And it’s dual clubs like ours that continue to get hammered.

  The reality for dual players is that hurling is always the first code to suffer, primarily because hurling involves more time-consuming skills work. Players struggle to compete if they’re not specializing, and that difficulty creates untold friction within dual clubs. Whether we want to admit it or not, there are hurling people within the club who would like nothing better than to stick a knife in every football they see. And football people who would love to make firewood out of every hurley that passes through the gate.

  The hurling people want success. So do the football people. Yet the club has no history of being a successful dual senior club; and with a historical hurling background it’s easy to see why football people get frustrated. Back in 1998, we got to the senior football semi-final and seemed more concerned with the ramifications of winning the game than losing it. We were already in the hurling semi-final and that was our priority, especially with nine dual players starting on both teams. Lissycasey beat us in the football semi-final and they took Doonbeg to a replay in the county final. Doonbeg went on to win the Munster club football title, while we went on to win our first Munster club hurling title. Something had to give.

  However, hurling no longer sits that comfortably at the altar of parish life and football has become a much more central part of the living church. The young players have developed a wining culture in football, not in hurling. In the near future, St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield will be targeting winning senior football titles, not senior hurling titles. And for some people in a club so historically connected to hurling, that is a vision they’re not entirely comfortable with.

  Of course a dual senior club should aspire to success in both codes, but that presents huge difficulties in a club with limited numbers of senior players, and friction is inevitable. Then injuries always pour petrol on the flames. If the football and hurling managements don’t work closely together, the outcome is chaos and festering resentment. With so many dual players this year, it’s already easy to envisage serious problems emerging down the road. The footballers have already stated their intent this year by securing the transfer of four players from Clooney-Quin, a neighbouring senior hurling club with only a junior football team. One of those four is Declan O’Keeffe, the former Kerry goalkeeper who won two All-Irelands and two All-Stars. A player with that class and ambition isn’t joining St Joseph’s just to make up the numbers.

  Before the U-21 hurlers played their championship match on St Patrick’s Day, the club was toying with the idea of tossing with Inagh-Kilnamona for a home-and-away arrangement. The match had been fixed for Meelick, right on the Limerick border, and the U-21 management were prepared to take the risk of playing away to Inagh-Kilnamona if they lost the toss. With the way preparations had gone anyway, they felt they’d nothing to lose.

  In any case, the request was never made and the match went ahead as planned. Inagh-Kilnamona had a good side, but our lads tore into them from the start. They got a foothold in the game with an early goal and then they dug in for a battle. In a team loaded with minors, they showed fantastic spirit and were level with less than two minutes remaining. But then they ran out of gas and Inagh-Kilnamona blitzed them with a late 1-2.

  The secretary, Dan O’Connor, said in the dressing room afterwards that it was one of the best fighting displays he’d ever seen from a St Joseph’s team. Most of the players were really disappointed, which showed that it meant something to them. It was a huge performance, really encouraging for the senior team, but it was still laced with frustration, regret and anger.

  Not that they’d lost. But Jeez, how could they have done if they’d trained properly?

  5. When We Were Kings

  As far back as March 2008, we had begun planning a ten-year reunion trip for the St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield squad that won the 1999 All-Ireland club title. When we properly mobilized towards the end of the year, we established a five-man organizing committee: Ger Hoey, Seánie McMahon, Noel Brodie, Lorcan Hassett and me. We decided on a weekend away in Kilkenny, with golf and drink and plenty of opportunities to rekindle old memories.

  Ger took over as chairman of the committee and everything was planned with military precision. He set up a direct debit account in the AIB for anyone who wanted to pay the €230 cost of the trip over a period of time. The date was set for the weekend of 27–29 March. Golf in Gowran Park was booked for the Friday, while a host of activities, ranging from archery to clay-pigeon shooting, was laid on for Saturday – if you had the head for it. We arranged a meal for Saturday evening and were booked into Hotel Kilkenny for both nights, where Liam Griffin had cut us a fantastic deal.

  After Ger passed away, Seánie received the planning folder Ger had assembled for the trip from his brother John. We seriously considered cancelling the whole event, coming as soon as it would after Ger’s passing. But John and the Hoey family had encouraged us to go ahead with the trip. They said it was what Ger would have wanted.

  So on Friday, 27 March, we took off to Kilkenny. Some of the lads had tee’d off in Gowran Park golf club at noon and the guys who were working followed them down. We all met in Hotel Kilkenny that evening. We had planned to spend that evening together in a local pub, so Seánie had rung Kilkenny hurler Martin Comerford, and he’d suggested Sham O’Hara’s pub in Thomastown. We had a bus organized to take us there.

  Late in the evening, about ten of us gathered around the warm fire, and a debate began as to the merits of Portumna’s emphatic All-Ireland final success the previous week. Portumna had certainly earned the right to be considered the greatest club hurling team of all time: the first club to win three All-Irelands in such a short time span (four years); a record final winning margin; the highest scoring total ever recorded in a club final over 60 minutes. A Munster club team had never previously lost an All-Ireland final by more than six points, but De La Salle were skewered by 19 points – and Portumna could have won by more if they’d really wanted to.

  Then the debate heated up: how would the St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield team of 1999–2000 have fared against Portumna? It’s impossible to compare teams from past and present, but such comparisons are at the heart of sporting discourse. A thousand pub conversations would otherwise die in the throat.

  Personally, I felt we wouldn’t have beaten Portumna, primarily because of the telepathy and pace of their forwards and the threat of Joe Canning. Lorcan Hassett was thinking along the same lines. But that’s where the agreement stopped.

  ‘[Ol
lie] Baker and [Joe] Considine would have eaten alive their midfield pairing of Eoin Lynch and Leo Smyth,’ said Jamesie O’Connor. Fair point. Physically, Baker and Considine were massively imposing and they had an infectious lack of respect for reputations. In his prime, Baker was one of the most powerful midfielders ever to play the game, and yet Considine was still our outstanding player in many of our big matches. They were our tone-setters, too; some of Athenry’s big guns tried to start a scrap early in the 1999 All-Ireland semi-final, but the two boys finished it pretty quickly with a couple of right good slaps.

  ‘We’d have had the big guns to shut down their key men up front,’ said Eoin Conroy. Very valid argument. Seánie would have gobbled up Kevin ‘Chunky’ Hayes and Donal Cahill was a brilliant club full-back. Eugene Cloonan told the physio Colum Flynn one time that Cahill was his most difficult opponent. After Brian Lohan, Cahill was the best full-back in Clare for a decade. He was so mentally strong that he’d have relished a crack at Joe Canning.

  ‘Physically, we’d have been able to stand up to them,’ said Seánie. Absolutely, because the physicality of some of the top clubs has really dropped in recent years and nobody has really stood up to Portumna physically in the last couple of seasons. That Athenry side that we ran into, and which won three All-Ireland club titles, were a physically awesome side. Huge men, real enforcers: Joe Rabbitte, Brian Feeney, Brian Hanley, Gerry Keane, Paul Hardiman, Brendan Keogh, Cloonan. When the teams met in 1999 and 2000, some of the hits were as ferocious as I’ve ever seen on a hurling pitch. Athenry may not have had the pace or class of Portumna, but they were a real warrior side who would have fronted up to Portumna. They certainly wouldn’t have allowed them to consistently dominate games like they do now.

  Portumna are a scoring machine, but our game was built on a superb defence and they wouldn’t have railroaded through us like they do against most teams in the country. We conceded the second lowest score in an All-Ireland club final against Rathnure in 1999. Of the nine Munster and All-Ireland club championship games we played between 1998 and 2000, we kept six clean sheets. Every member of that back seven played for the Clare seniors at some stage.

  Portumna are an exceptional side, but not having to negotiate a tough provincial campaign is a huge advantage in peaking for an All-Ireland semi-final and final. In our three years competing in the Munster club championship, we never once had a home draw. Some of those away games were like entering a cauldron: Mount Sion in Dungarvan in 1998, when the sulphur from the replayed Clare–Waterford Munster final was still hanging in the air; against Toomevara in Thurles in 1999, when the Clare–Tipperary rivalry was at its poisonous apex. That club game was almost seen as an extension of the ongoing inter-county battle, as reflected in the crowd of 15,000.

  As we entered the dressing room at half-time that day, some young lads spat at us. Inside the dressing room, we turned the mood into an engagement between Clare and Tipperary. Jamesie had his arm broken in that year’s replayed Munster semi-final, while Ken Kennedy and Darragh O’Driscoll had been part of the Clare U-21 squad which lost that year’s Munster U-21 final to Tipp when there was a mass brawl after the final whistle. Baker used it all as fuel to ignite the bonfire. ‘Tipp shit down on you, you and you over the summer,’ he said to Jamesie, Ken and Darragh, pointing at each of them in turn with that mad look in his eyes. ‘And now we’re going to do something about it.’

  Then Jamesie had the last word before we left the dressing room. ‘For ourselves,’ he said. ‘And for the Banner.’

  There were some serious teams knocking around the Munster club championship ten years ago: Toomevara, Ballygunner, Mount Sion, Ahane, Blackrock. And yet the hardest struggle was getting out of Clare. Clare clubs won six successive Munster club titles between 1995 and 2000. During all those years, the county championship was run on a knockout basis, so if you weren’t 100 per cent prepared for every game, you’d walk into a haymaker.

  The standard of Clare club hurling now is light years behind what it was a decade ago. The overall quality of club hurling around the country has definitely dropped in the last decade, with the exception of the Kilkenny championship.

  ‘Look,’ said Ciaran O’Neill, ‘we’d have beaten Portumna by ten points.’ There was probably an element of drink and pride associated with that assessment; but the discussion brought home just how special that team was and how good those times really were.

  It also probably demonstrated that we didn’t fully appreciate that fact at the time and that our ambition didn’t always match our potential. There is still a lingering sense of regret that the team underachieved, especially within Clare, and a degree of disappointment that we didn’t win the second All-Ireland.

  The team was driven by three of the best and most important hurlers to play the game over the last 20 years. The Friday night before we won our first Munster club title in 1998, Jamesie O’Connor, Seánie McMahon and Ollie Baker won All-Stars. They had also managed the same feat in 1995.

  When Brian Lohan ran into Wexford and Rathnure’s Rod Guiney a couple of weeks before the 1999 All-Ireland club final, Guiney asked Lohan for a synopsis on Doora-Barefield. ‘Twelve very good hurlers,’ said Lohan. ‘Where are the three weak links?’ inquired Guiney. ‘Weak links?’ responded Lohan. ‘The other three are All-Stars.’

  Failing to win successive All-Ireland club titles cost us our place in the pantheon of great club teams, but we still have a lot to be proud of because we’re the only Munster club to reach successive All-Ireland club hurling finals. All the other great clubs in Munster – Thurles Sarsfields, Mount Sion, Ahane, Newtownshandrum, Glen Rovers, St Finbarr’s, Toomevara, Patrickswell, Ballygunner, Sixmilebridge, Clarecastle, Newmarket – failed to match that feat. The legendary Blackrock team of 1978–9 – perhaps the greatest club team of all time, because they included a combined total of 28 inter-county All-Ireland senior medal winners – are the only other club to win successive Munster club titles. When you consider those statistics, there’s no doubting what our team achieved. And it’s even more striking when you consider where we came from.

  When I first started playing with the club in the early 1980s, we were only a junior outfit. We won a junior A title in 1983 and an intermediate title in 1985 to take us back into the senior grade for the first time in decades. We lasted three years up there before we were sent packing again with our tails between our legs. The relegation final against Newmarket-on-Fergus in 1988 was played on our own pitch in Roslevan and I remember thinking we were a complete joke. We barely had a team, we switched goalkeepers at half-time, and we ended up getting beaten by a side that seemed more interested than us. I was only a young fella, but the lack of ambition still hit me in the face.

  The following year was my first season on the panel and we reached the intermediate semi-final, which we lost to Clonlara. Smith O’Brien’s beat us in a quarter-final in 1990 before we reached the final in 1991. That team contained five minors and Corofin just rolled over us. My outstanding memory from that game was of an auld fella from Corofin on the line with a woolly hat; every time Corofin got a score in the second half, he banged the hurley against the ground and roared: ‘Sew it into the bastards.’

  Still, we knew we were coming strong. We won a minor A title in 1990, the club’s first in 30 years, and that team provided the bedrock for the club’s maiden U-21A success in 1993. We finally won back the intermediate title that season, and we retained our U-21 title the following year. Although it was our first year back up senior in 1994, we went straight into the final, which we lost to Clarecastle by three points.

  That defeat marked the beginning of a period during which we remained under Clarecastle’s thumb. They beat us by a point in the first round in 1995 and by two points in the quarter-final in 1996. In the showers after that match, Jamesie said, ‘The wheel will turn, it always does.’ We expected it to turn the following year but it didn’t; they beat us in the 1997 final by six points.

  By that stage, people withi
n Clare had a certain perception of us: a nice team with some really good players but who weren’t able to cut it at the top. Clarecastle on the other hand saw it in more crude terms. They labelled us as a ‘poo-poo’ team and they weren’t shy in proclaiming it around the county: that basically we shit ourselves every time we met them. It absolutely galled us and we never believed it for a second. But we still couldn’t crack them.

  That Clarecastle team was packed with hardened and experienced campaigners. They saw us as a crowd of young lads who were there to be bullied. When Joe Considine made his senior debut in 1996, he was almost excited to be in the exalted company of players like Anthony Daly, who was marking him. At one stage of the second half, the two of them were jostling after the ball and Daly saw it as a perfect opportunity to lay down a marker; he clocked Joe with the butt of the hurley into the jaw.

  Considine is originally from Cooraclare in west Clare but he had gone to school in St Flannan’s College as a boarder. Cooraclare didn’t have a hurling club and Considine didn’t have a hurling background but, like a lot of young boarders in Flannan’s, he spent his evenings honing his hurling skills in the ball alleys. Considine made the Dean Ryan team (U-16½) but wasn’t good enough to make the Harty squad. His hurling days looked numbered after he left Flannan’s because he wasn’t affiliated with any hurling club. Since he was good friends with Ben Conroy and me, he joined our club while he was still a minor.

  It was a massive achievement for Considine to play senior hurling within three years, but this was a whole new level of reality. He was nearly in shock after Daly’s introductory lesson and now he had to listen to a host more Clarecastle players calling him a hillbilly and telling him to ‘fuck off back to west Clare’ where he belonged.