The Club

by Christy O'Connor

  The two of us were out on the town that night and Considine was still reeling from the events of the day.

  ‘I thought Daly was a nice guy,’ he said to me.

  ‘He is,’ I told him. ‘But these fuckers would take your life on the field to beat you. Wake up, Joe, this is the reality of senior hurling.’

  Joe was offended by what he’d been called on the field, but I assured him that that was mild. Word came back to us later that evening of how they had referred to us in the dressing room before the game: neo-townie scum. They didn’t give a damn about any of us and they would have cut our throats once they crossed that white line. Seánie had soldiered beside Daly and Stephen Sheedy with Clare for years, but when he moved up to centre-forward in the closing stages of the 1997 county final, Daly and Sheedy tore into him. They told Seánie that he had no business up their side of the field and to ‘fuck off back down to where you belong’. It was never our style to go sledging or mouthing on the pitch, but they had us under their thumb and they’d been giving us a lesson in the ruthless edge we needed to adopt if we were going to live with them.

  After four years of Clarecastle oppression, we were absolutely ravenous in 1998. Jamesie returned from his honeymoon after only six days, and on the day he got back we trained in Roslevan at 4 p.m. because we wanted to maximize the session on a cold Wednesday in early November. He said that day that he had come back for one reason: that we owed it to ourselves and to two men in particular – Ciaran O’Neill and Ger Hoey – to do everything we could to win that county title.

  When we played so poorly to defeat Kilmaley in that county final, our first title in 40 years, the overbearing pressure told in the performance. In truth, it felt like an anticlimax. But we were liberated afterwards, and that spirit was evident the following week in Dungarvan when we mowed Mount Sion down like roadkill. The suppressed emotion and satisfaction burst out like a geyser and the feeling in that dressing room afterwards has never been matched since.

  By then, we had the belief to chase real history. At a training session in Cusack Park the day before we played Mount Sion, Jamesie said if we beat the Waterford champions that we’d win the All-Ireland club title. After beating Mount Sion, it almost felt that we were on a mission of destiny.

  Some of the hurling we played in the first half of the Munster final against Toomevara – on a muddy and sticky pitch in the Gaelic Grounds – was the best we ever produced. Physically, we had also developed into a massively imposing side. Once we defeated Athenry in the All-Ireland semi-final, nothing was going to stop us. We beat Rathnure in the final by 12 points.

  There was still one caveat, though. We never ran into Clarecastle during the 1998 campaign because Éire Óg had taken them out in the first round after a replay. In their eyes, we weren’t the real All-Ireland champions because we hadn’t beaten them. Johnny Callinan, the former Clare player, said as much in his column in the local newspaper, The County Express.

  We knew we were in line to meet them in 1999, but we were almost derailed by Ogonnelloe in the quarter-final. The game was fixed for Broadford, in the heart of east Clare, on a really wet Saturday. A massive east Clare crowd were at the game, baying for blood. There was no stand or proper crowd-policing policy, and it was pure mayhem. Jamesie went on a solo run down the line at one stage of the second half and the crowd had veered so far out on to the pitch that he was weaving in and out through the bodies.

  We were chasing the game all the way through, and when they got a point with a minute remaining to push them ahead by four the show looked over. From the puckout, Ollie Baker, who had been moved to full-forward, scrambled home a goal. Deep in injury time, we were awarded a free from about 100 yards. Seánie, as you’d expect, slotted it to take us to a replay, which we won by six points.

  Clarecastle felt that the wheels were coming off our wagon and they were primed for us. Despite all the huge games we’d played in the previous 12 months, the 1999 county semi-final honestly felt like the biggest game we’d ever played. It was all on the line: not so much our county, Munster and All-Ireland titles, but our reputation and our quest for true respect. We knew that the only way Clarecastle would ever respect us was by beating them.

  Before a huge crowd – 12,000 – we blew them away in the first half and led by 0-10 to 0-2 coming up to the break. They got a goal to give them a real lifeline in the game, but we were physically standing up to them and they knew it.

  The usual abuse towards Joe Considine had been flying in the first half, primarily from their substitutes bench. At one stage, one of their mentors came in to give advice to one of their players and Considine buried him with a shoulder. The message was very simple: for years Clarecastle had been dealing with boys; now they were dealing with men. And this was a group of players who were prepared to finish them as a team.

  ‘The onslaught will come now,’ said Jamesie to us in the dressing room just before we went back out for the second half. ‘And we’re going to meet it head on.’

  We banged in two goals in the space of 90 seconds after the break and they spent the second half chasing us. Anthony Daly single-handedly kept them in the game and they won a penalty with ten minutes remaining with only four points between the sides. Before the penalty was taken, some Clarecastle supporters were singing an old tune.

  ‘Ye have them, lads. They’re going to shit themselves again.’

  Those days were long over, though. We saved the penalty and won by four points. We’d been the dominant team and the deal had been closed. We were not only officially the best team in the country, but we’d also finally earned our true respect in Clare. Clarecastle couldn’t deny that any longer and Daly acknowledged as much afterwards. He stood at the entrance to our dressing room and shook every St Joseph’s player’s hand on the way in.

  *

  Respect was always what it was about for us because we worked so hard to earn it. On the night we won the All-Ireland title in 1999, we were welcomed back into the bosom of our people in Roslevan. Jamesie made a great speech which really underlined how the team had been shaped and defined along the journey. He told a story from a challenge game we’d played against Clarinbridge in Galway three years earlier.

  The game was on in Clarinbridge on a Sunday evening and we arrived with a full squad. They only had 13 players and we ended up giving them two players to make up the numbers. They were a young side with a raft of players on county minor and U-21 teams, but we still felt that they had shown us a serious lack of respect that evening. As Jamesie recalled that story he finished with the line: ‘Now that we have achieved what we have, no club will ever disrespect us like that again.’

  We went on to win another county and Munster title in 1999 before being beaten by Athenry by four points in the 2000 All-Ireland final. We took out Clarecastle in the first round of that year’s championship but got sucker-punched by Éire Óg in a low-scoring dogfight semi-final. That game was part of a double-header semi-final on a Saturday evening and there must have been over 12,000 people at it, even though the weather conditions were dire. After Éire Óg got ahead, the crowd smelt blood. Every score they got and clearance they made was greeted with a crescendo of noise.

  Éire Óg were probably one of the poorest teams we’d met, but they were the first Munster team to beat us in over two seasons. They deserved the win and they celebrated it afterwards almost like a county title. Some of their substitutes were trash-talking as we were coming off the pitch. We later heard more loose comments about our worth as a team flying around from some of their players and supporters. They were delighted with themselves, and then Sixmilebridge came along two weeks later and wiped them out in the final.

  When we were growing up, Éire Óg had always been our main rivals because we’d gone to school with most of their players in Ennis. They’d never really regarded us as a threat, but they were forced to review that attitude after we beat them in the 1990 minor final, hammered them in the 1993 U-21 final and took them out in the senior
semi-final a year later. After that, Clarecastle assumed the status of our archrivals.

  When 2001 arrived, we were like men possessed. When we beat Clarecastle in the county quarter-final, the prize was another shot at Éire Óg in the semi-final. We thought they’d disrespected us the previous year and we were refuelled by a desire for retribution. In our eyes that day, every club in the country respected us – except Éire Óg. ‘Even Clarecastle respect us,’ said Jamesie in the dressing-room huddle before that 2001 semi-final. ‘Well, today we’re going to teach respect.’ We annihilated them by 24 points.

  We beat Sixmilebridge in the county final before narrowly losing the Munster quarter-final to Ballygunner in Walsh Park. Since then we have failed to win any more county titles; our last final appearance was in 2004, when we lost to Kilmaley by a point, with the second-last puck of the match. That team still had the core-group of bodies from the All-Ireland winning side, but more and more of those players have slipped away in recent years and we’ve never really replaced them. The aura around St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield has been stripped away, layer by layer, with each passing season. That aura is what we’ve all been struggling to rediscover over the last few years. Ten years on, ambitions of winning another All-Ireland club title exist only in a parallel universe. That is our reality now.

  As the chat continued around the fire in Thomastown, a few of us got talking about how fortunate we were to have played with some of hurling’s greatest players of the last 20 years – Jamesie, Seánie, Ollie. But to many of us in Doora-Barefield, Ger Hoey more than anyone else stood for everything we believed in: respect, honour and dignity. He was the player who everyone really looked up to, who always carried people with him through the immense force of his character and personality. It was fitting that the last 12 people to carry his coffin in Templemaley cemetery on that fresh February morning were all former St Joseph’s teammates.

  One of the defining moments for that team came at half-time in the 1999 All-Ireland semi-final against Athenry. Six points up, but having to play into a near-hurricane in the second half, we knew we were going to face the ultimate test of character, belief and spirit. The side was full of leaders, but the true warrior stepped forward and set the tone. ‘I can guarantee ye, this game will be level with 15 minutes to go,’ said Ger Hoey. ‘And then we’ll see who the real men are.’

  Ten years on, for those of us fortunate enough to have been on that team, the real sense of satisfaction and pride was knowing that you were surrounded by great men. Really great men.

  6. The Future

  The sweetest victory I ever tasted was our minor A win in 1990. The final whistle was absolutely beautiful; the explosion of emotion, the kinetic charge of elation as myself and Seánie McMahon hugged each other in the goalmouth, and the absolute purity of the satisfaction which followed. Beating our archrivals, Éire Óg, enhanced the sensation because we’d been listening to their players in school for the previous two weeks telling us by how much they were going to beat us. They were reigning champions and hot favourites, but we won an epic match by a point.

  There’s no doubt about it but that win was effectively the launch-pad for our All-Ireland club success nine years later: eight players from that minor panel in 1990 started the 1999 All-Ireland club final. It was the club’s first minor title in 30 years and it heralded the beginning of a great odyssey for many Doora-Barefield players, none more so than Seánie McMahon.

  He couldn’t make that team and the only reason he played in that 1990 minor final was because our full-back, Donal Cahill, cried off with illness that morning. Seánie never seemed destined to become a good player, never mind possibly the greatest centre-back in hurling history. In his early teens he was a light, timid player. That could possibly be traced back to when he was 12 and he got all his front teeth smashed in during a schools match, an incident which probably set him back about four years.

  When Seánie was 16, there were 60 players called for a Clare U-16 trial and his name wasn’t among them. That devastated him, but he couldn’t claim to have been a victim of injustice when he couldn’t make the Doora-Barefield minor team a year later. He only got his chance through the misfortune of someone else, but he played well in that final and he always spoke afterwards about the huge level of confidence he gained from it. We all did.

  We never had a culture of underage success, but winning that minor title infused us with the belief that we could go on to greater things. Three years later, we won our first U-21A title, hammering Éire Óg in the final. The night before that game, our trainer, Tony Kelly, told us that Doora-Barefield were going to play a huge part in the future success of Clare hurling. Clare hurling was at an all-time low at the time, but Kelly could already see the bigger picture through the talent in our panel. Anyone in Clare will tell you that the county would not have won All-Ireland titles in 1995 and 1997 without the influence of Jamesie O’Connor, Seánie McMahon and Ollie Baker – all members of the 1990 minor panel.

  We haven’t won a minor title since. We continued to reach minor finals over the next decade – we narrowly lost five finals between 1992 and 2001 – but we haven’t even been back to one since then. We won our last U-21A title in 1994, and our record in the competition over the last decade has been one long horror-story.

  In our club there is absolutely no culture of underage hurling success between the ages of 15 and 21 any longer, and the rate of player fall-off in those age groups has nearly been at haemorrhage level. We haven’t had success at U-15A since 1994 or at U-16A since 1995, while we’ve won only three more underage A hurling titles in the meantime.

  On the other hand, we’ve developed into a real underage football powerhouse, winning 17 A titles in the last two decades. In the last three seasons alone, we’ve contested six A finals in football (including one Feile final) and not one in hurling. It’s always much harder to win underage hurling titles, especially when most of the dominant underage hurling clubs concentrate solely on hurling. In order to remain competitive at hurling, a dual club like ours has almost to double its efforts at underage hurling coaching because the skills development of young hurlers requires a much more concentrated investment than for footballers.

  We have had some fantastic people working with our underage teams over the last decade, but we made the same mistakes that the county board made after Clare won All-Ireland titles in 1995 and 1997: we rested on our laurels.

  That was the time the club needed to really push the underage development, yet one parent once told me that his son didn’t bring his hurley to school for six months after we won that All-Ireland. At the time, that kid was an enthusiastic ten-year-old, and the club shouldn’t have just left it up to the school to foster his development. When he and his friends – the kids who brimmed with excitement and vigour when the All-Ireland trophy was brought around to the schools – played at U-14 level four years later, they were competing in the B grade. The club has to stand indicted for allowing that to happen.

  In our defence, we had just bought the land in Gurteen and most of the energy from the people in the club was poured into that development. But we still took our eye off the ball.

  When I wrote an article for the club yearbook in 2003 entitled ‘Time for Action’, I interviewed Joey Carton, who was then, and still is, Provincial Games Manager for Munster. He had been at the heart of the De La Salle underage revolution in Waterford city. When Carton first got involved in the club, De La Salle were on the floor and they’d seriously discussed winding up the club at an AGM in the 1970s. They were an intermediate team without prospects. By the early 1980s, they couldn’t field a minor team, and the only way was to start again, from the bottom. A juvenile committee was formed with teenagers such as Carton on board, and that’s where the long climb to the summit began. In the last decade, they’ve won half a dozen U-16 county titles, five U-14s and a minor crown. Last month, they reached an All-Ireland club senior final.

  Talking to me for that article in 2003, Carton
emphasized the importance of nurturing hurling skills development between the ages of six and ten. At the heart of it was the setting up of an underage development committee to cater for those age groups. ‘That committee seems like the most unimportant in the club but it is the most important,’ said Carton in 2003. ‘The club can have its finger on the pulse there and can see what’s coming. You cannot understate how crucial that is to a club.’

  Carton’s comments always made perfect sense. If kids can manage to execute the basic skills at that age group, they have a far better chance of progressing as underage hurlers. Moreover, they will be far more confident and will get far more enjoyment out of hurling, which consequently makes it far easier for the club to hold on to those players. Hurling is such a technical game that it’s almost impossible to eradicate bad habits from a 14- or 15-year-old.

  In that article, Carton had also spoken about the importance of continuing that coaching in the schools. That was always a no-brainer, because whatever coaching is done in the club would inevitably break down if it wasn’t maintained in the schools. No hurler – no matter what age – can drop a hurley for a sustained period of time and then expect to be at the same level when he next picks it up. Hurling just doesn’t work like that. For years, the schools filled that gap, but coaching hurling in the schools is no longer a priority for principals and teachers who face increasing demands from school life. And the club needed to acknowledge that.

  For years, some of us had been raising those points at AGMs, but nothing was ever done about it. Finally, at a meeting in July 2008 to draw up the plans for our new state-of-the-art clubhouse, I couldn’t take it any more. ‘I’m sick of all this talk about the development in Gurteen. When are we going to realize that we need to start pumping money into our underage structures? The way we’re going, we’ll have the best facilities in the county and we’ll have no players.’