To be honest, it was just inside the post. I knew it was over but I was roaring ‘Wide ball!’ and the umpire waved it wide. The ’Bridge full-forward, Brian Culbert, roared at him for getting the call wrong and, after I took the subsequent puckout, the same umpire asked me if that ball was a point. ‘No,’ I told him. ‘Wide ball. Good call.’
Honestly, this is something I have a slight moral dilemma over. It’s dishonest and I sometimes feel like a total hypocrite, especially because I often write about the importance of honesty and integrity in GAA. The prevailing culture in our games is to push the limits of fairness, to see what you can get away with. Trying to influence an umpire isn’t the same as cynical play or verbally abusing a referee, but it’s still wrong. It’s hard to defend or explain it, but in the heat of a championship battle, when the game could go either way on a marginal call, you just become conditioned to battling for those calls. It’s hard to describe it but you almost do it without thinking. It’s an in-built mechanism that you hit to survive. And anyway, with the speed the ball travels, you can often be on the wrong end of those marginal calls. We lost a championship match to Éire Óg in 2006 by a point with the last puck of the game. The ball was at least a foot wide and the umpires, who clearly didn’t see it, panicked and put up the white flag. And that defeat effectively wrecked our season.
Anyway, with this game slipping from us, we needed to find some spark, and we finally did. Seánie had begun to exert his influence up front and four points in five minutes from Seánie, Conor Hassett, Damien Kennedy and Kevin Dilleen pushed us three back in front, heading into the final quarter.
Then, I nearly blew that lead with ten minutes remaining. On a free-out ten metres from our own goal, I tried to pick out Kevin Dilleen with a short pass and never saw Gilligan drifting across my line. He launched the ball back into the square and, after a mad scramble when it broke, I had no choice but to throw myself on it to ensure it stayed out of the net.
Seconds later, Patsy came down and abused me for not driving the free longer. So did half the back line. When one of the selectors, Steve Whyte, then came down the line from the other side of the field to have his say, I lost it with him.
‘I was trying to do the right thing. So will you ever just clear off and don’t be annoying me.’
The game was still in the balance, heading into the last five minutes, when we finally broke their resistance. Seánie laid the ball on a plate for Conor Hassett, who broke through the cover of the full-back line. The goalkeeper came out and Hassett took it around him and slipped it into the net.
I looked out at Ken and pumped my fist. This game was as good as nailed down.
Hassett quickly scored a point to push us six clear. They responded with two late points, but the referee only played nine seconds of injury time – you could see it on the electronic clock – and we were winners on a scoreline of 1-13 to 0-12.
By the time I made it down to the bottom goal, just in front of the dressing room, Seán Chaplin was standing on the edge of the pitch, having shaken hands with all our players. ‘Well done,’ he said as we shook hands.
‘Hopefully, we’ll see ye again,’ I responded.
A couple of minutes later, both he and Rusty Chaplin entered our dressing room to extend their congratulations on our win.
‘I said it to ye before that there is a championship in this team,’ said Seán Chaplin. ‘And I still believe there is. But there is a long way to go and hopefully we can regroup now and we might meet ye down the line.’
The mood in the dressing room was electric. There’s nothing like winning a championship match on a beautiful summer’s evening. With such a giddy atmosphere, Patsy decided to announce details of our bonding weekend.
‘We’ve a few Clare Cup games still to play, but we’re going to the Aran Islands on the weekend of the 4th of July. Try and keep that date free.’
After congratulating everyone on the performance, John Carmody then took a more circumspect tone. ‘We haven’t even started yet. We have 30 sessions and ten matches played, but we’re going to train like madmen now for the summer. So be ready for it. Just remember what I said before the game – do whatever it takes this year to bring that Canon Hamilton back to the parish. Make the commitment now that we’re going to do it.’
It’s already looking positive for us. One of the most satisfying aspects of this evening’s performance has been the impact of our substitutes. Everyone who came in – Seánie, Paul Dullaghan, Noel Brodie and Mikey Cullinan – made a contribution. Joe Considine is planning to come back training with us in the next few weeks when his football commitments ease off, while Ivor Whyte is making really good progress after recovering from a cruciate knee injury, and Seán Flynn’s shoulder injury should also be well cleared up by the time our next game comes around. Any team which wins a championship has to have sufficient depth, and we really look to have it now.
We all went into Ennis that evening to celebrate, starting in Mossy’s. The place was buzzing. The weather was beautiful, June was coming and the season was pregnant with promise and hope for us.
Some victories are taken for granted, but to win a big championship match with your friends and teammates is a beautiful feeling, and tonight is one of those moments. The feeling of being a band of brothers fighting for the same cause, a feeling forged in good and bad times.
At one stage, I pulled up a stool beside Patsy, who was sipping a pint of Heineken through a smile that was lighting up the whole bar. ‘Ah Jeez, there’s nothing like this,’ he said. ‘It’s just some feeling to win with your own club. All your own buddies. It’s not the same with another club. There’s no comparison. This is what it’s all about.’
A couple of minutes later, Ken Kennedy passed us on the way to the bar and he just smiled at us. He had been sick heading into the game and at one stage in the second half he turned around and told me to be really alert because he was struggling with the pace of the game. Still, he had given us everything. And so had his brother Damien.
When Patsy got the job, some people doubted whether the Kennedys would give total commitment to a new managerial regime which had effectively removed their father. There was no need to doubt any more.
‘They’ve been brilliant,’ said Patsy. ‘They’ve given me absolutely everything. It says a lot about them.’
After a while, we moved up to the Brewery Bar on the square, where most of our young crew were fetched up. The music is louder and the skirts of its female clientele are always shorter up there. Towards the end of the night, I got talking to John Carmody. ‘We’re going to get stronger when we get everyone back and there will be great competition for places,’ he said. ‘But we really need to push it on now. Because it takes absolutely everything to win a Clare championship. It’s a savage hard championship to win. It always was.’
Most of the lads made their way to Cruise’s Bar and the Queen’s Hotel nightclub, but before Seánie, Donal Cahill and I headed for home, Seánie had to get his usual post-pints feed: a Hawaiian burger and large chips from Enzo’s takeaway. The man has an unbelievable sweet tooth and an appetite like a horse, but playing club hurling allows him summer indulgences which he had to suppress for 13 years when he played for Clare.
We were all still munching on chips when we pulled up outside Donal’s house, around 2 a.m. We got talking about the game and I relayed a story to the two lads about a conversation I’d had with Gráinne Hassett – Lorcan and Conor’s sister – in Mossy’s earlier that evening. She said that she was surprised at how big the crowd was and she was curious to know if players could hear what was being said among the throng while the game was going on.
I said that I never took any notice of the crowd during a match – and then I thought of our championship game against Sixmilebridge last year in Shannon. During one passage of play in the opening ten minutes that evening, when it was helter-skelter in the spilling rain and we were under pressure to clear a ball in the bottom corner, I heard this rasping, disti
nctive voice from the crowd which immediately registered with me: it was Ger Hoey.
We all just shook our heads at the sadness of the memory. We stayed in the car for another 35 minutes talking about Ger – how much this evening would have meant to him and how happy he’d have been with the performance. And for sure, he’d have been out celebrating with us tonight. Stuck in the middle of it. Loving it. Ecstatic that Doora-Barefield seemed back on the road again.
Seánie lives just half a mile down the road from Donal, and before I dropped him off I just looked at him.
‘This is the year to do it,’ I said to him. ‘We have to do it. We just have to.’
‘No doubt about it,’ he responded.
We sat talking in the car for another 15 minutes. About Ger. About the club. About our ultimate aim for the year. Without losing the run of ourselves, we started to visualize the county final in October like a couple of kids. When we won county titles in 1998 and 1999, Ger had his eldest daughter Elaine as one of the team mascots. Seánie has three sons now and I have one son and we hoped that they’d be the team mascots this time around, please God. We could almost picture them, togged out in their little maroon-and-white jerseys and their little hurleys, and not knowing what was going on. Hopefully, the next generation of Doora-Barefield players.
‘When we won our county medals in the past we were young, and we’d appreciate them an awful lot more now,’ Seánie said to me. ‘It’s eight years since I won anything now, even with Clare. I would just do anything to win it this year. This is definitely my last cut at it. And it would be some way to go out.’
On the way home, I was giddy with the thought of it all because I just want it so badly. Excited too because I really think we have a great chance now. A really great chance.
9. Going Down
Déjà vu. July 7th and, for the second year in a row, we’ve found ourselves staring into the abyss of relegation from the league. We’ve gone from being regarded as the Manchester United or Chelsea of Clare club hurling to being viewed as consistent league relegation candidates. Blackburn Rovers. Sunderland. Hull City.
I couldn’t tell you exactly how many Clare Cup titles (Division One) that we’ve won over the last 15 years. Definitely three, maybe four. When we won the title in 1998, the final was played in November 1999, a week after that year’s county final, and we treated it as a warm-up for the Munster semi-final against Toomevara two weeks later. The weather was so bad that day that Jamesie O’Connor and Donal Cahill – who were injured – left at half-time and went off to a local pub in Tulla to watch South Africa and England in the rugby World Cup quarter-final. They weren’t even back by the time we were being presented with the cup.
We could afford to treat the league like a joke back then because we were still good enough to win it if we made a moderate effort. Not any more. It seems like we’re only able to get up for championship games any more, which is a huge problem in trying to maintain any consistency. When we went into our last game against Éire Óg last year, the stakes were huge because the loser was going down, but we blitzed them in the second half and that performance was later identified as a turning point in our season. Now? Our final-day opponents, Clarecastle, are safe and have an outside chance of qualifying for a semi-final if other results go their way. And we know that they’d like nothing better than to put us down.
It still shouldn’t have come to this. Apart from the game against Cratloe three weeks ago, every game we’ve lost has been by a score or less. Some of those defeats were games thrown away, while bad luck nailed us in a couple of close matches. In our first match against Clooney-Quin, which we lost by a point, Davy Hoey took a penalty with ten minutes to go; the ball ricocheted off their keeper’s hurley, hit the back stanchion of the net and flew back out. Even I could see from the other end of the field that it was a goal but the umpires somehow missed it. The same evening, we missed about eight scoreable frees. Our regular free-taker, Conor Hassett, was supposed to play, but the Clare players weren’t allowed to line out with their clubs that weekend ahead of a league game against Cork. The club were hoping Hassett would be released because he wasn’t even on the panel for the game on Sunday. But he wasn’t.
We thought we got a perfectly legitimate goal with the last puck of the game against Inagh-Kilnamona but the referee disallowed it for a square ball and we were beaten by two points. Still, we had enough chances to win two games that day, and our consistency has been so poor that we can’t take refuge in bad breaks or poor refereeing decisions. We’re flirting with relegation because we’ve become conditioned to losing tight league games.
The Clarecastle game was originally fixed for last Friday, the day before our team-bonding weekend trip to the Aran Islands was scheduled. But Darragh O’Driscoll’s sister was getting married on Friday and a number of the lads were attending the afters. The option then was to play the game on Tuesday, two days after lads returned from the Aran Islands like zombies.
That was discussed on the field in a huddle on the day of our last league game, after we beat Sixmilebridge. I was totally against the trip. ‘We can’t go on that trip if the game is fixed for Tuesday. Jesus, it’s hard enough to beat Clarecastle with a fully fit team, never mind a team that’s fucked from liquor.’
There was no response to the comment. Conny later told me that some guys were looking at me as if I’d two heads on me. As far as they were concerned, the trip had been planned, guys had arrangements made and it was going ahead. Management said that a decision would be made over the next few days, and on Wednesday we got a group text to say that the game against Clarecastle was going ahead the following Tuesday. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t going to go against the wishes of the group.
Only eight players from the senior panel went on the trip, which was a clear statement about either the unity of the group or the point of the exercise. To me, it was pointless with what was coming down the tracks. Some guys were working, more guys couldn’t have been bothered, but some lads were clearly planning ahead for the Clarecastle match.
The day before the match, we trained in Gurteen and you just knew some guys were shook up. What’s more, a U-21 football championship match had also been fixed for that evening, which wasn’t ideal preparation for them, so close to a big hurling game. Anyway, management decided to run the drink out of guys’ systems. That training was certainly no benefit to me or my arthritic hips, so I just worked hard in the wall alley for almost half an hour while the boys plodded around the field behind me.
It was a wet evening and the air was sticky with humidity. At one stage, Ken Kennedy came up to me during a water-break, sweat and raindrops dripping off him like he’d just emerged from the shower with his gear on. He hadn’t been on the trip and he wasn’t impressed. ‘That’s fair bullshit the night before a game so important. It’s all right to run the shit out of guys who were drinking all weekend, but the whole squad shouldn’t be doing this running.’
He was right. Already, negative energy was seeping into the collective mood.
It was always going to be a tough struggle against Clarecastle anyway. Greg Lyons has gone to the USA for the summer, while Cathal O’Sullivan has gone travelling to South-east Asia for six weeks. Kevin Dilleen is playing for the Clare footballers against Donegal on Saturday evening and there are no guarantees that he will be released. It’s the same story with Conor Hassett, because Clare are playing Galway in the hurling qualifiers as well on Saturday evening.
Jeez, this is going to be some dogfight now.
*
The away dressing rooms in Clarecastle are split into two different rooms, with the showers and toilet area in between. We always set the physio table up in the smaller second room, and I always tog off in there any time we play in Clarecastle, just because the majority of the group use the bigger room and there’s more space in here. This evening, though, everybody was gathered in one room – an indication of how the panel had been thinned from when we were last here against Sixmilebri
dge six weeks ago.
When I was going to the toilet, I heard some of the lads outside discussing how strong the stale stench of Deep Heat was in the room. I just smiled to myself. I’ve broken my nose three times playing hurling, and the last time I broke it my nose was smashed in three places from a lash of a hurley and it effectively destroyed my sense of smell.
By the time I went back in to put on my gear, it was clear from the staccato nature of conversation that this was a big game. The room was quiet, too quiet. After we togged off and completed the warm-up, John Carmody approached me coming off the pitch on our way back to the dressing rooms.
‘There are no excuses tonight because we’ve got our strongest team available on the pitch,’ he said. Dilleen and Hassett had been made available to us, and Clarecastle were only missing Jonathan Clancy. It was also a sign of how the power has shifted in Clare hurling in that there was only one established county player between the two squads. A decade ago, St Joseph’s and Clarecastle would have provided around 12 players to the Clare panel.
Clarecastle were making their way out as we went back in to put on our jerseys, and it was obvious that they were up for the game. Aside from our rivalry, they have their own motivations. They had been heavily beaten by Crusheen in their previous game, which had all but killed their chances of a semi-final spot. Now they were looking for a performance and atonement in front of their own crowd.
Fahey alluded to that beforehand. ‘They were poor against Crusheen but they’re going to come out firing tonight because they have to. They’ve a strong team out, they’re just down Jonathan Clancy, they mean business and they mean to win. They’ll be psyched up to their eyeballs, but we need to be controlled and disciplined here. Crusheen didn’t concede any frees against them, so it can be done. It can be done, but if there has to be rough stuff dished out, we dish it out. We don’t fucking spare them, because they won’t spare us.’
The Club Page 12