Anthony Daly: TJ Reid and Ballyhale just know what it takes to win big matches
TJ Reid takes time to sign an autograph for supporter Matthew Groarke at the end of the game. Picture: INPHO/Ken Sutton
We always associate this time of the year with county finals and the provincial club championships, but there’s another unglamorous and tension-gripped side to early November hurling too, which can cut far deeper than a county final loss.
On Saturday, I was in the rain and wind-swept Clonlara to watch my beloved Clarecastle get relegated to intermediate. We were last in that grade in 1931, when we won the intermediate championship, but a 90-year unbroken sequence of senior hurling was finally severed.
It was heartbreaking, but we always speak about the pride in our black-and-white jersey and the lads went down with honour, fighting to the last whistle to try and stave off relegation against Crusheen.
We also saw the other side of play-off drama and the whole gamut of emotions associated with trying to survive inside in that bearpit. Crusheen were jumping around like lunatics at the final whistle until Michael O’Connor, the Clare PRO, was suddenly out in the middle of the field waving his hands like a fireman announcing that the blaze wasn’t quenched. Within seconds, Crusheen realised that, despite believing they had escaped the inferno, they’d actually been engulfed by it; O’Callaghan’s Mills — senior finalists last year — had staged a remarkable comeback to beat Clooney-Quin. Crusheen were gone down on scoring difference.
It was all a different world from yesterday and the glitz and glamour of the Kilkenny county final, and a Ballyhale Shamrocks team and club that almost seems to operate on a different planet to everyone else.
They’ve lost some of the greatest hurlers Kilkenny have ever produced in the last decade — Michael Fennelly was the latest to pack up — and yet, a small parish continues to defy logic and convention and demographics and just keeps on gobbling up titles.
Colin Fennelly was well held yesterday. So was Eoin Cody. Adrian Mullen got a great flick for his goal, but he was also marked well by a sticky and resolute O’Loughlin Gaels defence. But Ballyhale still scored 3-19 and strolled in the last quarter to a fourth successive Kilkenny title.
It’s just incredible the way the south Kilkenny club can keep producing these exceptional players. Ronan Corcoran was a deserved man of the match, but TJ Reid can’t have been far behind him.
When I was looking back on my notes afterwards, I had written down early in the second half, ‘Reid gone deeper’. TJ may not have shot the lights out from play but the amount of dirty ball he won, and the volume of scores he engineered from the middle of the field neatly encapsulated how Reid and Ballyhale just know what it takes to win big matches.
I watched the match from the living room, but I also had my laptop out to try and keep tabs on the Cork county semi-finals. At the second water break of the Glen Rovers-Sarsfields match, Sars had the tactics board out at one end, while Graham Callanan was going around grabbing Glen lads by the jersey at the other side of the pitch to rile them up for the last quarter.
I’m not knocking new-world tactics (the tactics board is a big part of Limerick’s water-breaks) but there’s a lot to be said for old-school principles at this time of the year.
O’Loughlins fought like demons from the first whistle but Ballyhale never backed off for a second. The three Ballyhale goals were also a prime example of old school ways delivering high-end results; the first one originated from a huge delivery from Reid into the square; Ballyhale’s second goal came from a Reid sideline cut which Mullen swatted into the net; Ballyhale’s final green flag came from a corner-back, Brian Butler, just breaking a raft of tackles, taking the punishment, keeping going and sticking it in the net.
O’Loughlins will be devastated to have fallen off in the last quarter but they can hold their heads high with pride – especially Paddy Deegan — because they went out of the battlefield on their shields.
O’Loughlins came with all the hunger you’d expect from an underdog. They were savaging Ballyhale in the tackle in the first half, but they never recovered from that three-goal blast; after the second water-break, they didn’t score again until injury-time.
It’s actually mind-blowing to think that a club formed less than 50 years ago — a small parish — is now chasing a ninth All-Ireland title.
