Kieran Shannon: GAA weekend reminds us the club is where it’s at

RTÉ, despite Morning Ireland having so little to say about GAA yesterday morning, have added to the profile of the club game by televising it live, supplementing what TG4 have been doing for over 20 years

Loughmore-Castleiney’s John McGrath celebrates with a supporter after the Tipperary SFC final win over Clonmel Commercials at Semple Stadium, Thurles, on Sunday. Picture: Michael P Ryan/Sportsfile

When it came to the sports bulletin yesterday on Morning Ireland, Darren Frehill and his team cut their losses. After leading with the FAI women’s FAI Cup final — a new departure to be welcomed — followed by mention of Ole Solskjaer’s sacking and an obligatory reflection on the Irish rugby team’s latest dismantling of southern hemisphere opposition, there wasn’t time to get through the club GAA action.

So Frehill advised us to check out RTÉ’s website for more details if we wanted to know exactly who it was the few teams he had mentioned had overcome and how.

In many ways it was disappointing that there wasn’t room time for more clubs that had contributed to such a fantastic weekend of Irish sport to be namechecked on national radio when there’d been enough for Leeds as well as their victors Spurs. But in another way it was totally understandable too. I mean, whatever about where you might start with all the drama that the club and provincial championships threw up, where would you stop?

There were just so many storylines, wherever you looked and opened up your Examiner Sport supplement yesterday. If you were to be pushed, you’d have to begin with the heroics of Loughmore-Castleiney. We’ve had some incredible dual runs down through the years, like Cratloe in the middle of the last decade and Slaughtneil in the latter half of it but something about how the McGraths et al have come back from those two agonising one-point county final defeats last year to feature in both again this year makes them about everyone’s favourite club that they haven’t yet seen. 

For them to finally get on the right side of a tight final and last-minute goal in their 16th week out in a row, knowing they’ve to go to the well again next week in the hurling final replay, makes them the headline story of the club season so far, with more stories to know and to come from them. How do they manage it? When did they park the football celebrations? Maybe around this time next week they’ll get time to take a breath and tell us, though if they beat Thurles Sarsfields, that means it’ll be 19 weeks on the trot they’ll be out playing championship, with the prospect of it extending to 22.

Across Tipp’s southern border, you had the Cork final. Glen Rovers didn’t get a shout out on Morning Ireland yesterday morning, but they’d have been worthy of it; that’s five of the last seven county finals they’ve been involved in, and in the last four of them they’ve either won or contributed handsomely to a terrific contest. But the day belonged to Midleton, and with it, one of our favourite GAA photographs of this autumn for the redemption and reconciliation contained within: an ecstatic Midleton manager Ger Fitzgerald with one arm around an emotional Conor Lehane, another over a beaming Ben O’Connor.

Back in that awful winter of 2008-2009, Fitzgerald and O’Connor would have been on opposite sides of the Cork strike, Fitzgerald a selector to then manager Gerald McCarthy and O’Connor one of the players who favoured a more cutting edge setup. Yet there they were last Sunday — all season — teaming up together to concoct that perfect blend of tradition and innovation, Fitzgerald as manager and a totem of the club’s history, and O’Connor cementing his reputation as one of the county’s leading and brightest coaches.

And then there’s Lehane, a glorious ballplayer whose response to being cut from the Cork setup has clearly shown he has the grit and fight which he was supposedly deemed to lack. “If there’s eight or nine better forwards than him in the county,” said O’Connor afterwards, “we don’t know anything about hurling.” Well, O’Connor and Fitzgerald know hurling, something the weekend reaffirmed.

Then you had all the drama in Kerry which Frehill didn’t get round to mentioning, it still being only the semi-finals stage down there, but thankfully his television colleagues covered live on Saturday night. The first half of Austin Stacks-St Brendan’s was a tough enough watch, though both sides seemed to find it even harder to score, but after that it took off to deliver marvellous theatre with all the extra-time goals and spills topped off by a penalty shoot crowned by Kieran Donaghy.

It was said of Roy Keane the time he remarkably reconciled with Niall Quinn to manage Sunderland that he was the one story in Irish sport that kept on giving, never ending and never dull. Donaghy likewise has been entertaining us for 16 years since breaking onto the scene against Longford and Armagh that summer of 2006 much like Keane did that early autumn of 1990. Whenever we’ve thought his race was run, he’s found the legs for another: 2014 and what Brolly thought of all that, nose-to-nose with Aidan O’Shea in 2017, raising the phoenix that was Tralee basketball back from the flames to make it the most compelling ticket in that sport, to go along with his involvement with Armagh. Now at 38 and a half (he’ll be 39 in March), he’s back in a county final after kicking the winning penalty.

And it’s not just any team Stacks are playing in the final the weekend after next. It’ll be their deadliest of rivals Kerins O’Rahillys, who themselves edged a one-point heart-stopper, trumping Dr Crokes. Such is the affection Stacks’ fans hold their Strand Road counterparts, they refer to their club grounds as Ibrox. In truth Stacks-Strand Road has none of the poison of Celtic-Rangers, but with it being the first county final between them in 85 years, it’s going to be possibly the most anticipated county final in Ireland.

In Waterford, the Nire edged Rathgormack by a point as well with the remarkable Michael Ryan at their helm, the same margin Ballyea won the Clare hurling final without Tony Kelly last week. And that’s just staying in Munster. In Dublin you had St Jude’s, the county’s great nearly men of the past decade, lose out again by a point to Kilmacud, St Loman’s scrape past Garrycastle in extra-time in the Westmeath final, not to mention the extraordinary last-minute-goal Tullamore conceded to Naas in the first round of the Leinster championship.

In truth, we could go on and on, just as the action will go on and on in the coming weeks. This autumn hasn’t just confirmed what the summer of 2020 suggested — that the split-season can and does work — but that the GAA can survive giving up August and September to the club game. What we lose in quality — and the last few weeks will also give us an appreciation and appetite for when the county game kicks off again in the new year — is more than atoned for in the competitiveness and romance the club game throws up, much more than three of the four football provinces do anyway.

RTÉ, despite Morning Ireland having so little to say about the Gah yesterday morning, have also added to the profile of the club game by televising it live as often as it has on Saturday evenings these past 18 months, supplementing what TG4 have been doing for over 20 years. Indeed there’s a case for a Sunday night ‘The Club Game’ highlights show, even if the coverage would have to be less your traditional Match of the Day and feature more top-10 crazy clips-stories to squeeze everything in.

Because we’re all Loughmore-Castleiney now. Can’t get enough of these club games.