Forget Poland, the Páirc is the place to be
On Sunday it stages two of the best three teams in Gaelic football, Cork and Kerry. A fortnight later it presents Tipp and Cork in hurling which should pack the place like June days of old. And yet for just pure electrifying sport, a game that promises to be the equal of those senior faceoffs is the clash of Cork and Tipp tomorrow night in the Bord Gáis Energy Munster U21 hurling championship.
Last year when they squared off Tipp ran up 1-21 yet lost to an Aidan Walsh-inspired Cork that ran up 4-19. The previous year the counties drew 5-17 apiece.
Yet those games weren’t even the best games in those respective Munster U21 championships, as anyone who witnessed Limerick and Cork’s glorious shoot-out in Thurles last August will testify.
There are a number of factors that make the grade so intriguing, a prime one being the ‘will they’ question. Will the stars of that night go on to be the stars of tomorrow? Or as Liam Sheedy puts it when talking to underage coaches, will it be the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? It was a case of the latter with the Cork U21 teams of the late ‘90s. At half-time in their 1997 U21 decider against Galway it looked as if Diarmuid O’Sullivan would have to be replaced after sustaining a serious blood injury to the head. Just as Donal Óg Cusack was coming to the climax of an impassioned plea to his team-mates to “win this one for Sully“, in strode O’Sullivan himself, the top of his head resembling an Egyptian mummy, declaring that there was no way he was coming off and no way Cork were going to lose.
That was the beginning of the legend of The Rock, and the end of the beginning for a great team. After the game team captain Danny Murphy coolly told his colleagues that he expected them to win multiple All-Irelands, including at senior. Murphy would only be a fringe player on the 1999 senior panel and gone thereafter but the core of that team saw his vision through. In ’99 another inspiring leader spoke in their victorious dressing room — Brian Cody — telling them he’d seen this day coming, having commented to friends throughout ’97 and ’98, “that’s not an U21 team with players playing senior: that’s a senior team playing U21.”
Of course, there are no guarantees at this level. The Limerick sides that strung three titles together went on to win a single Munster senior championship match, though this column maintains a lot of those players got an unfair rap for “underachieving”. Sure, some of them got carried away and drifted away, mistakenly believing talent alone would see them through. But the Stephen Luceys and Damien Reales and Brian Gearys who stayed on to take the brunt of that criticism actually carved out respectable senior careers.
Another part of the grade’s uniqueness is its sudden-death nature. There is a strong case for revising the format. A grade that exists as much to facilitate development as produce a champion should allow more competitive games for all teams; why not make some of their challenge games actual round-robin championship games to justify all that preparation?
But equally there’s something glorious in the grade being the last pure knockout competition in inter-county hurling.
Besides, you can always choose not to die even after a defeat. In 1992 a fancied Clare team lost to Waterford narrowly in a pulsating Munster final. It would be the end of Ger Loughnane’s tenure as an U21 manager, the county board dismissing him, perplexed how such a talented crop of players had come up short, and fearing this was the beginning of the end for them.
The players who had marvelled at the quality of Loughnane’s hurling sessions didn’t see it that way. Neither did Loughnane. In the dressing room afterwards he departed from the usual mumbling of thanking everyone for their efforts, instead telling the Jamesie O’Connors and Colin Lynchs how his emphasis on speeding up the pace of their hurling had been validated. “You saw it for yourselves, lads: Thurles like a carpet, the ball flying around; we have to get up to that pace.”
That night he dropped Brian Lohan off in his home in Shannon. Lohan had endured a torrid night from Sean ‘Growler’ Daly, and told Loughnane he feared he’d never play for Clare again. Loughnane told him he would star for the Clare seniors within a couple of years.
Three years later Clare won a senior All-Ireland with Lohan at full-back and one Ger Loughnane as coach. Both will put it down to their U21 days as much as the infamous nights in Crusheen.
Those defeats could easily have signalled the end for them. Instead they were just the end of the beginning.
