Kieran Shannon: Magnificent Maree have broken the mould
HISTORY MAKERS: The University of Galway Maree team celebrate as Pat Duffy Cup champions. Pic: INPHO/Ben Brady
It’s not just in Maree that they’re still pinching themselves – any and everyone who follows national league basketball at all probably has not quite yet processed or appreciated the exact magnitude of what transpired in Tallaght last Saturday night.
The Fields of Athenry has rung out in multiple sporting arenas over the decades, everywhere from Anfield to Toulouse, but there was something particularly authentic, apt and refreshing hearing it resound around the National Basketball Arena before, during and especially after the most remarkable of Superleague National Cup finals.
Belting it out on this occasion were the supporters of a team actually from Galway.
Even more, they were supporters from a team from a small Galway village, very similar to the one 12 miles away which Pete St John wrote about and even less as the small bird flies.
There’s been national league basketball in Ireland 50 years now, a National Cup for the past 40. Throughout that time there has also often been a third top-level competition; in its early incarnations it would have been known as the National Top Four Championship, in more recent years it’d have been known as the Champions Trophy. That means that every season there’s usually at least two bits of silverware that every team in the top-flight of men’s national league basketball can aim for, often a third.
In all that time no Galway side had ever laid their hands on any of them. In fact prior to last weekend no Galway side had ever reached a Superleague final or a Superleague National Cup final or the final of a Top Four or Champions Trophy or whatever name you gave the last competition of the season.
Such trophies, such stages, were usually the preserve of the sport’s bluebloods and entirely the preserve of the urban.
Before Eoin Rockall and Stephen Commins lifted the Pat Duffy Cup last Saturday night, there had been 114 previous top-flight national trophies handed out. Of those 114, 44 had been hoisted by teams from Cork (20 league titles, 13 Cups and 11 Top Fours/Champions Trophies). Forty-two of them were from teams from Dublin (14 leagues, 18 Cups and 10 end-of-season trophies). In fact throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was only one team from outside Dublin or Cork that got its hands on top-flight silverware – Killarney, who on the back of Paudie O’Connor’s audacious move to recruit American players, won two leagues and two National Championships.
In the 1990s others got in on the act. Ballina famously became the second provincial club to make the breakthrough, winning a couple of Cups either side of winning the 1992 league. Shortly thereafter Tralee Tigers won a league in ’96. The same season Belfast Star of the Sea won the first of three consecutive Top Fours and then won back-to-back Superleagues in the last two seasons of the old millennium.
In 2002 Waterford (the league) and Limerick (the Cup) also got in on the action, while Tralee compounded their status as a national force by winning a further pair of cups and leagues before the decade was out.
Even when the Tigers faltered and disappeared, their legacy remained. In recent years in the guise of Warriors the town has got to celebrate a couple of Superleagues, a pair of Champions Trophies and this time last year a Cup as the Arena on that occasion resounded to the tune of The Rose of Tralee after they beat city slickers Neptune.
Even then though they were still townies. An urban team. Prior to last weekend every team who had won a trophy at the top end of the men’s game had been an urban team – with never that urban area being a Galway team.
Last Saturday Charlie Crowley’s men changed all that, becoming the first team since Ballina in ’96 to bring a top-flight trophy across the Shannon, the first to bring one inside the county bounds and the first to bring one to a rural village. Such a destination might happen all the time in the GAA and its All Irelands competitions. In basketball it simply doesn’t – until now.
Maree have broken the mould and it is only fitting that it is them that broke the mould. It has throughout the years produced a litany of All-Ireland winning school teams and underage National Cup winners and some fabulous internationals. Michelle Fahy is one of the greatest five players the women’s game has ever known, Claire O’Sullivan (nee Rockall) one of its most decorated. Although they would return home in recent years to win first division honours, their litany of Superleague medals were all won representing urban powers.
Rockall’s mother Mary has coached multiple of those underage teams and players; her brother Eoin the co-captain and starting guard the other night. James ‘Crazy Horse’ Burke was a standout scorer for Galway Democrats in the 1980s but before then and after then he was of Maree, likewise Pat Finn. They still coach in the club and last weekend had sons on the winning team.
There has been the odd begrudging comment that they required considerable outside help and finance to contend and get over the line. But you know what Behan said about begrudgers and in their charismatic 25-year-old coach Charlie Crowley they have just the man to echo those sentiments. For as long as Crowley has been on this planet, this writer has over and over again heard the same said about whoever wins.
The truth is almost every setup or at least winning one requires a blend of homegrown players and some imports be they foreign or Irish. For every Shane Coughlan the great Blue Demons had, they had a couple of O’Reillys (formerly Neptune and Chríost Rí) and O’Sullivans (Ballincollig), and inversely, for every Paul Dick a Tralee recruited, they had a couple of homegrown players, famously winning their 2019 league up in UCD Belfield with five native players on the floor.
Instead of continuing to be the whipping boys of the Superleague, a couple of years ago they decided to go all in. Link up with the institution formerly known as NUIG (and before that UCG) as multiple city clubs have over the last 25 years. Recruit top-calibre players as their professionals and be open to players from other clubs in the area playing with them through structurally-linked agreements. When it came to the crunch last Saturday, it was a local kid, Crazy Horse’s own son, John, that came up with a couple of monstrous baskets, including a dagger three in the corner, to ensure the Cup was going back west. This was as much a club win as any club that has ever lifted a national cup.
Crowley himself has been as much a breath of fresh air as the team that he leads – most notably for the way that he leads. The way he’d leap and gesture to the crowd after a momentum-shifting basket might not be conform to the school of Jim Gavin but he’s being entirely himself. His players have obviously responded to that and all of basketball should cherish it too.
And so all the great Galway songs have probably got a rendition in recent days. The Fields in the Arena, prompting Greg Allen – an attendee at every Cup final since the first in 1984 – to record and tweet the atmosphere as good as he’s ever seen, reminiscent of the days Ballina beat the bodhráns in Neptune. N17. As for To Win Just Once? Well, they’re top of the league too. Who knows, with the fire in his eyes being so wild, Crowley might only be starting Brewing Up A Storm. They’ve more dreams and songs to sing.
