Tommy Martin: Does small club success hold a clue to minding all our sporting youngsters?

COMMUNITY JOY: St. Thomas’ Damien Finnerty celebrates after the All-Ireland Club SHC final win. Pic: Laszlo Geczo, Inpho

HURLING the little streets upon the great is pretty much what the All-Ireland club championships are about, but that doesn’t make the success of clubs like St Thomas’ of Galway and Watty Graham’s Glen from Derry any less worth noting.

The hurling champions, St Thomas’, are your classic club championship case study, an amalgam of townlands that amounts to a few hundred houses on the road from Loughrea to Gort, the kind of place the competition’s sponsor would use in an ad campaign.