Success for Castleknock and Blanchardstown
ALL IS quiet in Dublin 15. A spring breeze whistles through the leafy suburbs, but nobody is talking. All minds are focused on Sunday, but they dare not speak about it. It will be a big day around the disconnected housing sprawls that make up this part of the capital. St. Brigids are within touching distance of an All-Ireland final. All those years out in the cold are about to come to an end.
Since they took the first county title, there has been a lot of hype about the Castleknock club. Much of it centres on the Gallaghers, particularly Rory who has found himself, through no fault of his own, cast as the saviour-in-waiting of Dublin football. The cousins were the final two pieces in the Brigids puzzle and, around these parts, the picturesque Fermanagh village of Belleek is no longer just famous for its china.
Of course, talk to anyone in Brigids and they will tell you a different story, maybe a more reliable version of events. There is a little resentment at the skewed take of the outside world on Brigids’ success. As if it is about two cousins from west Fermanagh and 13 other players, they are piggy-backing to county and Leinster titles. That the likes of Peader Andrews and Jason Ward would flounder without the scoring prowess of Raymie and Rory.
That is the story most like to believe. There is another story, that begins when the cousins were still kicking points for Erne Gaels. It begins long before the unusual double-act of Paddy Clarke and Gerry McEntee arrived at a frosty field on January 16 last year and started the process of moulding a championship-winning team.
Tony Hegarty has been involved in Brigids most of his life. During his nine-year reign as team manager the club rose from intermediate to senior status. Now club secretary, he has worked for days like Sunday all his adult life. Many in Russell Park have. It began on a Saturday morning, like this one, mild for February even with a spring breeze freshening the air.
Twenty-three years ago, when St. Brigids were only considered a distraction in Dublin GAA circles, a few people got ambitious in Russell Park. They decided Saturday mornings should not be for cartoons, but for football, and an U10 schools league was set up. It started with two teams and 40 kids, but within a decade had developed into 18 teams and 300 children.
“This has been a long time coming, a long time in development,” Hegarty says. “People will talk about the players we brought in, but almost all of our team is home-grown, they are players who have stuck with us all the way along. Like our captain, Jason Ward, he has been involved since the U10 leagues, as have the likes of Declan Lally and Barry Cahill. This is not about two players, this is the culmination of a lot of work over a lot of years.”
You need to travel up to Dublin 15 on a Saturday morning to see the scope of this under-age programme. It has been described, fairly accurately, as one of the biggest ever under-taken by a GAA club in Ireland. And after two decades, the enthusiasm remains. Barry Cahill has spent the last two summers coaching kids at what the club calls its “nursery”.
While a lot of success must go down to its toil at under-age level, there are other factors. In the eighties, the population of Blachardstown and Castleknock exploded. There were houses as far as the eye could see in west Dublin.
“Obviously, the population of the area has grown since the eighties, but you have to capitalise on it, and that is what we did,” says Hegarty.
“People took advantage of the population growth, we nurtured the young boys and girls from that population.” Brigids have to be complimented for that. Dublin 15 isn’t the only area of the capital to mushroom in the last decade and a half. Other GAA clubs have been slack to take advantage, or lost potential stars to other sports. As Saturday mornings, and the response to the success, have displayed, Brigids made itself part of a community that could so easily have become an Irish Milton Keynes.
The roots have been set for a long time, but the team still missed a few ingredients. Only four years after becoming senior, Brigids found themselves in a county final. It was around the time that Kieran McGeeney was carrying Na Fianna to Dublin titles. They were well beaten. Three years later, the same team beat them again.
The Gallaghers surfed in on a wave of hype, but still Brigids fell in the final stretch. The team needed a fresh voice to guide them. Or as it happens, two fresh voices. Like the team he is training, Gerry McEntee is determined to shy away from the glare this week. Shame too because the man has some interesting ideas on what direction the GAA should be taking in the future.
Paddy Clarke, on the other hand, has never had a problem with the limelight. His four years at Louth were famous both for the number of times his name was used in connection with a fairly obvious literary cliche and the acrimony that surrounded his departure. It still leaves a bitter taste in his loquacious mouth. It even made him stop and ponder the merits and de-merits of taking on Brigids.
Managing a club is different in some respects. “You don’t have to deal with all the political shite you get at county board level,” Clarke declares. “At the end of the day, and this is certainly true in Brigids, people are involved in a club because they want to be involved in a club, because they care about what they are doing. Some people are involved with a county board just because they want to be seen.
“I have seen the work people are doing in Blachardstown and Castleknock, people who don’t get anything out of it just the satisfaction of the club doing well, and these people are far more capable than a lot of people I have seen working at county boards. People have asked me the difference between managing club and county and there isn’t that much of a difference, preparation-wise, but you are allowed to do your job in a club. There is always some sort of politicking at county level.”
When Clarke was approached, he immediately sought out an assistant manager.
In Louth, Clarke had the proviso that there should only be a two-man selection committee. He did the same with Brigids. His second man was McEntee, “a savage intense man, a born winner, he has a mental toughness which he has instilled in the lads, which is possibly what the team needed,” according to Clarke.
“What is the point in having these three-man or five-man selection committees. It doesn’t make sense, the only thing that makes sense to me is having two men in charge of a team. You are always going to need someone to bounce ideas off, but once there is any more than two, there is always more compromise. Two people can learn to work together.”
They may resemble the odd couple, but they have struck upon a winning formula. Clarke came to Russell Park armed with a three-year plan. Within a year, they were Dublin champions. “I thought it would take a couple of years, I thought after three years of working there, we might capture a Dublin title. I thought it was a slow, building process, but I never thought we would win in the first year.”
When he and McEntee arrived, the team had already been mourning for five months at their failure in 2002. Even in the early days of training, the duo felt this was a team going places, or at least determined to reach the destination they targeted for so long.
“There were a lot of senior players in the team, players who had struggled for 10 years of more. And it amazed us the amount of commitment they were still willing to give. I think they dragged the younger fellas through.
“That is to their credit. Some of the elder statesmen were realising this doesn’t go on forever and a career can pass very quickly. They pulled it around, they responded well to Gerry’s training and brought the young players with them. We lost heavily in the league to Ballymun and Kilmucud and that sort of set us back, but once the championship started, the players had only one thing on their minds. And that was winning.”
The draw helped them, too. Their final two games in Dublin were against Na Fianna and Kilmucud Crokes. Two teams that held the Indian sign over Brigids for some time. If they needed any more motivation, well that was it.
Leinster was an added bonus. And as Tony Hegarty says, “anything after this, what happens on Sunday, it will just be another bonus.” It has been a long time coming for Brigids. They have spent a long time watching other clubs be successful. Twenty-three years ago the seeds were planted on a Saturday morning with 40 kids. Now, the fruits are being borne.
Paddy Clarke chuckles when asked what Brigids mean to him. He reckons himself and McEntee are two more outsiders, helping the club to be successful, but they have been brought into the family. After his bad experience with Louth, where he was going up against four relatively inexperienced managers and wasn’t even considered, Clarke is enjoying football again.
“For a year, I was absolutely gutted with the way I was treated with Louth. We only had a small bit of success with Louth, but even the smallest bit of success threatens the power of a county board. If you get a bit of success, you are no longer an ordinary foot-soldier they think they can control.
“That is why it is so much better being involved with clubs, like Brigids. There are no egos, nobody thinks their power is getting threatened. The bottom line is if you are working for a club, at whatever level, you are doing it because you love the club. That is all there is to it, and it is certainly true at Brigids.”
The players might be keeping quiet this week, but their manager more than makes up for them. And the story he tells is a different one from the two-man show that Brigids have been called.
This is a story involving most of the community of Dublin 15, a story which doesn’t have to end on Sunday.
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