Enthralling prospect of Ballyea and Clarecastle
Yet when Clarecastle and Ballyea meet on Sunday in Cusack Park in Ennis to decide the destination of this year’s SHC, the bite will be as intense as anything ever seen in this most passionate hurling county, or indeed anywhere in the country for that matter.
This isn’t just your run-of-the-mill townie/rural club battle, not just your usual David/Goliath contest, not even the normal ‘neighbouring clubs’ argument, though it is all of the preceding.
What marks this game out as special, is that this is a throwback to the early days of the GAA, an old-style dispute between two teams from the one parish.
Clarecastle are the red-hot favourites, the aristocrats from the town end of the parish with 26 county senior final appearances behind them. Ballyea are the country cousins, preparing for their first ever appearance at this level.
While their illustrious counterparts were winning their ten senior titles (one shared with Ennis, nine solo, would have been much more but for the great Newmarket team of the ‘60’s/’70’s, against whom Clarecastle lost seven finals), Ballyea were battling to get their heads above the junior parapet
Current chairman and team selector Michael O’Neill outlines the story.
“The club was formed in 1934/35, that’s when our records start. Prior to that, we’d have played with Clarecastle, but I don’t know how it came about that we set up our own club.
“Even though it’s the one parish, there’s a very definite rural/urban divide, and Ballyea has its own church and school, a very strong sense of its own identity, so perhaps that was it.
“We did well in the ’40’s, won an intermediate championship in 1944 but the set-up was different at the time. The best players in the combined parish would have played senior under Clarecastle, while the rest played intermediate with Ballyea, so that team would have had several hurlers from the Clarecastle side of the parish.
“We had good minor teams in the ‘50’s, but the ‘60’s are a bit of a blank for some reason; and the early ‘70’s.
The major breakthrough however was in 1976. I know people might laugh at it now, but we won the Junior B double, League and championship, and that really started us on the road.
“Five years later we won the Junior A championship against Doora-Barefield. We won that again in ’91, and ’99, and then two years later, in 2001, we won the intermediate championship and we went up to senior B. But this is totally new territory for us. We have never been down this road before“.
Speaking of roads, that’s all Ballyea appears to be. A series of roads, none of them major, criss-crossing what used to be an entirely agricultural area. “After we beat Éire Óg in the quarter-final, I was umpiring a game in which their U21’s were playing,” Sean Sheehan, father of wing-forward Kevin, explains.
“They were losing that game as well, and I remarked to an Éire Óg supporter, who didn’t realise I was with Ballyea, that it was a bad week for them. Indeed it is, she says, a club with a population of over 40,000 beaten by a team that doesn’t even have a village to its name!.”
There is a centre to the whole place. A little crossroads with church/school/community-centre side by side along one little road. The recently-developed GAA field lies a few hundred yards away along another route.
There is no shop in that central area, no pub, just fine green fields. As a result that GAA field however, is now very much the heart of this half-parish and a measure of the strength of spirit that was always in little Ballyea, a spirit which, according to O’Neill, is on the rise.
“Up to about twelve years ago we had no facilities here, and a few of us got involved, did various fund-raising events to put this place together. We felt it was vital that it should be close to the school, which it is.
“The response we got was fantastic and the amount of money we’ve collected over the years has been unreal. The whole thing cost us about €150,000, and it’s all paid off now. We’re not finished yet. Shortly we hope to expand the field to make room for another pitch and we’re building a stand and extending the dressing-rooms.
“There are still only around 850 people in Ballyea, as against several thousand in Clarecastle, but we’re growing. We have five teachers in the school now with 130 pupils, where a decade ago it was only a three-teacher with sixty or seventy children.”
The increase in numbers comes as a direct result of the explosion in population in nearby Ennis and with the pitch now in place along with a strong underage structure, Ballyea are now reaping the benefits.
“Every now and then in a small community you get a batch of players that you know have something special, that are all around the right age“, says Michael O’Neill.
“That was the case with this team. In 1996 we won the U21 C, in 1997 we won an U16 division 1A title, and most of our lads, with the exception of the very young fellas like Kevin Sheehan would have come from those two teams.
“We won the U14 B title last year, and we have great U10 and U12 teams. Now we’re in this year’s minor C final, with ten of that team U-15“.
That’s Ballyea then, a growing success story. But what of Clarecastle?
Last year, Anthony Daly, probably the most famous hurler in Clare, even allowing for the great Tull Considine, coached the famous Magpies to yet another county final.
Captain of the Clare team that won the All-Ireland titles of 95 and 97, Daly had suffered a debilitating blood illness and didn’t play all year. But now he’s back in hurling harness and looking good, as is the team, he believes.
“I think we’ve improved. What I’m hoping is that losing last year’s final will be a help to us this year and spur us on. A few the younger lads have come on a ton, Jonathon Clancy and Tyrone Kearse are starting to play really well, while Niall Dunne has been our first man on all year“.
And himself? “I’ve come back but my role has been limited enough.
“I suppose I didn’t do too bad against Kilmaley (quarter-final), but I was knackered with the flu, against Shannon and probably shouldn’t even have played. They took me off ten minutes into the second half, but they brought me back on again for the last seven or eight minutes and the ball just wouldn’t go away from me.
Everywhere I went the ball seemed to follow me around. It wasn’t any great instinct, I can tell you, I’d been trying to read everything for forty minutes before that and didn’t get a puck!
“But I must have cleared eight balls in those last few minutes“.
The last team Daly expected to see between him and another county medal was Ballyea.
“The draw was kind to them, you’d have to say that. They won their group in the B senior championship and that qualified them for the county quarter-final which was a great achievement in itself. But then, when the draw was made, the Bridge, Shannon, ourselves, Kilmaley were all on the one side of the draw.
"On the other side you had Tubber and Ballyea, the two B teams, while O’Callaghan’s Mills and Éire Óg were the two A teams, and neither of those have been really that strong over the last few years. Still, the Mills would have been seen as favourites, with Éire Óg behind them, and Ballyea managed to beat them both“.
One of the major reasons they did, according to O’Neill, was the man at the Ballyea helm this year.
“Fergie O’Loughlin struck up a fantastic relationship with the players and the quality of his training was top-class. He brought the lads up that step they needed to make it at this level. This time last year we were still hurling, but it was to avoid relegation in a real dog-fight that we only barely survived.
"When we spoke to Fergie in March about taking over, it was strictly for the senior B championship, and the Clare Cup. That we succeeded in doing all that and more, that we are now in both the senior A and B finals, is partly due to his training methods“.
The supreme irony in all this is that Fergie O’Loughlin is also the Clarecastle trainer.
His family is steeped in black-and-white, he won senior titles himself with the bigger club, played the critical sweeper role all last year, including the lost final and would be lining out this week against Ballyea but for a knee injury suffered on an Italian ski-slope last February.
While it’s true to say that this final pairing has surprised everyone in Clare, including in Ballyea itself, no-one was more surprised than O’Loughlin, and it left him in a terrible position. In the end he had to go with his roots.
“Not in my wildest imagination did I see it coming, and the way things have worked is a bit surreal. Ballyea have really over-achieved, gone far beyond what anyone expected.
"It was a real wrench to leave, but I won’t try to fool anyone, I’m a Clarecastle man at heart, I have a great passion for Clarecastle hurling, and there was only decision I could make.
“Still, when you get involved with a team like I did with Ballyea, six months working together, get to know them as players, get to know them as friends as well, it’s very difficult.
"It wasn’t an instant decision, I had to think about it for a few days, reflect on the whole situation, but it came down to one thing, I can’t train two teams to beat each other, so I had to make a choice. I think the Ballyea lads understood.”
They did, confirmed by O’Neill. “We knew that if we progressed from the senior B, met Clarecastle, all bets were off“.
All bets are off anyway, in this one. No-one fancies Ballyea, no-one, a fact recognised by Tony Griffin, their only Clare senior representative.
“We’re being written off, totally, and it takes the pressure off. This is only our second year at senior level, and I’m very proud of how far we’ve come in those two years.
"We prepared well for every game this year, and this is where it’s got us. We’ll go in, give it a lash, and if we’re good enough we’re good enough, if not, we’re young enough to be back again.
“But you know, heart can move mountains, it did in the quarter-final and semi-final when we were written off both times, so you never know“.
Can they do it? Can they shock the Clare hurling world, do what Kilmaley did back in 1985 when they too came from nowhere and won their first ever senior title against hugely-fancied Éire Óg?
NO-ONE is a better position to make that call than Fergie O’Loughlin. “We don’t have to go back to 1985 to know what can happen.
"We’ve been beaten ourselves in recent years in situations where it was expected that all we had to do was turn up. There was Cratloe a few years ago, Newmarket before that whoe put back on our arses both times.
“We’ll be reminding the lads of that. Unless we play to our full potential, this will become a battle, and if that happens, it will be right up Ballyea’s alley.
"They don’t have the depth of talent of Clarecastle, no doubt about that, but their hurling has improved enormously in the last few years, and what they’re lacking in numbers in the squad they make up for in heart.
“They are very honest hurlers who have tremendous passion for the game and work extremely hard for one another. They’re a tremendously clannish group. I’ve socialised with them after playing matches and I know, the team travels together, move together, drink together, eat together, nearly sleep together.
"There’s a tremendous bond there within the group, and when it comes down to a battle, these lads won’t be beaten easy. They fight for each other, battle for each other, back each other, and that in itself will move them on. We’ll have to be up for this from the start, or we’ll be in trouble“.
If Ballyea lose, they still have the senior B final to look forward to. If they win? Fairy-tale meets horror story, all in the one parish.
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