Synthetic hurleys gaining ground

Twelve months on from revealing he used a synthetic hurley, Ryan O’Dwyer is still playing with the Cúl Tec product and swears by it.

Others have followed suit with O’Dwyer’s Dublin team-mate Johnny McCaffrey using it, if only for the first few minutes of games.

Keen to avoid his regular ash hurleys being broken, he has the more resilient Cúl Tec hurley in his hands for the throw-in before exchanging it at the next break in play.

More have joined the stable, including Offaly duo Diarmuid Horan and Conor Mahon and Laois’ Eoin Reilly, while Dublin forward David O’Callaghan and Tipperary’s John Coghlan are also known to have used it.

McCaffrey’s use of it is a testimony to its sturdiness but the Offaly company who make the hurley hail its performance too.

“It’s not unbreakable for safety reasons but obviously he feels it doesn’t break as easy,” said Cúl Tec’s Gerry Grehan. “But for us and for the people who use it, the consistency is the big thing. You use a Cúl Tec, pick up another and it’s exactly the same. The quality is uniform.”

Popular with a number of hurlers in this year’s Dr Harty Cup, Grehan hopes to see its product rival the traditional ash in the years ahead, starting from under-age.

Already, there are plans for a goalkeeper’s hurley at the end of the year, which will concentrate on control and being able to kill the ball on the stick.

“It’s very hard to ask senior players to change over from timber hurleys they’ve used all their lives. We’ll see the U12s and U14s using it.”

The one gripe some players have with the Cúl Tec hurley is that its dependability is diminished slightly in wet conditions. The reason for that? The ash-coloured finish applied to the hurley.

As Grehan explained: “The drawback is the hurleys are finished in a black colour and we would paint them an ash colour with a matt finish.

“The coating did seem to wear after use but people have come up with an ingenious way of maintaining the friction by using Loctite glue and fine sand.

“As we go forward and our hurleys become more acceptable, we won’t have to finish them in the ash colour if the market could accept the black hurley.”