‘The publicity is given to the Super 8s and the county teams, but everyone loves the small fish’

In the Croke Park dressing room, it became real for the Kanturk hurlers. Anthony Nash turned to Lorcan McLoughlin and gave the feeling a name.

“I said to him, ‘you wouldn’t want to leave the dressing room’. You don’t want to walk out and have the moment end.

“You know in a couple of days, lads are going to start moving on, they have to go back to play colleges or fall in with the county or whatever, to get ready for the leagues at club level.”

Kanturk had stayed on their feet to plant a late knockout blow on the chin of Ballyragget from Kilkenny, Ian Walsh knocking over the winning point two minutes into injury time. The north Cork men held out to collect the All-Ireland intermediate hurling club title.

After the game Nash was asked what he was thinking when the lead point went over.

“I was trying to organise the lads for their puck-out, because there was no point in shouting, given the roar of the Kanturk support.

"If they’d won the puck-out or won a free… the point went over two minutes into injury time and four minutes were signalled, so there was time remaining. The lads did well to kill the ball and come away with it.

“In fairness to Ballyragget, the time was there, and we’d have been disappointed to concede an equaliser, but it was such a tight, tight game that if we’d lost by a point, even, then we wouldn’t have had too many cribs.”

When Kanturk went upstairs in Croke Park for food after the game, the Ballyragget players made a point of congratulating their opponents and wishing them well.

The gesture struck home.

“Nobody outside saw that, but it made a huge impression on all of us,” says Nash.

“They were obviously hugely disappointed but to have that kind of spirit and guts, to come up and wish you all the best, it was a great touch. They didn’t have to do that. I’ve had to stand on pitches and listen to winning speeches, and each of them did that after the game. I thought it showed great character.”

So did Kanturk. Nash can point to a recurring theme to their big games.

“The three finals we’ve been involved in, they’ve all gone that way. We beat Mallow by a point (in the Cork final), the Munster final was a win in extra time, the All-Ireland was a win in injury time — we’ve also had very tight games in the football, so it showed a great attitude among the lads.

“We conceded the goal and Aidan (Walsh) went off, so there might have been a doubt late on last weekend, but being involved in tight games all year definitely stood to us.”

So did the little things. They weren’t accustomed to Croke Park, so the more they saw of it up close, the better.

“The lads walked Croke Park the night before, and I think it’s something you have to do. There’s no point in saying you’ve been there to see games and so on — you have to come down the tunnel and come out onto the field.

“And in fairness to the people in Croke Park, even though there was a kids’ game at half-time in the junior game, they left us walk the field, so everyone got a feel for the surface and so on.

“That made a difference, to see how it felt — a nice touch from the Croke Park ground staff, and that all helps. A lot of the Ballyragget players had played games there before, so from our perspective the tiniest thing was a help.”

They weren’t the only club from Duhallow to come out of Croke Park with an All-Ireland title last weekend, either.

Knocknagree, 12 miles west of Kanturk, won the All-Ireland junior football club title on the Saturday.

Nash and his teammates know them well: “Over Christmas, Knocknagree came in for a few drinks to Kanturk over Christmas and we met up with them, we’d know them from Duhallow and from playing against them and that, but there’s a good link there.

“John Fintan Daly has an office in Kanturk, sure.”

Daly, the Knocknagree manager, used the wall of his solicitor’s office for a particular sign early last October: it read Ceantar Cnoc na Gri Abú.

The following week his Knocknagree side beat Iveleary in a county junior football semi-final in Millstreet and the day after that Kanturk won the county premier intermediate hurling final, beating Mallow by a point.

“After I put up that sign, Kanturk in intermediate football and hurling and Knocknagree in junior football played 17 championship games between them and won them all,” says Daly.

“What an experience over four months. Without realising it, I think the two clubs drove each other on, each raised the bar for the other — when one club won a big game, the message went to the other, ‘ye have to win yours’.”

The links aren’t confined to a Christmas pint. Daly’s time with the Duhallow senior footballers is proof of that.

“Jerome and Marion Walsh from Kanturk — parents of Ryan, Paul and Ian Walsh, Aidan is their nephew — were at our game on Saturday with friends of mine,” says Daly.

“My friends told me the Walshes were nervous beforehand but delighted we won — though they also knew it was up to Kanturk to win then, so the pressure was on.

“I coached the Duhallow senior footballers for 12 years, and in that time I put Jerome Walsh in with Danny Culloty at midfield and we won county titles. The links go back that far.

“I haven’t checked it, but has it ever happened that two Cork clubs so close to each other have won All-Irelands in the same year?

“I doubt it. Duhallow as a region has won one third of the championships available to it, put it another way.”

Last Saturday evening, after they’d beaten Multyfarnham of Westmeath, the Knocknagree squad had a bite to eat and a little time together as a group:

“Then we went out to the Red Cow, and even though it’s only a small village, we had 800 people in the dining room together.

"It was literally every man, woman, and child in the parish. Including a woman of 94 who was in hospital only two weeks beforehand but who came to the game in her wheelchair.

“It’s difficult to describe. Even people who wouldn’t necessarily have an interest in the game but who’d be interested in the area, they were all there. The homecoming was fantastic.”

Daly took the Monday morning off and put the game on the TG4 livestream (“What a service,”) to watch it all over again and to analyse it properly.

“Looking at it from start to finish, I said ‘there’s five years’ work there, in one game’. There’s huge satisfaction in that.

“The club backed the management team all the way, and we went out playing positive football. People said they were amazed the way they took to Croke Park, for instance, but they’ve grown up very quickly though they’re only boys, really.

“They’d have had disappointing defeats along the way but we didn’t talk about Croke Park until after the semi-final. And then I drove home the message — ‘we have a good skill set, we have pace, we can score, we’ll have no fear of Croke Park whatsoever. It’s ideal for us and it’s what we want.’

“They were looking forward to the bounce, the expanse, the surface. We told them to go for it from the word go and they did; we had one chance so we said we’d leave nothing after us, and they delivered.”

Getting to the mountain top didn’t make him emotional at the final whistle.

“I wasn’t, no. In my younger days I’d have been seen as a bit excitable, that would have been a fair description, but not anymore.

“In that regard I can’t praise the other members of the management team enough. John Horgan is a young man — a Kerryman — and he’s done a wonderful job, so have Billy O’Neill, Ed McSweeney, and all the others in the backroom.

“But we were all calm. We never lost the plot. If the manager isn’t totally focused and calm, how can his players be focused? When the final whistle blew, I was just relieved and satisfied, delighted to see the players get their just reward. Quiet satisfaction.

“It didn’t hit home for about 48 hours, until I was able to sit down and watch the game, and appreciate that we’d won playing attractive, attacking football.”

Daly had said beforehand that he’d push a Knocknagree player up on the sweeper if Multyfarnham deployed one. They did. He did.

“Our number 2, Michael Mahoney, 18 and captain of our minor team last year, played as a runner, not a sweeper, and had a wonderful game,” says Daly.

“He scored a goal, set up other scores and did serious damage to his direct opponent, who was the sweeper.

“We squeezed the sweeper and played the game in their half of the field. That doesn’t come overnight, though. That’s why I said it took five years.” In that time Daly and his management team worked on specific skills like tackling.

“We don’t commit lazy fouls and have a reasonably good tackling technique. We turned them over in possession — we knew they were a ball-carrying team and when they carried the ball into us, we were able to turn it over, mostly without fouling.

“Tackling was very important, so was our kicking, our kick-out strategy... we worked on all of that for a long time.”

The preparation bred confidence. Beforehand he was asked what he thought of Multyfarnham having four panellists on the Westmeath senior squad; if Knocknagree were in Westmeath, said Daly, they’d have six on the county squad.

Nash says the homecoming to Kanturk will live long with the team. It was then the reality began to sink in.

“We got back home at around half eleven that night. The town was jammed, the community hall was wedged with kids at midnight.

“Even in Croke Park I saw people crying with the emotion of it. If someone had said we’d be hurling with Kanturk in Croke Park… everyone is entitled to a sense of ownership of it, because everyone contributed. They coached us, lined the pitch, made the sandwiches.

“I know, I know, it’s a real cliche, ‘everyone is involved in the local GAA club’, but you owe it to everybody, and they’re entitled to that.”

It’s something Daly can identify with (incidentally he outs Nash as a talented footballer: “Very good left leg, right corner forward with our Duhallow U21s, it’s football he should be playing”). The Knocknagree man is keen to thank the other clubs who rowed in to help them.

“Not only did we get messages of support, we got financial donations we never asked for, and the clubs who gave us money weren’t looking for recognition for that either — they knew the financial costs involved and they were fantastic to help us.

“Some of those clubs, we’ll be facing them in the future and they won’t do us any favours, but they were great to us.

“I’d say every club in Duhallow was represented over the weekend, the Saturday and the Sunday when Kanturk played. And huge goodwill from east Kerry as well, which we really appreciated.

“I’m still answering the messages. I got a hundred messages beforehand and over 400 texts after. It shows how wonderful the GAA is, the goodwill we got; people and clubs recognised a small club fighting against the tide.

"The publicity is given to the Super 8s and the county teams, but everyone still loves the small fish.

“The population of the parish is about 600, so in terms of resources . . . there were about 1,300 junior football teams in Ireland in 2017 and we were the last ones standing.”

Everything moves on. Anthony Nash points out that Kanturk have a significant date coming up in the medium term.

“I think when we all retire in years to come we’ll appreciate it, but apart from the achievement we have other challenges now.

“In some ways we have something even bigger now, we’re going to be the first team from Duhallow to play senior club hurling in Cork. That’s something we’ll be getting ready for.” In the short term there’s another key appointment.

“This Saturday we’re hosting the Kanturk teams in the Knocknagree community centre,” says John Fintan Daly. “We’re going to take a photo of the match squads together to mark the occasion, in all their finery, all the cups they’ve won in attendance.”

The squads. The cups. The story.