Limerick's Aaron Gillane keen to kick on... (and keep his hurley in hand)

By Paul Keane

Three poached eggs, three rashers. You could set your clock by Aaron Gillane’s match-day routine which begins with a protein-packed breakfast in his Patrickswell home.

Typically, his mother cooks it for him, the habit of a lifetime, but 24 hours out from last month’s All-Ireland final, a horrible thought dawned; his mother wasn’t going to be around.

She and his father, brother and sister had booked into a hotel in Dublin on the Saturday night and Gillane was left at home alone.

“Actually, that’s a funny story,” Gillane smiles, outlining how his family supported Patrickswell in the Hurling 7s tournament at Kilmacud Crokes on a Saturday afternoon.

“My mother then drove back down on the Saturday night so she could make my breakfast the next morning. Just to keep the routine.

“She makes my breakfast before every match; three poached eggs and three rashers. I shouldn’t be telling Joe O’Connor that but it did the trick for me. Routine is important, ticking the boxes. You try to do the same thing before every match. It does help to settle the nerves, gives you something else to think about other than the match.”

Driving back down the M7 to cook eggs and bacon, it’s all in a day’s work for an Irish mammy, though Mrs Gillane needn’t have been too concerned.

Ciarán Carey was already on the case and in situ in the Gillane kitchen, dropping little nuggets of wisdom to ensure All-Ireland final day worked out better for the young forward than it did for him in 1994 and 1996.

Gillane was actually across the road in his aunt’s house on Saturday night when Carey arrived so his former club manager let himself in and waited in the kitchen.

“I was just getting ready to go up to bed, he called around half 10,” recalled Gillane. “He calls at the weirdest of times! Obviously he had been there, in ‘94 and ‘96, and he wasn’t successful. He was saying, ‘It’s just another match. Get the circus out of the way’. What he meant was get the parade out of the way, meeting the President. Just have tunnel vision and focus on the match. It’s just another game. That settled me a bit. I’d know Ciarán fairly well. I’d be good friends with his son, Barry. He’s always around Patrickswell too.”

Gillane presumes that Cian Lynch, Carey’s nephew, got the same pep talk before facing Galway though isn’t sure if Diarmuid Byrnes, the other club man who started against Galway, received a home visit that night.

“I hope he didn’t call to Diarmuid afterwards — it would have been about 12 o’clock!”

Still just 22, Gillane finds it hard to reconcile the fact that he now has an All-Ireland medal and Carey doesn’t.

“It’s hard to believe, Ciarán and Gary Kirby as well, two of the greatest hurlers that ever played. A big thing for us was bringing the cup back to Patrickswell. We were bringing it back for them as well. Ciarán was over us in 2015, then Gary. So they obviously did a load of work with us. Bringing the cup back was repaying them in a way.”

Even allowing for late night visitors, Gillane was glad to be able to sleep in his own bed the night before facing the holders.

Joe Quaid, Limerick’s goalkeeper in 1994, recalled how a special flight to Dublin was laid on for the team 24 years ago, no expense spared. A whopping 13 hours later, they eventually reached their team hotel. In Wicklow.

“You couldn’t make it up, no wonder we couldn’t win,” smiled Quaid.

Lessons were learned from the experience of 2007 also when Limerick reached the final but lost to Kilkenny.

“I’d be good friends with Brian Murray who was there (as goalkeeper) in 2007,” said Gillane. “He was saying they went up the night before and he said he was walking around the lobby of the hotel at five o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t sleep. If he was in his own bed, it would have settled him a bit better. I like my sleep and I like my home comforts.”

Having tasted All-Ireland final day, Gillane wants to experience it again yet concedes that just 20 months ago his county career was in tatters.

Unproven at that stage, he was dropped from the panel by new manager John Kiely. It took a strong Fitzgibbon Cup campaign and words of encouragement from Mary Immaculate manager Jamie Wall to turn things around, prompting Kiely to offer a recall. There was another black spell, the darkest of all perhaps, when Gillane got his chance against Cork earlier this summer and saw red, striking out at Sean O’Donoghue in their round robin encounter.

“It was a low point,” he said.

“You work so hard to get into the team, and the team is competitive, and then I just lost the head for a second down in Cork and I was walking off the field. The first thing that came into my head was, ‘Jeez, this is your first year playing with Limerick and now you have ruined your chance’.”

He got back in though, making seven Championship appearances in total, six as a starter, and was a central contributor in their season of seasons.

Think Aaron Gillane now and the red card in June is an afterthought, dwarfed in significance by the 13 points and man-of-the-match display in the All-Ireland semi-final rematch which earned him the PwC Player of the Month award for August.

Mind you, if he had a euro for every time he’s been asked about dropping his hurl when through on goal on two separate occasions that day, resulting in kicked efforts that flew wide, he’d be a rich man.

“Yeah, yeah, there’s been a load of people saying it, ‘Oh, why are you dropping the hurley?” sighed Gillane.

“But obviously it wasn’t intentional. I would definitely have had a few more goals if I’d held onto it. It was something that was playing on my mind coming into the final because it had happened so much in the Cork match. I don’t think I dropped it at all in the final. I don’t know why it happened, it was just awkward sometimes, if I was going up to catch the ball it (the hurley) could have got stuck under his hand or whatever.

“It could have hit his hurley and then dropped out of my hand. It’s obviously more important to hold onto the ball than the hurley but I definitely wasn’t dropping it on purpose, no.”