How Kanturk navigated along a championship dual carriageway of hurling and football

Lorcan O'Neill and Aidan Walsh, Kanturk, battle for the dropping ball with Tadhg Twomey and Colm O'Donovan of Newcestown at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Picture: Jim Coughlan

Many is the club manager who has scanned the field at training on a midweek night and counted with one hand the number of players. Few of them have done it less than two weeks before a county final and accepted it as par for the course.

Welcome to Kanturk.

Tom Walsh knew the score. With the club’s footballers facing Aghada in the semi-final of the Cork Premier Intermediate championship last weekend, the hurling manager had ample warning that he would be operating with a skeleton crew in the days beforehand.

Of the five on hand, two of them were goalkeepers. What to do but cut your cloth to suit your measure? One-on-ones, two-on-ones: all told, they went at it for 70 minutes in the club field while the bulk of their buddies were away training with the big ball in Mallow.

“When there is hurling on the weekend, we train hurling, and when there is football on the weekend, we train football,” Walsh explains. “What’s most important is that that’s what the players want and they’re committed to that. There are no undercurrents here, no hurling against the football. That’s not a problem.”

The number of players stitching the two sides together is well into double digits. This is just how it is and the quid pro quo between the football and a hurling side managed by Tim Healy has been paying dividends out to both accounts all season.

On Sunday the hurlers face Fr O’Neill’s in the Senior A Hurling decider in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and, win or lose, most will flick the switch inside their heads soon after the final whistle and tune into the football final against Newmarket on the first weekend in December.

It’s automatic for them now, this symbiotic relationship. All of them.

When Aghada were beaten, Walsh was on the sideline kicking every ball and delighting in the footballers’ progress. When it was over, Healy addressed them on the field and told them that they were hurlers again as soon as their boots came off.

There are hundreds of stories — some real, more apocryphal, many embellished — about clubs up and down the country where the two codes live at loggerheads. Others can maintain a functioning relationship, but the lucky ones actually lift each other’s boats.

Kanturk have caught a wave.

“People can try and poison you in relation to this clash between hurling and football but you just don’t get into that zone,” says Healy over a cuppa shared with Walsh earlier this week. “You understand that the most important thing here is the club and these are the players that you have in this point in time.

“You want those players to carry on the tradition of a dual club. As you know, it’s becoming much more difficult to play dual. Our fellas love playing it. We have fellas who prefer the hurling and fellas who prefer the football but they cross over and they give their all, regardless of what ball is thrown in on any given Saturday or Sunday.”

It all sounds so… simple.

There is no talk of spreadsheets or endless phone calls and meetings here. Healy’s take is that the process of running one team, and then hitching it to another for the ride through a given campaign, is complicated enough without adding any more carriages to the tail.

The key, according to Walsh, is getting the bedrock right. That means a solid block of pre-season work for the players based on each individual’s wants and needs at a club gym built a few years back and which is adding as much value as an extra layer of social glue.

The meeting of minds from there on in seems almost organic, a five-minute chat at a game here or a quick catch-up to plan ahead when the fixtures land. To watch Walsh and Healy natter amongst themselves for a minute or two this week was to see a pair of men perfectly at their ease.

“Look, it’s not like he’s my wife,” Healy laughs. “I’m not chatting to him every day. Maybe that’s the secret to a happy marriage.” But that familiarity clearly helps. Walsh, whose son Aidan remains a fixture on both sides 11 years after winning an All-Ireland football title with Cork, had known Healy for decades. Played hurling and football with him and served as club officers together.

Their brothers were tied at the hip growing up, too.

Other factors filter into the culture besides. Kanturk’s historical footprint shows periods where one or other of the footballers and the hurlers flew the flag higher but it’s just four years since both were cresting the summit of their respective codes.

That was the year they claimed both Intermediate titles and the hurlers eventually went on to add Munster and All-Ireland honours to the haul. There was one point then when the dual players went almost three months without a weekend off.

Necessity can be a virtue as well. The vast majority of the players from that spell are still togging out. Anthony Nash has since transferred to the South Liberties but most of the others not in action these days are still helping out in other ways.

Add everything up and Kanturk are operating with a combined squad of 35. Most of them are based locally and the sense of ‘all for one’ is encapsulated perfectly by the fact that the hurlers and the footballers share the one leadership group.

Is it any wonder that one side’s success has stoked the fires of the other?

“This is something we have discussed at great length,” Walsh says. “A lot of it is to do with momentum and that kind of momentum is there again this year. You start winning and, really, there isn’t that much training you can do. Winning matches brings great confidence.” Onwards they go.