John McGrath’s days are dragging. “Myself and Brian were at home on the sofa last night and I turned to him at one stage and said, ‘this is the longest evening ever’.”
He wasn’t tired until it was over. The routine of games and recovery and training and games has given way, for a few weeks, to rest. And that makes him a small bit restless.
Disappointment is still knotted into the memories. He was the winter wonder. Man of the match six weeks in-a-row.
A double county champion. Scorer of the winner in both finals. A story arc that would have readers lamenting how Roy of the Rovers had gone a bit predictable.
Yet here he is again, weighing what-ifs. Rewinding turning points. His year concluded by defeat and a red card, same as his brother Noel. Munster exits in both codes still clouding his horizon.
“A club All-Ireland, I can’t even begin to imagine what that is like. What it would mean for the club. And how much of an ambition it is. It’s not something we’ve ever spoken about as a group. But every year when you’re watching the final you think, I’d give anything to be there.”
The seesaw of sport. However high you get, the only way off is down.
After the defeat to Ballygunner, wider recrimination took in the referee and the reactions of opponents. But folk line up to testify to the honesty and fairness of the McGraths.
“I’ve often got a knock myself where it doesn’t look much but just the way it happens it can be sorer than it looks. It’s very hard to judge. I was just trying to get the ball to take the penalty. You feel you’ve let people down. I don’t think there was any major force in what I did, but there’s no point in dwelling on it or trying to blame anyone...”
He dwelt last year. “I don’t know how many weeks after those two final losses that they were the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep. It was horrible.”
He is confident the stewing won’t simmer as long this time. Noel’s wedding, the festivities, going back with Tipp. Regret will melt into satisfaction at achievements a place will never forget.
“We’re trying to remember the earlier few weeks more than the last two. It’ll just take a little while to get over. But we can’t let it ruin the year.”
***
“Probably our best year ever,” says Pat Cullen, “I know we did it before, but having lost the two finals last year it took some spirit and determination.”
Pat is well placed to assess the club’s feat, even from his latest vantage point as manager of the Junior C team set up last year — “one of the best things we did. It brought back lads who were pulling away from the club. Now we have 25 lads involved that mightn’t have been involved at all. And they might have kids coming up in the next few years. They are part of it.
“Seamie Bohan played, who was on the ’88 team that won our first county senior in hurling. A sub, though of course he thought he could play the full game…”
Is there any need to mention Pat is gone 80? He won a county minor medal in 1956 and has served the club in every capacity over the decades since. He was chairman for that ‘88 breakthrough, and the football title the year before. He’s just become president. He only stopped refereeing five years ago because he had enough of the fitness tests.
The whole country wants to know how Loughmore-Castleiney does it, a small place drawing on around 1,000 people.
How the same panel of players can swap codes week on week for five months and take down Tipp powerhouses like Thurles Sarsfields and Clonmel Commercials.
No doubt it’s some potent cocktail of tradition, desire, genes, best practice. Over the years, they have shared some of the logistics. Warming up with footballs, training with hurleys, that type of thing.
But there’s something in Pat that captures the spirit of the place. Pride and worry and restlessness and urgency. Drawing lines to the past while keeping an eye on the future.
It’s people like Pat puzzling over that knot of houses one side of the parish they are getting no player out of. A dry patch they can ill afford.
“In 10 years’ time, I don’t think Loughmore will be senior. We’re weak at juvenile. We’d have 11 or 12 at some ages, and that’s with a couple of girls.
“And it isn’t for the want of being looked after and it’ll only be better than ever with the new ball wall and the astro. Eugene Stapleton, as chairman, was the driving force for all that. A lot of money for a country club with two pubs and no companies in the parish. No post office even.
“But until the McGraths start breeding, and a few other lads, I don’t know…”
Pat Healy is another joining up generations. Club PRO now for 39 years, though he finally finished up at the AGM last week. Twitter and Facebook his toughest opponents. “It’s a young man’s game.”
The club countered by making him vice president. It’s Pat in that marvellous photo hugging John McGrath after the win over Borris-Ileigh. Pat’s face typically out of shot, but always close.
“Those guys keep the club going,” John says. “Pat Healy hardly misses a training session. Pat Cullen would do anything for the club. Without people like that the club just doesn’t function. It’s fantastic to be able to bring joy to people like that. You talk about it being a team effort, but it’s a parish effort.”
Pat Cullen has known enough barren years to savour this.
“I’m quite happy now, whatever more the Lord will give me. What more do you want at this stage of your life? You only have the one chance at life, make the best of it. It’s the same in a club. You often only get the one group of players that are going to achieve something. Make the best out of them then. And if you don’t have great players, get the best out of them anyway.”
Tom McGrath talks brass tacks. Tom is part of the dynasty, five county titles from ’77 to ’92, club officer for years, current manager Frankie’s brother, Liam’s father, uncle of Noel, John, and Brian.
“In clubs that have problems with the dual side of things, it comes back to two management teams. Both managers want their cut. We solved it by amalgamating the two. I’m guessing 2011 we did it first. The hurlers didn’t do well in 2010, the footballers were beaten in the county final.”
It doesn’t sound like a disastrous year, but there is a tendency in Loughmore-Castleiney not to sit on their hands.
“This whole thing is not new,” Tom adds. “You had the double in ’13. Back in two finals in 2014, the only time we’ve retained the football. In 2002 a lot of this panel won an under-12 double, hurling and football. In the same year, we won the minor double, Evan Sweeney, Ciarán McGrath, those lads.
“In ’87, we contested both county finals, won football, lost hurling. Same in ’83. There was a minor double in ’76 and ’79.”
Imagine if they had hurler of the year Cian Lynch, whose father Seán was on that ’79 team.
Tom continues: “The two games have been part of our DNA since I was a young fella. But I remember when hurling wasn’t the fashionable sport, football was the primary game.”
Though landlocked in hurling heartland, the club has 15 senior titles in football, four in hurling. Pat Cullen remembers soccer international Niall Quinn’s father Billy, a Tipp senior star from the Rahealty club in Thurles, coming out to play football with them, along with his brother Dick.
“Billy won a county football medal with us in 1955. And he was legal too,” he laughs.
***
Loughmore-Castleiney drew praise at the Tipperary AGM for trusting their own people, for setting an example more could follow. Declan Laffan’s backroom for the 2013 double were locals. This year the same, with one exception. Michael Dempsey, Brian Cody’s right hand man for so many years, lent a hand.
“Until Mick came in, I had never been involved in a team in the club with anyone from outside,” says John McGrath. “Very few people who would have been able to come and have such an immediate impact, with such a brilliant understanding of what we needed.”
He remembers an early chat, coming off the field after a match. He sensed Dempsey was trying to figure them out. “He was kind of asking me, does it get monotonous at all, playing week after week.”
Dempsey chuckles at it now. “That was my biggest fear going down. That these fellas are in-house and how will I be perceived. I had a connection, I had helped develop an underage plan for them. But even that, you didn’t have to spoon-feed them. If you told them ‘I think this is the direction you should go in’, they were already gone and doing it. There’s amazing initiative there.
“The important challenge for me was to understand their culture, what they were about. I already had some idea, I obviously knew the McGraths from my time with Kilkenny. But my God I didn’t realise how genuine and sound they were.”
At Cody’s side for eight All-Ireland wins, Dempsey wouldn’t be unaccustomed to hardship. His natural inclination wouldn’t be to lighten a load.
“What I was trying to figure out: was there a preference for hurling or football? I was aware the club was focused on the two, but I wondered, deep down, was there a sense they’d favour one. Most dual clubs would have a preference.
“How was this going to be managed? Might it not be better to focus on one? Because what they did is just incredible, in terms of the commitment given to the two games and getting their bodies right between matches.
“I knew John and Noel and a few of the others as Tipp hurlers, and saying to myself, ‘Tipperary is a mad hurling county, with serious tradition’, so maybe there is a bias here to hurling.
“But I wouldn’t have picked it up at all, which amazed me. For them, there is no separation.
“It’s a tribute to the values of the management team, and, in particular, to the ambition and resilience and character of the players.
“Losing the two finals last year was never mentioned this year. I think that would create anxiety and fear that it would happen again. I’m sure deep down it crossed their minds. But they have an incredible capacity before games to focus on the here and now and the future and it’s not about the past.
“They can get their heads around what is required the following week, whether it’s hurling and football, to zone in and be totally zoned in.
“To play 19 weekends in a row is just phenomenal. If a county team had to do it there would be an outcry about player welfare. But in Loughmore-Castleiney, that would never come up.
“There’s no excuses. Brian McGrath fractured his thumb early on in the football quarter-final, played on. We didn’t realise until after when he got x-rayed. They recommended surgery and pins, he took a break, missed a football game, deferred the operation, and ended up playing all the rest of the games.
“Not many players would make that sacrifice. A guy who’s hoping to be on the big stage with the county next year. And not just the McGraths. John Meagher and lots of other fellas, they are not in the business of making excuses. If they can take the pitch, if selected they are going to give their best.”
John McGrath has suffered with osteitis pubis more or less since he emerged as a Tipp senior. Last year or two it has settled down, but most seasons kicking a football wasn’t advised. Not that it stopped him playing football.
“Ah, you just get on with it, do what you can to help the club at the time. Whether that was just me running up and down the pitch, handpassing instead of kicking, so be it. I think anyone in the club would have done the same.
“This year is the most I’ve kicked a football in seven or eight years. I don’t do too much in training any more, try to roll it out for the games.”
A kick of the ball is his highlight of the year. The winning goal against Clonmel at the death. Stephen Gleeson’s Tipp FM commentary perfect: “Brian McGrath into Ciaran McGrath into Liam McGrath into John McGrath… John McGrath has won the county final!”
“I was never so on cloud nine after a game,” John says. “It’s one of the sweetest victories we ever had.”
Still, the night after there was a hurling session on the Ursulines astro in Thurles. They haven’t lights yet on their own patch.
Following Sunday, the hurling replay felt different. More relief. John slotted the winner from an angle in injury-time and there wasn’t a murmur of celebration. They were jubilant last year when John’s 65 put them in front in injury time. Only for Bryan McLoughney to reply with the killer goal for Kiladangan.
They don’t look back much, but they don’t forget either.
***
They lost an important man to them in July, Fr JJ O’Rourke.
Tom McGrath remembers well a Saturday morning in 1971, the first Feile. He reckons it was the first hurling match of any consequence he’d won. Against St Mel’s from Longford.
Fr O’Rourke had arrived as curate from Birdhill and was marshalling and building. “He’d tell you he knew nothing about hurling or football, but he was an organiser. A leader really.”
Loughmore-Castleiney were a junior B hurling team, but by 1980 they were senior and haven’t stepped back since. “The ‘88 team had Fr O’Rourke’s fingerprints all over them. He’d organise 10-a-side teams in the parish. Lads from Loughmore and Castleiney got to know each other for the first time.”
It’s Tom’s way too of insisting there’s a lot more to Loughmore-Castleiney than the McGraths. The family tree blossomed. John McGrath senior, 91, Tom and Frankie’s uncle, had 27 grandnephews and grandnieces winning county finals in November, between the Loughmore double and the camogie with Drom-Inch.
But they all talk of a spirit that connects the generations through Fr O’Rourke and Sean Mockler, who drove the football side, and the Cullens and Bill and Jim Ryan, who played on Bloody Sunday.
There’s another important thread: Eddie.
When they last won the double in 2013, the place had been rocked by Eddie Connolly’s illness, diagnosed after the hurling semi-final. He inspired them with his bravery and positivity. The ovation from supporters, teammates, opponents when he returned for the semi-final in 2014 is part of Semple Stadium lore.
When Eddie died in 2015, it devastated a community. But his spirit has become part of that handover between generations.
His mother Maureen was a stellar player, a Tipp captain. She’s been selector with the seniors last two years, just as she was alongside Eamon Sweeney on that under-12 double team in 2002, when John used to be brought in off the bench, aged eight.
“I remember Maureen with teams since I was seven,” John says. “she always has a few wise words.”
“Eddie is talked about a lot,” says Tom McGrath. “And Ronan Stapleton, a teammate of Eddie’s on the 2007 county winning team, also gone way too soon.”
“Over the last couple of weeks, you’ll always think of and remember Eddie,” adds John.
“Even if he’s not spoken about all the time, the guys think of him. I think we all took a thing or too and learned a thing or too from the way Eddie used to play. He was always a warrior.
“And if lads can bring half of what he had out to the field, we aren’t doing too bad.”
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