Football's dual influence on Banner hurling showpiece
READING THE GAME: Eire Óg's Ciarán Russell with and Kilmurry Ibrickane's Andrew Shannon in last year's Clare SFC final at Cusack Park. Pic: Eamon Ward
Shortly before Ballyea made their breakthrough in 2016, they asked Tom Ryan, the former no-nonsense Limerick manager who guided that county to two Munster titles in the mid-90s, to come out and help with the coaching with the view of it being a long-term arrangement. So one evening he drove into the car park of the club grounds, took one look towards the field to see there were just eight players there, and duly circled back out through the gates, never to touch foot in the place or be seen there again.
Sure he’d seen enough: there simply weren’t enough hurling-only players there. What could he do when there were so many lads away also playing football? How and what could they win?
History has gone on to show that what Ryan perceived as one of Ballyea’s greatest obstacles has been one of their greatest competitive advantages.
Of the 19 players that got game-time against Cratloe a fortnight ago to qualify the club for a fourth county hurling final in six years, only six did not play senior or high-level intermediate club football this year: goalkeeper Barry Coote, corner forward Mossy Gavin and the star county hurling quartet of Tony Kelly, Paul Flanagan, Jack Browne and Niall Deasy. The other 13 are all footballers (just like Kelly, Flanagan and Deasy were for years, like when they helped sister club Clondegad reach a county senior final in 2017, and Browne was too with his father’s native Kilmihil).
What’s more, six of those 13 footballers are current or recent county footballers: Pearse Lillis, Cathal O’Connor, Aaron Griffin, Gary Brennan, Cillian Brennan and Martin O’Leary. A different breed of athlete, physically, mentally. They’ve all played and won in Croke Park. They know how to prepare, work, graft. The qualities that has made Colm Collins’ Clare such an established, competitive team in football are part of the formula as to why Ballyea are bearing down on a fourth county title in six years.
Martin Brennan, father of Gary and Cillian, knows what it’s like to try to run a training session with the kind of numbers Ryan passed on; this year he managed Clondegad, the club that provides the core, though hardly all, of the footballers which his friend and counterpart in Ballyea, Robbie Hogan, has at his disposal. Come the summer and autumn in Clare it’s one week hurling, one week football, so in a hurling week Brennan would have had just eight to 12 players at one of his sessions, just like Hogan would in a football week. Having so many dual players has its challenges but he can see how it has such rewards, especially for a Ballyea.
“Ballyea have been fortunate I suppose with the contacts they’ve developed with senior inter-county players over the years. It always helps when you’re winning because it draws those type of competitors and they then bring that competitiveness to Ballyea.
“I’ve a theory which not everyone might agree with but footballers have a need or at least a love for fitness that is not necessarily inherent in club hurling. So when the likes of Gary and Cillian and Cathal and Pearse come back, they’re bringing a level of fitness and physicality that gives Ballyea a major boost. I mean, if I’m an opposing half-back and I’m seeing a Cathal or Pearse coming at me, I’d hate it. Because they’re going to always be in your face, on top of you, hunting you down, they’ll never pull back.”
It is by design more than accident that most of those county footballers operate in the forwards with Ballyea. Griffin would be a stickman and a scorer but the others would be primarily piano lifters for artists like Kelly and Deasy. Some discerning Ballyea supporters last October were baffled when rookie county finalists Inagh-Kilnamona elected to play with a sweeper. True, Deasy as the song goes, was on fire but Tony was out injured. Why play a sweeper against a forward line featuring four footballers?!
They nearly got away with it. Going into the last quarter they were up three points. But then the likes of O’Connor, the county football midfielder with the build of a Ballyhale Fennelly though not quite the stickwork, finally managed to start turning wides into points. Together with county football wingback Lillis and county football fullback Cillian Brennan, he formed a half-forward line that ran up a ridiculous hook-block-tackle count and by extension an assist count as well. Whatever wristwork they lacked was offset by their blue-collar work.
They bring that attitude off the field as well. Brennan gives an example in the form of his two sons. This summer for the first time in over a decade Gary focused exclusively on club football. He and his wife Niamh Nee Mulcahy, the Limerick county camogie player, had a newborn child, were living in Castleconnell, and he was studying for a third-level qualification. From full forward he duly played possibly the best club football of his career; to date he’s among the top scorers of the 2022 Clare SFC championship. Three weeks ago though Clondegad (featuring five of Ballyea’s starting 15) bowed out at the quarter-final stage to reigning county champions and dual 2022 finalists Éire Óg, Ennis. The following Tuesday evening he was back training with Ballyea. The following Saturday he came on at halftime in the county semi-final against Cratloe, to be joined shortly afterwards by his brother Cillian.
“And the following morning at 8am the pair of them were back down in the club field in Ballyea,” says Martin. “They might have played half an hour the previous day but they wanted to brush up on their stickwork. That’s the kind of discipline a county footballer has. You’d have seen that a lot with Gary through the years. Early on he wouldn’t have been considered or even rated as a hurler but when he got a bit of time back with the hurley and the longer the season went on the better he would get.”
Ballyea is unique in that it is both your quintessential rural club with just the one church, shop, school and pub yet also a quasi-divisional team. Of the 13 footballers who got game time against Cratloe, seven play for Clondegad (based in the neighbouring parish of Ballynacally), two (O’Leary and 2016 captain Stan Lineen) for Kilmihil while there’s one apiece from Cooraclare (Lillis), Coolmen (O’Connor), Lissycasey (Griffin) and Shannon Gaels (Thomas Kelly, not to mention county football panellist and Ballyea panellist Darragh Bohannon). Just because there’s no hurling in the west of the county doesn’t mean there’s no hurlers from there. They just gravitate to where there is hurling and Ballyea is such an oasis. The Local Inn on the Kildysart Road isn’t just where Ballyea host so many autumnal homecomings; it’s essentially the very spot where east meets west, where hurling country blends into football and vice-versa. There they all meet and team up.
Ballyea don’t collect all these county football stars though; they produce, nurture them. As Mikey Hehir, who has coached both Ballyea and Clondegad points out, “There’s this perception out there that we snap up these guys when they’re 18 or over! But almost all of them have been coming to us since they were 10 or younger, just like there are kids that age playing and training with us now that play their football elsewhere.”
Their opponents in Sunday’s final, Éire Óg, share certain commonalities with them but are also quite different. They don’t have just dual players; they’re a dual club who are in both senior finals. Half their team that played in the extra-time semi-final win over Sixmilebridge will also be on the football panel that contests next week’s final against Ennistymon. It’d be even more if they had been out of the hurling: county man David Reidy was a key contributor in last year’s football breakthrough while prior to his concussion difficulties Shane O’Donnell used to also play the big ball once ‘the Townies’ were out of the small ball.
Key to them being within a game of winning their first senior hurling title since 1990 is that again they don’t just have footballers in their ranks – they have current or recent county footballers. Gavin Cooney can score in either code; Ciaran Russell can defend, lead, read a game. Aaron Fitzgerald played for the county footballers before switching over to the hurlers last year.
And then there’s the curious case and addition of Cian O’Dea. He still plays his football for Kilfenora and up to last year used to hurl with Corofin. But after being appointed last year the games development officer of Éire Óg, he decided to hurl with them as well.
Rory Hickey, best known for being a former county referee but an accomplished club hurling one as well, has seen in his current role as camogie club chairperson the impact an O’Dea has had on the club on and off the field.
“He’s brought a whole new dynamic and approach to how we coach kids. The old stagers would have had them in three lines kicking the ball to each other. With Cian it’s all movement, games, fun. With the hurlers then he started out at corner back in the first round of the championship but the last day against the Bridge it was him who popped up on the edge of the square to catch a ball and pop it off to Shane for the equalising goal. Only for him we’d be out of the championship. But I think what said most about him that day was that earlier that morning he was coaching our U14 girls football team in a final in Clarecastle. It was a rotten day and anyone else would have said, ‘I’ve a big game later on, I’ll leave this go.’ But he wouldn’t leave them down.”
The same time O’Dea was heading out the door to coach those kids the Brennans were down in the field in Ballyea, brushing up on their hurling. Different clubs but similar mindset.
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