All-Ireland joy justified all the work for Pauric Mahony

SHACKLES OFF: Ballygunner’s Pauric Mahony isn’t feeling under any pressure, freeing him to perform to his best abilities. Pic: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

Winning an All-Ireland medal with Ballygunner last February has made Pauric Mahony’s life “a lot easier”, he is happy to admit.

Beating Ballyhale Shamrocks at the 11th hour like they did was one thing, but the achievement itself has justified all the work the 30-year-old has put into training and returning from two serious knee injuries.

“I’m not sure about others but from my side, obviously as a Waterford person, it’s not something we’re too used to,” Mahony said at the launch of the AIB Club senior provincial finals. “For years when we had a couple of counties under our belt and no Munster, we were saying, ‘Jeez, if we won one Munster, we’d nearly be happy’.

“Then obviously things change, and you get a bit older and wiser. There are new lads coming in and you realise there’s an extra layer of belief within the group. Obviously, it’s one of those days and we probably don’t think about it enough now but when we’re finished we’ll probably look back and say, ‘that was the happiest we ever were as a group but also as people’.

“It made things a lot easier in terms of getting on with life and maximising yourself off the hurling pitch as well. Things became a lot easier for the fact that you had achieved something so big.

“If you think about the time and effort we put into the game. It’s not just nowadays turning up to training on Tuesday and Thursday with a match on Sunday. There’s so much more that goes into it: the gym, trying to get the body right, the mind right. It influences a lot of what you do outside of the pitch – so, yeah, it makes it easier to come back and do it again if you can get to where we were last year.” 

Scoring 13 points, seven from play, against Na Piarsaigh the last day, Mahony had a licence to play off the fringes of the tussles as the out-ball option. He felt it too.

“It’s great with young lads flying around the pitch. There might have been a time a couple of years ago when I would have taken on a little extra pressure in the Ballygunner forward line. Dessie (Hutchinson) mightn’t have been there. My brothers Mikey and Kevin mightn’t have been there and Peter Hogan might have been very young. It’s different circumstances now playing with Ballygunner and that’s probably why I’m enjoying it so much.” 

Then there’s his cousin Patrick Fitzgerald who is hotly tipped as a Waterford star in the making and one player Ballyea will look to negate in Thurles this weekend. Like Mahony did, he is making the step-up as a teenager. “I would have coached the Ballygunner minor team two years ago and he would have been one of the star players on it. It’s more sitting around the dinner table and you could be having a casual conversation with him about hurling.” 

Starting just one championship game for Waterford this past season, Mahony was used sparingly by Liam Cahill but has no intention of stepping away having spoken to new manager David Fitzgerald about the 2023 season.

“To be fair to Davy, he’s left the Ballygunner lads completely alone,” says Mahony, the only current Waterford player to have previously played under the Clare man. “I have had some good conversations with him about next year. It’s really exciting for the players in Waterford at the moment. I don’t know if there’s a point to prove but it feels like that – that as players and individuals we haven’t been delivering enough for Waterford.

“The last time in Waterford there was huge success when he was here. For a county that doesn’t have a huge amount of Munster championships, Davy was the last one to bring a title here."

Winning two of the last three Munster championships, Ballygunner’s Waterford players are used to the dual commitments overlapping but not like last March when the All-Ireland, Munster and county medal presentation clashed with the Division 1 final win over Cork.

"It was hard to get a date last season. I suppose it interrupted our celebrations a little bit because we weren’t able to enjoy the night with the lads. It was very hard at the time because I suppose they thought the league final would be on the Sunday and we’d still be able to go to the night on the Saturday.

“The lads made the most of it – the ones who weren’t involved with Waterford. We got back (from Thurles) at about 11:15pm, 11:30pm. They waited around and held some of the presentations at that stage. We were playing Tipp in two weeks’ time so the next day was a recovery session and it was just in and out for us.”