Teddy McCarthy would be proud of this Sars team, says manager Johnny Crowley

The late Teddy McCarthy played a huge role in convincing Crowley to take charge of the Glanmire club and he has led them to their first county hurling final in eight years.

PROUD: Sarsfields' Coach Johnny Crowley against Imokilly' in the Co-Op Superstores Cork Premier SHC semi final at Pairc Ui Chaoimh. Picture; Eddie O'Hare.

The approach came from the late Teddy McCarthy. The dust had settled on the 2022 club season. An unhappy and unsettled season for Sars.

Edged out by Blackrock. Eviscerated by the Barrs. Eliminated at the group phase. Title contenders turned upside down at the first fence. Soft touch Sars.

The off-season required the filling of a managerial vacancy. McCarthy held the role of vice-chairman. It was he who made the call.

Johnny Crowley was going about his business one afternoon last autumn when his phone pinged. Teddy Mac’s number flashed. An offer out of the blue to come back and lead the blue.

Crowley had managed the club to county glory in 2010. A second chapter had not been in his thinking. He initially said no to Teddy simply because of time and restraints.

“To be fair to Teddy, he is pretty persistent when he gets something into his head,” Crowley recalls of the late vice-chairman’s unstinting perseverance.

“I met himself and the chairman, Keith Mulcahy, three or four times. They weren't taking no for an answer. The more I thought about it, it just felt right. In the end, I was thrilled to say yes.”

The iconic Teddy McCarthy image from the Irish Examiner archives of the 1993 league final against Wexford when McCarthy’s left knee was ten inches over the head of the Wexford player competing for the same ball

Fast forward 11 months and Crowley has the club back in a first Cork hurling final in eight years. Their county final road was not a route you’d ever associate with Sars. It was anything but dual carriageway serenity.

In their opener against Kanturk and their most recent outing against Imokilly, there was stubbornness and steel in refusing to accept their trailing injury-time position. In the quarters against Blackrock, they won ugly.

Crowley has them back in a county final by unfamiliar means. The sadness is that their most familiar face is no longer around to see if this new preference for substance over style will culminate in county glory.

“From a personal point of view, I think of Teddy a lot now in the sense of where we are,” says Crowley of the 57-year-old who passed away in early June.

“I genuinely don't think there would be a prouder clubman if Teddy was around today. I think he would be so proud of what we have done and what we have achieved thus far.

“From a group perspective, we really haven't brought Teddy up in the dressing-room. It is just something that I feel would be an injustice to Teddy and the group, if injustice is even the right word and I’m not sure it is.

“But he is constantly in my head, especially after games funnily enough. Not so much the week or day of a game, but after games when I reflect back. I said to myself after we got out of the group, ‘God he would be so proud’.

“And then when we beat the Rockies, he was such a Sars man and such a proud Sars man that he would have loved a victory like that. A semi-final then and now a final. I think, yeah, he'd be proud.” 

Crowley’s pride in his players lies not in the results they’ve posted. It is rooted instead in their reaction to being removed from their comfort zone.

The manager has commanded dressing-rooms outside of Riverstown. He’s seen inside a few set-ups. The facilities at home, he says, are second to none. Astro, wallball, gym, and a carpet of a playing surface.

“My thing was that if you got a new pair of white socks from Santa, you could nearly wear the same pair of socks for the whole two months of pre-season and not dirty them because it is so clean down here.”

Sarsfields' Coach Johnny Crowley celebrates the win over Imokilly' in the Co-Op Superstores Cork Premier SHC semi final at Pairc Ui Chaoimh. Picture; Eddie O'Hare

He wanted the socks muddied. He wanted a mentality change. They left the carpet and Riverstown behind. They left behind what was comfortable.

They spent every Tuesday and Thursday night of February and March at the Ballindenisk equestrian centre 10 minutes up the road from them. They did two nights on a dirty farming field belonging to club sponsor Johnny O’Connell.

They did six weeks at Riverstown boxing club. There were beach sessions too. At the end of the two months, the socks from Santa were filthy.

“I had been up in Ballindenisk one day and I often said to myself, it would be a great place to train a team if you were ever involved at that level again.

"When I got the job, one of the first things I did was go up and have a chat with Robert Fell. I put my vision in place and he said no problem whatsoever.

“I can tell you now it was pretty rough. Diarmuid [O’Sullivan] and Neil [Fitzpatrick, S&C] took the sessions. The two lads worked so well together.

“Another feature of Ballindenisk is that it's up very high. You can imagine your February and March sessions in the bitter cold. There was no moaning. The lads just knuckled down.

“It was something challenging and that was what we wanted to do - challenge these guys and see what they'd do and where they'd go.

“We have pictures of the farming field sessions. Looking back, the lads were absolutely destroyed. But good craic. We always had a little smile on our face. While it was incredibly hard and incredibly tough, it was also very enjoyable.

“Riverstown boxing club were also brilliant to us. Those sessions were massive in our team building. Two of the players suffering broken ribs speaks to the intensity of those sessions. The challenges we put in front of the players early doors; we are getting the benefits of now.”

Crowley managed the club to minor glory in 2007. There was U21 success a few years before. It all fed into the run of seven senior final appearances in eight years between 2008-15.

They won four of them to treble the club’s haul of little All-Irelands to six. But then they fell off a cliff.

“Maybe the appetite was gone. The fire in the belly wasn't there. This year, it is something we have tried to stoke up again,” Crowley concluded.

Stoke they have. The call from Teddy set it all in motion.