Lorcán McLoughlin: 'Once you got a taste for success at all, fellas were willing to stay at it'

Lorcán McLoughlin has been through the ranks with Kanturk and now faces into a first Premier Senior county quarter-final.

Lorcán McLoughlin blasts home Kanturk's goal against Newmarket during the McCarthy Insurance Group Co. FL Division 3. Picture: John Tarrant

2007 was the year Lorcán McLoughlin graduated to the adult club scene. He graduated straight onto Kanturk’s flagship team. The club’s flagship team was a middle of the road intermediate outfit.

In 2007, Kanturk went as far as the county semi-final of Cork’s third-tier hurling championship. Two years later, they were fighting relegation.

Up and down. Hit and miss. Sometimes progress, more times stagnant.

Newtownshandrum is 25 minutes up the road from Kanturk. When a teenage McLoughlin was starting out among the adults, Newtownshandrum might as well have been in a different time zone.

In that same 2009 season where the Kanturk intermediates overcame Ballygarvan in a relegation semi-final, Newtownshandrum collected a fourth senior county since the turn of the millennium. They’d add a third Munster in six years before that 2009 winter wrapped up.

McLoughlin and Kanturk didn’t aspire to climb to the top grade that Newtownshandrum ruled simply because they didn’t think it realistic. They knew their level and they knew the level they wanted to get to. Neither came anywhere near the rung of the ladder occupied by the crowd 25 minutes over the road.

This afternoon, Kanturk head to Fermoy to break new ground, make history, and go where no Kanturk team has previously gone. Coin it whatever way you want. They all mean the same thing and all capture the journey travelled.

A first Premier Senior county quarter-final. Unthinkable from where they started out.

“Back then, it was a million miles away. Just unheard of,” said 34-year-old McLoughlin, one of the club’s outstanding servants.

“You had one of the best club sides in Newtownshandrum over the road, and you're thinking, these lads are on a different planet altogether.

“We were setting our stall out to survive really. Win a game just to survive. That was probably the goal for the first five years I was involved. You might be lucky to win one or two games, and then get comprehensively beaten in a quarter-final.

“Could you even envisage something like this back then? No way. You couldn't make sense of it because it just seemed so far away.” 

We don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of giving a year-by-year history lesson of how Kanturk went from there to here. By the same token, we can’t not mention when the culture changed and the club began rising.

Kanturk hammered Mitchelstown 1-20 to 0-4 in the 2011 county junior football decider. The 19-point win represented the club’s first adult county title since 1969. Two years later, most of the same players delivered county intermediate hurling glory.

“It just seemed that the attitude and mindset shifted. In the last 10, 15 years, it has come on an awful amount. Once you got a taste for success at all, fellas were willing to stay at it. But it has been a long road.” 

Plenty of the servants that put silverware on the table over the past 13 years are still going and leading. It’s doubtful if Kanturk would have survived last year’s relegation decider against the Glen were it not for McLoughlin’s masterful sweeping. But dependance on the older cohort is not what it was.

Brian O’Sullivan, Rory Sheehan, and Ryan, Tommy, Colin, and Alan Walsh have all played underage for Cork, be it hurling or football, in the past five years. They’ve gone straight to the top of the bus and asked to take the wheel. O’Sullivan and Alan Walsh are their top-scorers for the campaign about to break new ground.

“With our younger lads, there is so much confidence there. They’ve brought renewed energy. They have that energy that anything could happen. There is no fear there. It is a county quarter-final. Absolute new territory for us, but those young lads are raring to go. It is great to see.

“Some of us older fellas, we can probably see both sides where we have got some clippings down through the years, whereas these fellas know nothing other than senior hurling since they graduated to adult level, and they’ve also had success at Senior A level too.” 

McLoughlin, as he noted, has known many years far less glamorous than this. And so he’ll both enjoy and relish a top-tier knockout afternoon against the 33-times county champions. That’s the company they now keep and seek to conquer.

“Uncharted water for us. A huge amount of work from everyone involved in the club over a number of years has made this possible. A lot of investment from a lot of different coaches. It will be a brilliant day for the club. It is history for the club.

“Even though it is new ground, it was the next step for us that we were hoping to take.”

A very different attitude to when he first graduated onto the scene. Can his Kanturk now graduate up another step of Cork hurling’s ladder and within one step of county final Sunday?