Patience a virtue for Bandon ahead of much-delayed decider
Eolann McSweeney, Bandon takes a tumble in this clash with Sarsfields' Kevin Crowley during their Co-Op Superstores Intermediate A HC semi-final match at Riverstick. Picture Dan Linehan
Ladies and gentlemen, will you welcome back to the stage, please, the Bandon hurlers. And our sincere thanks to Bandon for their patience.
Sunday’s Cork Intermediate A hurling final has taken on a strange sort of persona. The final has become less about the outcome, and more the incredibly long wait to get to the outcome.
How the time was passed and who was more unsettled by the extra four weeks stitched onto the never-ending lead-in carries almost greater intrigue than who might climb the steps on Sunday afternoon.
Just for those unfamiliar with the wait, the timeline is as follows: Aghabullogue and Bandon won their respective semi-finals on Saturday, October 4. The final was fixed for a fortnight later, Saturday, October 18, at 5.30pm.
The day before the first attempt at playing the decider, Friday, October 17, the throw-in time was brought forward by one hour to 4.30pm because of the orange weather morning in place for Saturday night. Early on the morning of October 18, the final was brought forward again, from 4.30pm to 4pm.
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The Cork executive's attempt to outsprint the elements proved futile. Two hours before throw-in, the game was pulled. Management members of both camps were already on the ground in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The Bandon bus turned on its heel and went back down the N71.
There were tentative moves by the county board later that same Saturday to see if there was an appetite to try again a day later, on the evening of Sunday, October 19. Nothing happened on that front and so the postposed fixture was pencilled in for 5pm on Saturday, October 25.
The ink was hardly dry on this latest refixture announcement when the goalposts again moved and were pushed further into the distance.
Realising the error of their ways in asking dual players Seán and Cianie Furey to line out in a county hurling final with Aghabullogue on the Saturday and in the Senior A football decider with their native Cill na Martra less than 24 hours later, the game was kicked back to Sunday, November 9.
That November 9 date came with an asterisk, of course. If Aghabullogue were successful in the Premier Intermediate football decider of November 2, which they duly were, the hurling would go to November 16 owing to Aghabullogue’s Munster football involvement on November 9.
All caught up, let’s proceed.
Aghabullogue, as you can tell from the above, have been kept busy. Since the extra-time semi-final victory over Aghada on October 4 - seems like another lifetime ago, doesn’t it, when you go through all the subsequent snakes and ladders surrounding the still-to-be-played final - their many dual operators have come through a county football semi-final, final, and Munster quarter-final.
The consequent conclusion is that they are the championship sharper coming into Sunday.
And so, what of Bandon? We’ve not heard a peep out of them in six weeks.
Their manager is Joe Burke. We ask him a question that will probably be better answered on Sunday evening. The question is: Was it more preferable to have six weeks exclusive focus on a single code, or does he look with envy at Aghabullogue and their frequency into the championship arena, albeit for a different code, in the same six-week period?
“Look, Aghabullogue are battle-hardened, but we certainly won't be using the delayed fixture as an excuse if things go wrong for us on Sunday.
“We’d have 10 or 11 lads who are starters in both codes. This length of time on one code is kind of uncharted territory for us, really. It has always been week on, week off, week on, week off.”
Once the final didn’t happen on the first weekend it was supposed to happen and Bandon were thus presented with this large void to fill before eventually getting to make the full trip into Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Burke says they made no attempt to pass the time with anything from left field.
Besides one challenge game, all preparation was kept in-house and on the local pitch. They kept to what they’d been doing all year. The players, he explained, didn’t require anything left of field to lift or sustain their application to the correct level for the additional four weeks onto their season.
“Their attitude has been fantastic, we can't say enough about them. They understood it was out of our hands, out of everyone's hands. They just knuckled down and got back to it.
“We had two plans in place, one for November 9th and one for the 16th. It's just an extra week of hard preparation again, and then you can kind of set them back a small bit now and just add freshness.
“That freshness is really the key, especially when you’ve had an extra month.”
Aghabullogue are chasing a second double in three years. Bandon are chasing a fresh chapter.
They rose to senior status at the end of 2016. The regrade of three years later saw them drop a step to Senior A. They were relegated out of that in 2021 and relegated out of Premier Intermediate in 2023. Their footballers were relegated out of Premier Intermediate at the end of September.
“We haven’t been to a county final since 2016. There was a core group, back in 2017, ‘18, they all kind of moved on at the same time, be that retirement or traveling. There was a massive step up for fellas that didn’t have much experience. The way the championship is structured now, it is unforgiving if you have one bad year. That happened to us. We came down from senior and we are Intermediate A now.
“There's a massive hope that we can go up a grade. It would be fantastic for the club overall.”
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