Tony Leen: Ballymac's new heroes walk among us, like the normal people they no longer are
SMILING FACES: Ballymacelligott players celebrate with the cup after their side's 1-16 to 0-13 win over Tyrone's Clogher Eire Og in the AIB All-Ireland Club JFC final at Croke Park. Pic: Piaras Ó MÃdheach/Sportsfile
MET Dan O’Shea on Thursday morning in Dunnes Stores in Tralee – small Dunnes, as we know it. The Ballymacelligott full-back was walking quietly among his subjects. No words were required. He had to drop a shopping bag to formalise our greeting, with the use of his shaking hand only. The other arm was in a sling. Last Sunday, he dislocated his left elbow in the All-Ireland Club JFC final in Croke Park.
Dan’s 35 now, so the consensus goes. The family homestead is above in Ash hill, at the top end of the parish. Dan’s now moved over to Ballyfinnane, which – despite the vastness of our parish - is perilously close to Firies territory. There’s no fear of him.
A bit older than Dan, DD O’Rahilly remains a bona fide great of Ballymac football, one of the many, many hundreds who toiled ceaselessly over the span of several decades to make the club relevant beyond its own footprint. DD was as thin as string but as tough as whipcord and more of a do-as-I-do sort of midfielder. You’d go down dark alleys with and for him. What he told me about Dan Shea many years ago, stuck.Â
The week of Ballymac’s December Munster final in Mallow against Buttevant, I ran into Dan in the gym while the seniors were training on the pitch. Gently stretching, he had at least one of his care running around his feet and it might have looked a tad incongruous if DD O’Rahilly hadn’t set me right previously, that Shea was one of the best, an endorsement equating, in these parts, to a papal imprimatur.
Dislocating an elbow is rarely a good idea but if it has to happen, then being at the heart of a war story from an All-Ireland win for Ballymac at Croke Park is the best worst case.Â
Dan and his colleagues returned from Dublin last Sunday night as All-Ireland football champions. That’s quite the mouthful. For anyone in the parish struggling to grasp the realness and its basic enormity – that these lads on the tele winning an All-Ireland were actually their own - the manifestations have been all around them this week.Â
Sunday night hysteria in the Halfway, Monday night mayhem in Glenduff House. They landed into MJ’s Diner in Tralee for breakfast like the normal people they aren’t, spreading good vibes like scented cologne.Â
One of the lads firing out the sausages, Fearghal ‘Oscar’ Kirby, chipped in with some funding to grease the wheels for the run to Jones’ Road. On Friday they grubbed at O'Riadas, another local eaterie. Cost goes with the territory now. Between the three of them, Gaeltacht, Dingle and Ballymac have tugged at the hearts of the natives and raised in the neighbourhood of €200,000 for their All-Ireland adventures. A pretty respectable neighbourhood. We won’t be breaking any non-disclosure agreements to venture that Ballymac chairman John Rice, who fixes knees and hips for a day job, waded fairly deep into his own jeans pocket to keep the rubber on the road over the last few years.
It’s a youngish, ballsy group who make mistakes but no longer wade deep in them. The sense from watching the squad grow is they enjoy going for the jugular and for goals. Thy've eschewed low blocks and tend to win by outscoring the opposition, not conceding less. Dan O’Shea and Aidan Breen are the two wise owls of the squad, preaching by deed and a few choice words. Breeno mentioned my late and only brother David after and it made me sadly proud. Or proudly sad, I'm unsure.Â
The age profile is very encouraging if the heads stay right and the club thinks smart. The size of our parish and the spill-out from Tralee for developable land has helped, as has a surge of minor talent into the senior set-up this season.Â
But Ballymac have been simmering for a bit. Twenty odd years ago we made an outrageous burst from Division 5 to Division 1 of a strong and competitive County League in five years. Back to back county intermediate finals were reached too. The chairman then, Tom O’Donoghue, had a can-do tap that produced more flowing miracles than the wedding at Cana. The importance of that can never by overstated.
Ballymac didn’t stay the course then and after regaining our status as a Division One club three years ago, the seniors were relegated to Two last summer. It’s probably our level, but maintaining this extraordinary momentum and parlaying it into something sustainable and far-reaching should be the primary goal for the club. Anyone passing the field on Sunday mornings should see the raw materials are there.
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THAT'S THE future, but for a few weeks, it must wait. Last Sunday night the road from Croke Park to Cork was tricky to navigate, the motorway fork beckoning us right for a 10pm homecoming in Ballydwyer when Monday school in Cork beckoned for herself and demanded the road not chosen.
We were spent by the Horse and Jockey, there was sporadic chat about folk we hadn’t seen, much less met, in thirty years, but I was lost thinking of how these young pups had advertised their audacity and chutzpah on the game’s great stage. How they had stared down moments that would have capsized most of us. How they wobbled, as they often do, for 10 or 15 second quarter minutes, but emerged to wrestle back the initiative from Clogher’s Eire Og after the break. If Dan O’Shea never kicks a ball again, he will always have January on Jones’ Road. That's enough. In fact it's too much. But so will Cathal Dunne, who had an immense afternoon at wing back. And so many others we thought might be limited by age and standard.
Past disappointments should have suffocated them too. For a few seasons, they’ve been automatically installed as short-odds favourites for the Kerry’s third tier championship, and that’s tied them in chains. Nobody buys the notion of curses, but only the blind would dispute that Ballymac hadn’t endured an extraordinary run of bad championship fortune. Final losses after extra time don’t begin to tell the devil in the detail.
Against Listowel in 2023, after a disastrous first half they roared back and went ahead deep in injury time and had one last play to see out. They couldn’t. The 2024 semi-final defeat on penalties to Firies doesn’t start to explain how they lost. Firies had a day for the ages just to stay in touch and never led ‘til the dying moments. Ballymac hit the crossbar three times, had a man sent off and missed a gaping open goal. By the time they lined up for penalties, every stomach knew the sickening endgame. Early last year, their forwards leader Vinnie Horan went down and out with a torn cruciate.Â
For all those unlucky moments, the realities of their own ineptitude and untidiness weren’t long in dominating the post-mortem. They drafted in a defence coach and a mindset coach, they more of less threw their hat at the Co League last year to periodise a late summer bounce, though they were still unlucky to go down. Half a dozen teenagers, part of a delightful minor group that annexed the club’s first Division 1 title last August, added spice, salt and vinegar.
From the Cusack stand camera angles, Croke Park must have looked rather deserted last Sunday but the colonisation of the lower Hogan stand with recognisable faces turned the occasion and the ground into a cottage crucible. When Dan O’Shea and then (temporarily) Daragh Broderick retired hurt, it had a bad sense of how Tyrone-Kerry games too often end. But these young lads aren’t manacled by history: they followed Daire Keane’s and Micheál Reidy's second half lead and drove for home.
Afterwards, the lovely guard of honour for the Gaeltacht side as they bounced out for the Intermediate final was gorgeous and spontaneous, even if it sort of wasn’t. They've gotten close. After their Munster final win in Mallow, Ballymac made for west Kerry to toast their respective provincial successes with Gaeltacht, who had defeated Aghabullogue on the same Saturday. Two days before Christmas, they quietly played each other at Austin Stack Park.
Who won? They both did. By more than they’ll ever know.
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