Brendan O'Brien: New seeds thriving on old ground as cricket takes root again in Kilkenny

NEW SEEDS: Members of Kilkenny Cricket Club look on during their Division 8 league game against Tyrrelstown at Castle Blunden last Saturday

Patrick Blunden knows. He sees that it’s nigh on impossible to stand in the idyllic grounds of Castle Blunden in rural Kilkenny as a game of cricket unfolds before your eyes and not think of Kevin Costner’s farmer who cleared a huge swathe of his Iowa cornfield to build a baseball diamond in the film ‘Field of Dreams’.

“There is a touch of ‘build it and they will come’ about it,” he chuckles.

This is no movie. There are no ghosts at play in this mature patch of parkland but men, women and children from around the county and beyond: a new generation breathing new life into the story of the sport in an unlikely part of the world that, once upon a time, was the beating heart of cricket on this island.

“So, back in the late 1800s, Kilkenny would have been a huge cricket county,” Blunden explains. “But then the GAA came along and a lot of those clubs changed into hurling clubs, which is why Kilkenny is now so good in the hurling, I suppose. It’s all bat on ball, hurl on sliotar. It’s the same sort of thing. And catching the ball, it’s all what cricket’s about.”

Costner’s Ray Kinsella was fuelled by a whisper and a vision of ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson. Blunden’s leftfield decision to convert a chunk of his agricultural land into a sporting theatre was twofold: the memory of his grandfather Sir William Blunden, who was a devotee of the game and a player with Gowran and Mount Juliet, and the desire to give something back to the surrounding community.

A chance encounter brought it to life.

Ed Hart had been living in Bagenalstown and playing for the local cricket club for almost 20 years when he helped his father with some renovations on the historic house at Castle Blunden, which is home to Patrick and his young family. The conversation couldn’t help but wind its way towards oval and crease.

Blunden and Hart spoke about the traditions of a game that had once been played out on the vast demesnes of Gowran Castle, Castlecomer, Foulkscourt and Bessborough and embraced by the farming classes. And about how the only club left now was an invitational setup in Mount Juliet.

They decided it was the right time and the right place to sow new seeds.

“So we had a little exploratory meeting and booked out a huge room in the Club House Hotel, I remember, and I think 16 people turned up,” Blunden laughs. “But it was enough to start going and we’ve now three teams in the Leinster league and 60-odd adults, same again with children, and we are reaching all communities.”

Their early steps have been assured. A Division 9 title and promotion were secured in 2021, just three years after the club’s foundation, and a fourth men’s team may be viable next season. A women’s select isn’t a million miles away and a recent blitz brought dozens of children together from around the province.

The ground itself is matching that rate of change. The artificial wicket is rated as one of the best in the province and there are plans to reseed the outer field area with a more suitable type of grass that will leave the days of barley and wheat ever further behind. Planning permission for a new entrance road has been secured and a clubhouse is in the pipeline.

“It was just an agricultural field,” Hart says. “We started with nothing. Literally a field. We did the groundwork ourselves and put the wicket in ourselves as well. All the equipment and everything as well, we kind of accumulated. I had a bit lying around at home and we brought that along. Cricket Leinster were very helpful, they gave us a few grants here and there to build up the equipment.”

This is all the more extraordinary for the fact that they had to contend with a pandemic so soon after they started, but the strength of their nascent membership was never more obvious than during and after Covid. Very few people fell away and Blunden himself tended to the pitch during lockdown so that there would be no ground lost.

That commitment has been mirrored by the contribution of players from the Asian community, without whom the project would have been impossible. Chief among them has been Zeeshan Mumtaz, captain of the first team, whose efforts on and off the pitch have been a key ingredient in the glue keeping it all together.

Like Hart, Mumtaz was playing with Bagenalstown when the idea for a club in Kilkenny was born and the prospect of being on the ground floor proved to be a tantalising one for men who were more than willing to accept that the payoff in the short-term would be a drop down the ladder in terms of playing standards.

Mumtaz used his contacts to bring others on board, some of whom hadn’t played in ten or 15 years, while his skills with bat and ball helped tide the team over while so many shed the rust. A fine, unbeaten century against Tyrrelstown last Saturday only highlighted the left-hander's continued importance.

If loyalty is a barometer for any club’s well-being then Kilkenny is clearly in good nick. Doctors make up a large percentage of the membership and some have continued to answer the call even when work took them elsewhere. They had a former hurler from Laois with them as well although Galway proved to be a commute too far when work took him west.

The hope is that more hurlers can be attracted given the county’s trademark pastime while the cricket development officer for the midlands area has already been to the local schools as the club looks to put down roots that intertwine with the international flavour of players from the UK, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

“The future? Ideally, we would like to develop the ground as much as possible,” says Blunden. “World Cup cricket is coming in 2030 and Ireland is a co-host. I mean, we would love to get a visiting team to base themselves here, unlikely as that may be, but that’s the idea. Somewhere outside of Dublin that is going to have a real kick at cricket, that’s what we want to do.”