ON SATURDAY, TWO clubs from hurling strongholds will be contesting the All-Ireland junior and intermediate hurling club finals at a double-header in Croke Park.
Cork’s Ballygiblin are back in familiar territory as they return to the junior decider after falling one point short of Kilkenny side Mooncoin in the 2022 showpiece. This year’s intermediate final will also feature a team from a hurling thoroughbred county, as Limerick champions Monaleen take to the stage.
On the other side of the line however, lie opponents from places that wouldn’t be described as hurling heartlands. But within their own communities, away from the areas that are predominantly football, hurling is all that matters.
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For the Tooreen club in east Mayo, reaching the All-Ireland intermediate final is a feat they have been chasing for some time. Three times they have previously reached the semi-final stage of the competition, and three times they have failed to clear the penultimate hurdle.
In the 2017 campaign, after winning their first Connacht intermediate title, it was Kilkenny’s Ballyragget who turfed them out after an 11-point defeat in the semi-final. Two years later, it was Fr O’Neill’s of Cork who clipped their heels, before being dispatched by Naas in last year’s semi-final.
“I suppose we were under a bit of pressure for our fourth semi-final.” Dom Greally of Tooreen GAA tells The42 as he explains why their fourth attempt to book a ticket for Croke Park was different. Greally is a former chairman of the club but is now a selector with the hurlers.
“We didn’t really talk about it before the game [but] to have lost another semi-final would have been very tough.
“Experience counted but this year, we have strength and depth. We have a great panel and we showed that in the Connacht final, and in the semi-final when we were minus two of our best forwards, Kenny Feeney and Shane Boland. The lads that came in stepped it up and there was no difference.
“In other years, we may not have been able to call on the same depth of substitutes that we have this year.”
Not far away in west Sligo, there’s another pocket of hurling disciples in a land surrounded by football folk. Easkey GAA was originally founded in 1888 and was mainly a football club in its formative years. Hurling became popular in the 1960s and 1980s, and county titles followed.
“There have been periods in the past where people like guards have come to the area and promoted hurling,” says Easkey GAA chairman Michael Conway. “There was a break until 2018 when we re-entered the championship at adult level and that year, we reached the semi-finals and lost in a replay.”
That break Conway refers to lasted for 35 years. A group of emerging talents in the club made the breakthrough to end that drought.
“In 2019, we reached the final and lost it to Naomh Eoin and we’ve beaten them three times [since]. The 2020 final was exceptionally good and we won it by a point in the last minute. Although 2018 is the first time we’ve entered an adult team, those lads would have played [together] since U12.
“We’ve won a couple of Féiles in that time. They used to run an U16 competition in Connacht back when the age grades were even numbers and we’ve won that twice.
“The Sligo, Leitrim, Galway and Roscommon champions would play off and then they’d play the Galway B champions. They’ve competed at a good standard growing up and there’s a core group of people there who have been there since day one with coaching and management.”
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In Sligo, there are just six hurling clubs. It’s a similarly small pool of competition in Mayo, while both the Easkey and Tooreen clubs also have dual players on their books.
Of course, they both have tough provincial competitions to face once they navigate their way out of their respective counties. And in the case of Easkey, they were forced to survive a 0-5 0-4 mudfight against Galway’s Ballygar in November before they could lift their first Connacht junior title.
“It was extremely windy, cold and very heavy rain,” says Conway about the horror conditions of that day.
“Our pitch is about 200 yards from the Atlantic ocean, but even by our standards, it was very bad that day. It was tough but we were glad to get over the line, even if it was only by one point. There was probably some commentary around the Connacht junior hurling and that it was only five points to four but you really had to be there to just see how bad the conditions were.”
Playing in short internal competitions force such teams to venture outside the county if they want to play more meaningful games. Tooreen and Easkey have crossed paths at one such competition where they faced off in the final.
Tooreen Community Group in association with Tooreen Hurling Club will host a coffee morning and ‘meet & greet’ with the players this Sunday morning from 11am in Tooreen Hall. We invite everyone to come out for a coffee and meet the team. See you all there 🔵⚪️ pic.twitter.com/KNt3S081Uy
— Tooreen GAA Hurlers (@TooreenHurlers) January 4, 2023
“The Cú Chulainn competition gave us exposure to a structured bunch of games earlier in the year,” Conway explains.
“The Cú Chulainn competition is a good competition. We played an Armagh team in the semi-final and then Tooreen in the final. They beat us but we weren’t at full strength and I’m sure they weren’t at full strength either but it was a good game, and a welcomed competition.
“We’d have played Tooreen in challenge matches down through the years so we’re fairly familiar with them and hopefully the result goes their way as well on Saturday.”
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Reaching a club All-Ireland final is always a major event for the local community. And the more rural the area, the stronger the feeling of inclusion for all supporters. The remoteness is what unites people in such times. If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a similar effort to ready a team that’s hoping to bring silverware back home from Croke Park.
And in preparation for Tooreen’s long-awaited journey to this point, the locals have decorated the area in the blue and white colours of the team, while a meet and greet event was also organised this week. Everyone got a chance to give the players their best wishes before Saturday’s showdown.
Both Tooreen and Easkey have also set-up online fundraiser pages to help cover the cost of participating in an All-Ireland final. The pledges have been pouring in.
We are looking for donations to offset the costs of our senior hurlers run to Croke Park, which means they have the best facilities to train in the lead up to the game & also their travel & accommodation costs
— Easkey GAA (@EaskeyGAA) December 23, 2022
All donations are greatly appreciated 💙🤍💛https://t.co/P5agai7LQC
“Tooreen is a very small village,” says Greally. “We have no shop and no pub. We have a church and a school, and when you see the people that were at our meet and greet, it’s virtually everybody. It has brought everybody from the village and the outside area together.
“For our sponsors and supporters, they’ve really enjoyed the build-up to the final and the excitement. The players have maybe stepped back a bit from that side of things and are totally focused on the game. They don’t want to lose sight of the fact that they’ve a game to play that they need to go and win.
“It’s the stuff of dreams really. There’ll hardly be anyone left in the village on Saturday. Everybody’s going. To get there and see the whole village there on that kind of occasion, that may never happen again. The icing on the cake would be to come home with the cup but it’s a wonderful occasion to be there with a small hurling club from east Mayo.”
The Easkey team that will line out in the curtain-raiser at Croke Park is “quite a young team,” according to Conway. As a result, the players are scattered throughout the country due to college and work commitments. And to make attendance at training a bit easier for the players, they have been holding sessions at various grounds in Longford.
Easkey are grateful to the clubs in Killoe, Clonguish, Longford Slashers and Kenagh for their assistance with that.
“Longford is the most central place we can get so it takes a huge effort and commitment from the lads. They’ve all been very accommodating to us, and [they have] very good facilities.”
The Easkey supporters aren’t exactly strangers to this stage. They previously followed their footballers all the way to the All-Ireland junior final in 2019. It’s a long road from west Sligo up to Dublin; roughly a four-hour drive. The team will get the travelling out of the way on Friday and their fans will follow.
Conway missed out on that occasion as he was working in America at the time, but he’ll be serving on the sidelines this time. The town will empty on Saturday, while support will flow from all corners of the world.
They’ll all be watching as the outsiders take on the representatives of the established hurling counties.
“There won’t be too many left [in Easkey] I’d say,” says Conway. “I was working in America the time the footballers were in the final in 2019, and a few others came home from Australia and different places. It was such a huge event at the time for a small club like Easkey, and to get back there for a second time in three years is massive.
“I know there’s buses going up for it and there’s people from the surrounding areas in Dublin and coming home from England.
“The crowd will be massive and hopefully the lads will play to what they’re capable of. We hope that’s enough to get a result on the day, but even if it isn’t, once we leave Croke Park knowing that we couldn’t have done much more is the most important thing.”
- First published 6.30pm, updated at 8pm to appear on TheJournal.
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