Malachy Clerkin: Losing an All-Ireland club final is hard —only the toughest make it all the way back

If the road to an All-Ireland club final is long and winding and bumpy as all hell, it’s nothing compared to the road home after you lose one. At the blow of a whistle, you go from being in contention to stand at the apex of all the thousands of clubs in the country to immediately being just another nothing pinprick on the map again.

Nowhere in the GAA is the fall as sudden or as brutal. At least when you lose an All-Ireland at county level, you go home to lick your wounds and the vast majority of your people have your back. You might not want to hear a single word any of them have to say but you will at least know that sympathy isn’t in short supply.

That’s not the way of it at club level. Go home after losing a club final and the only question the rest of your county ponders is how long they have to leave it before they start sowing it into you. They’ll generally give you Sunday night but will you make it through Monday without the smartarses coming hunting? Not likely. You’d be offended by the very thought.

In olden times, when the final was on Paddy’s Day, it wasn’t unusual for the losing team to have to gird themselves for the start of the next county championship just a few weeks later. You didn’t drown your sorrows so much as swallow them whole and deal with the indigestion as it came. The first crowd that crossed you were Rennie made flesh.

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It’s no surprise then that very few make it all the way back 12 months later. The club championships have been on the go nationally since 1970 and in all the time, only five clubs have lost an All-Ireland football final and dusted themselves off to claw and scratch their way to the following year’s decider. It’s even rarer in hurling, where only Dunloy and Ballyhale have ever managed it. Dunloy have done it twice, in fact – and lost both times.

In the days and weeks of general hubbub that followed last year’s double-header, the sheer uniqueness of what had happened across the afternoon got a bit lost in the mix. For the only time in the history of the competitions, both All-Ireland winners were making up for losing the previous year’s final.

Not only had Kilmacud and Ballyhale lost the 2021 deciders, they had lost them both in the exact same, gut-shredding way. Not just last-minute goals, last-minute of injury-time goals. Last attack of the last minute, caught by one last despairing dice rattle. Harry Ruddle for Ballygunner, Jerome Johnston for Kilcoo. Down went Shamrocks and down went Crokes.

For one of them to make it back to win their county and then their province and ultimately their All-Ireland would have been something. For them both to do it was astonishing. It was a shame that all the oxygen afterwards was taken up by the 16th Man bother. It could be generations before something like that happens again.

In fact, for half a century, only two clubs managed to get back to a football final and even then, success was thin on the ground. Clann na nGael, the great Roscommon side of the late 1980s, lost four finals in a row to three different teams between 1987 and 1990. Nemo Rangers from Cork lost two back-to-back at the start of this century before at least making amends at the third attempt. For a full 50 years, that 2003 win by Nemo was the only time a football club had won an All-Ireland the year after losing in the final.

And yet here we are. Maybe it’s just a quirk of the competition but this will be the third year on the bounce that the previous year’s runners-up are back for another swing. Not alone that, it’s the third year in a row where the original defeat was agonising, the sort of kick in the guts that ought to leave you bent double and gasping for breath for too long to mount a challenge again.

Kilcoo lost to Corofin in extra-time in 2021. Kilmacud gave up that killer last-kick goal when they were as good as out the gap against Kilcoo in 2022. Glen had a chance to win in injury-time last year but Conor Glass’s shot was saved by the Crokes goalie, himself making up for the brain fart that had led to the Kilcoo goal 12 months before. For Malachy O’Rourke’s side to haul themselves to the biggest day again is some achievement.

The club finals don’t, as a rule, tend to throw this sort of redemption around the place willy-nilly. Winning on the day of days is hard. But getting to the day of days is in many ways harder still.

St Thomas’s won an All-Ireland on the back of their first Galway senior title. Their first! Imagine telling them on that St Patrick’s Day in 2013 that they would win seven of the next 10 Galway titles, including six in a row, but wouldn’t add another All-Ireland. They’d have told you to go easy on the drink because there’s a heavy few days in store.

St Thomas’s have been back to one All-Ireland final in the meantime and got routed by Ballyhale. St Brigid’s won the football that same afternoon and this is their first time back in Croke Park, having fallen either to Corofin or the first Mayo team they’ve met in the meantime. O’Loughlin Gaels were last in a final in 2011 — Clarinbridge gave them a hiding — and this is only the second time they’ve made it out of Kilkenny since.

You don’t get to go again, is the point. It’s nobody’s turn. All you are given is a tumble down the mountain and a ticket to start at the same shitty square one as everybody else.

Only the real ones make it back from there.