ALLIANZ HURLING LEAGUE:The lower reaches of the national hurling leagues reveal a number of counties working hard to keep the game alive, writes KEITH DUGGAN
THEY WON'T feature on Sunday Sportand you won't read much about them in the newspapers, but the teams locked in the basement of the hurling league will keep on playing regardless. It took the ignominy of a no-score performance for Kilkenny's uphill bid to survive in division four of the football league to gain any attention.
But teams from the fringe hurling counties who turn out year after year through thick and thin for precious little reward face odds just as demanding as those footballers starved of oxygen in the pre-eminent hurling county.
In hurling, there is always a Russian roulette element as to which county is going to struggle the most. This weekend, the hurlers of Longford and Cavan face difficult away trips as they bid to record their first victories of the season. Seán Browne, the Longford full-back has been packing his bags for games like this every year for the last 17.
He started inter-county hurling in 1991, the same year as his namesake and Waterford’s celebrated and seemingly ageless talisman, Tony Browne.
“You aren’t the first to ask that,” Browne laughs this week when asked why. “But it is basically that I have always loved the game since I was a gossoon. We are struggling this year but there is no way I would think of quitting either. I love getting together with the lads and the banter and I have made a lot of friends out of playing with Longford. I love going to training and still get a buzz. It is kind of a bug and what else would I be doing in the evening?”
Longford’s fluctuating fortunes are a perfect illustration of the near impossibility of building on good work. Last year, the county won the Lory Meagher Cup in Croke Park for the first time. It was, manager Tom Lynam says, a wonderful day: they were not expected to beat Donegal but played out of their skins and claimed the match by eight points.
“I have to say that when we got to Croke Park, we were made feel as welcome and as important as if we had been Kilkenny or Tipperary. The people in the stadium went out of their way for us and the whole day was magical.”
But since then, Longford lost three Offaly hurlers who had been working in the county. Another three players have emigrated. Two retired.
“That is eight lads gone,” Browne says. “You just can’t replace those overnight from a county in which you have three clubs.”
And so this season has begun grimly with two defeats, including a heavy one to South Down, leaving them just above Cavan on points difference. “It is frustrating,” Lynam says.
“And I am sometimes caught between bawling the players out of it for their own good and just encouraging them and telling them to enjoy it. Sometimes I would give them a telling off and then I wonder: am I right, here? Am I doing the right thing?
“They are committing to this under difficult circumstances. And I have to say, the county board does support us. There is no point in denying that they see the team as an expense. But they make sure we get buses for away games and gear and boots once a year and generally a decent level of treatment. And hopefully last year brought a bit of pride to Longford. But it is an uphill struggle.”
Across the border in Cavan, PJ Martin is facing similar difficulties. He took on the manager’s role after serving as trainer for Brendan Nelligan last year and when he turned up for his first training session, he was dismayed to learn that a number of senior hurlers had retired: at any rate, they weren’t there. Straight away, he had to readjust his ambitions for the season.
“I felt myself when we got a very bad beating from Fermanagh that it was going to be a tough Tuesday night. But 21 guys turned up and it surprised me. I try to give guys the confidence to believe that they can hurl but that it is going to be a few years before that turns into results.
“I work a lot on skills and when I went up there first, the skill levels were poor enough and we did a lot of stick work and I enjoy seeing their skills improving. You know, we played well enough against Fermanagh for the first 20 minutes and then they got a couple of goals and it turned the whole thing. And they hurled the full hour against Leitrim. They kept plugging away.”
Martin comes from serious hurling stock: his brother Kevin was a feted member on Offaly’s 1994 and 1998 All-Ireland winning sides (and currently manages the Westmeath senior team) and PJ also hurled for Offaly.
“The biggest struggle is trying to convert guys from football to hurling,” he says. “Football will always take precedence and most guys are dual players. The tradition is in football. There is no real underage structure in place and we aren’t bringing players through.
“I do see the skill potential in the younger players. There is potential there and they hurled in the Féile competition but there is very little for them afterwards. The young players on our panel now don’t have the strength yet and get pushed off the ball a bit, but the potential is there. The other problem is that there is a feeling that the competition is run off very quickly.
“Our championship could be done in May. We only started in mid-January. So you have seven months when guys won’t be hurling and it almost like starting again.”
In London, that was the feeling that Eamon Phelan had when he switched eight years of playing for the Exiles and started coaching them. London’s form has been one of the early surprises of this league: they are unbeaten and currently reside at the top of division 3A.
The obvious supposition is that the surge in emigration has gifted London with a brand new squad. But Phelan says that they have picked up just three new players.
“The big difference was that we decided to give it an honest go. Often, we would have situations where the better hurlers would turn up on the Thursday and still get on the team for a weekend.
“And we would get beaten by five or six points and it would be respectable and that is that. But we had 60 players at the start of the season and the numbers have been good at each session and players know that they won’t get picked if they aren’t putting the effort in.”
Phelan is from Carrickshock and originally intended staying in London for just a few months but he liked the city and the hurling has kept him there.
“When you come from Kilkenny, the reality for most hurlers is that they are not going to get to play for Kilkenny. So this gave me an opportunity to play inter-county hurling and to play in some of the top grounds in the country. I remember my first game for London was against Mayo and coming from Kilkenny, I was probably a bit presumptuous and thought it would be no problem.
“I was in full-back and before I knew it, the player I was marking has smacked two points over the bar. People talk about the so-called weaker counties and they are dismissive of them but there are a lot of hurlers who are trying hard to improve.”
The difficulty is that it can be a house of cards. Longford too have risen up the league ranks in seasons gone by, once progressing to the old division two and playing counties like Kerry, Wicklow and Roscommon. “Outside the top tier,” as Tom Lynam puts it, “but still stronger than us and it was a good experience.”
While the league is important, the Meagher Cup has been vital for counties like Longford. Seán Browne remembers rounding a team up through phone calls and taking turns driving.
“Then you’d head off to Monaghan or some place and to be honest, you wouldn’t know when you would get back because you’d head for a rake of pints afterwards. But it has become a lot more serious now. If you heard of someone out on a Saturday night before a game, it wouldn’t go down well.
“As for the Sunday, I would personally go out and a few of us would get together and have the post-mortem. But that would be it. I do think the balance has been lost at all levels. Players do need to unwind because it is hard enough training and going to games and working: just getting together for an hour or two afterwards, well, I think it is needed to be honest with you.”
Browne is not too despondent about the season ahead. “There is no point in throwing in the towel. That’s what we told ourselves after the Fermanagh game. We have some young lads in now and let them at it.”
Tom Lynam, despite the obstacles, admits that he is as enthusiastic as ever about the game. “It is the same as any sport. When I am away from it, I miss it. I just have a love of the game. And getting the players to give their all and see what happens.”
Last year was their reward.
There was only one disappointment that day of the Lory Meagher final in Croke Park. He noticed on the way to the stadium that the Meagher final was not highlighted on the direction markings to the ground.
The other two were. It was, he recalls, also omitted from the afternoon menu. Once they reached the stadium, they were treated like kings. But that small oversight bothered him for a while and then he just got on with it. Being invisible is just part of the deal. “It worked out anyway. That day was the same as our Liam McCarthy.”
This weekend will be far removed from that glamour.
Longford visit Leitrim and will face a hard task to get anything from a game played in front of a handful of people, there to keep hurling going in spite of it all.
