Sarsfields rekindling old magic

The romance of it all. Sarsfields Hurling Club, whose heart beats in the sister half-parishes of New Inn and Bullaun in a rural area of Co Galway, has all of 300 houses in its catchment zone. Not only does it succeed in fielding a senior team from such finite resources, but next Sunday the club will contest its fourth AIB All-Ireland championship semi-final in six years.

"It has all gone beyond our wildest dreams," admits David McGann, a local schoolteacher and co-founder of the club back in 1966. In a little over three decades, Sarsfields have graduated from a junior team to one of the most respected in the land. Incredibly, the success has been brewed on a potion of brotherhood and family bonding. The Cooneys, the McGraths, the Kellys and the Kennys have all contributed.

Unfortunately, two of the team's stalwarts - Joe Cooney and Joe McGrath - will miss this latest episode in Sarsfields' great adventure, when they take on Dunloy, of Antrim, at Mullingar on Sunday. "Without those two, we'll be up against it," says McGann, yet in such a way that there is no towel being thrown in from the corner. It's just that, with their restricted numbers, two players of such quality will be hard to replace.

Yet, it is all a far cry from the mid-1960s when Sarsfields was founded after the then chairman of the Galway Board, the late Father Sollen, determined every parish in the county could have just one club. It improved the standard of hurling and, in juvenile hurling, the accent was on skill. From winning a junior county title in 1968 to an intermediate title in 1976, Sarsfields were on the move. In 1980, they won their first county senior title.

Michael Connelly, goalkeeper for club and county in those days, had assumed the role of manager by the time Sarsfields made their national breakthrough. In 1993, Sarsfields won the All-Ireland title and, the following year, retained it. Historically, they became the first club to do so. "Not even the big clubs from Cork, like Blackrock and St Finbarr's, managed to do that," points out McGann.

Connelly was a somewhat reluctant manager in the early days. "I didn't really want to get involved, but eventually did so at the request of the players, young fellows who I had to meet every day and every weekend," he recalls. "It just snowballed from that. When you take on a team, you just don't want to lose. The first thing we had to do was win back the county title (they did so after a replay in 1992) and when you get out of Galway you just breathe a sigh of relief."

Sarsfields have become acquainted to breathing such sighs of relief. They have become the dominant team in Galway in the 1990s. Connelly admits he had something special at his disposal. "There was something in those fellows, they just didn't want to lose. And the year after winning the first All-Ireland, there was no way they wanted to give it up. They felt it was just as easy to win as to lose."

Indeed, Connelly remembers that some outside observers thought they were mad when they went on holidays to the Canaries in the January prior to the second campaign, a time when some people felt they should have hit the training pitch again. "But that break did us an awful lot of good and, I believe, was one of the reasons we retained the title," he says.

"When you're training in bad weather for over six months of the year, it's nice to get a week in the sun."

Connelly will be in Mullingar on Sunday for the match with Dunloy, but not in an official capacity. In November 1996, after almost five years in the hot-seat, the man who led Sarsfields to two back-to-back championships decided to take a back seat. The reins were handed over to Michael Murray and Michael Mulkerrins, his fellow selectors in those heady days, who have brought in a number of younger players and rekindled the old magic.

To emerge as Galway champions in any year is a feat in itself. And, inevitably, the Galway champions go on to conquer whatever the rest of Connacht has to muster as opposition. Almost always, though, the hard work has been done, until the All-Ireland series. Their success rate at national level has been exceptional: they won the finals in 1993 and 1994, and lost to subsequent champions Sixmilebridge in the 1996 semi-final.

So it is that, on Sunday, Sarsfields will re-enter the national arena and former All Star Padraig Kelly, their captain, will seek to inspire them to another final on St Patrick's Day.

It's all a long way since the club was formed in 1966 and McGann and another co-founder Fr McNamara dreamt of the day when, maybe, they could possibly win a county title. "That would have been the ultimate," said McGann. But they got a lot more than they bargained for and, in another three days time, "every man, woman and child" in the area will give their backing to a team that doesn't know when the odds are too great.