The Club

by Christy O'Connor

  Then our full-forward Deccie Malone weighed in with his observation. ‘They know exactly what ye are going to do,’ he said, in a pointed reference to the same players. ‘They surround ye with three or four bodies because they know ye are going to run with the ball. And if that happens, there must be some of our players free.’

  Patsy remained positive, but he stressed the need to control their corner-forward Gearóid O’Donnell, who had been the most effective player on the field in the opening half. He had scored three points from play from only about four possessions.

  A couple of minutes into the second half, O’Donnell won a ball out in the half-forward line, turned and headed straight for goal. Marty O’Regan went to meet him and just as O’Donnell offloaded the ball, Marty buried him head-on. He was committed to the challenge, but O’Donnell collapsed in a heap and the ball was cleared down the field.

  Their players were roaring at the referee and then they turned their attention towards the umpires because blood was spilling from their teammate’s forehead. I told one of the umpires that I thought Marty couldn’t pull out of the challenge because both of them were going at full pace. The umpire agreed and that was the message conveyed to the referee when he came in to consult with his officials a minute later. O’Donnell was carried off and by the time he returned, around fifteen minutes later, his head was bandaged up and the game was really in the melting pot.

  A goal had given us some breathing space but Crusheen had charged at us midway through the half and they had all the momentum with the stiff breeze. We had been holding on, but they got a well-worked goal with just four minutes remaining which put them ahead for the first time in the match.

  It looked like another disappointing day, but we kept going and put a decent move together in a final attempt to save the match. I played a quick free to Kevin Dilleen near the far sideline and he quickly switched the play back across the goal to stretch their blanket cover. The ball ended up in the square and was scrambled across the line by Damien Kennedy. Seconds later, the final whistle blew and we were ahead by a point on a scoreline of 2-12 to 1-14.

  Jeez, we hadn’t felt this good after a league match in years. But this was more than just a win and two points finally in the bag; it was a performance that reflected honesty, integrity and work rate, qualities that we hadn’t really shown to date. And we’d just proved to ourselves that we can be a match for any team in the county when we produce those qualities. As we gathered in a huddle in the middle of the pitch afterwards, the vibe was excellent.

  ‘Great result, lads, wonderful character, that’s what this team is all about,’ said Patsy as we circled around him. ‘Since it’s a Bank Holiday weekend, I have no problems with guys going out tonight and tomorrow night. But that’s it then, no more fuck-acting between tomorrow night and championship. The real serious stuff starts from Tuesday on.’

  Before we broke up, I just wanted to make one quick point. I didn’t want to dampen the mood but I felt that Patsy had made a really important point to us 11 days earlier. And that it was now time to reiterate it.

  ‘Patsy identified a trend, and we have to be really aware of it. After a poor performance, we’ve then delivered a positive performance next time out. And then we’ve been poor again. We can’t allow that to happen now after this good performance. Especially when everyone is going to be telling us over the next few weeks that we’ll definitely beat Ballyea in the first round of the championship.

  ‘Well, they relegated Éire Óg to intermediate last year, just five weeks after Éire Óg had drawn with Clarecastle in the championship. We can’t afford to be flat against them because they are dangerous. [Tony] Griffin is sure to be looking for some form to bring into the championship with Clare and if he gets it into his head, he could go to town on us. We need to really tune into these boys now for two weeks and not be thinking about the big one against the ’Bridge [Sixmilebridge] at the end of the month.’

  By the time we made it to the dressing room, Noel Brodie was slagging Seánie about the impact his ‘18 stone’ frame had made in Damien Kennedy’s pushover goal. But as we emerged from the showers, water still dripping off us, Pat Frawley arrived in to alert us to the stormclouds gathering outside. He said that Crusheen weren’t happy about the O’Donnell incident and that a group of them were waiting outside for a showdown. He said that they were blaming Ken Kennedy.

  With that, I looked over to Ken, who was already dressed and making for the door. ‘Hey, where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘Wait up for the rest of us.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We’ll all go out together in case there’s any hassle.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less,’ he responded. ‘I didn’t go near him.’

  With that, he took off straight out the door, turning right in the direction where the Crusheen players were supposedly gathered.

  Most of us hadn’t a stitch of clothes on, so Eoin Conroy, who hadn’t showered and was heading for the gym, ran out after him. As the rest of us tried to get dressed in a panic, Seánie looked out the window and spotted Ken getting into his jeep, unscathed.

  7. Let’s Get It On

  The Clare senior club hurling championship has become a bear-pit. Prior to 2007, eight clubs had shared the title over the previous 40 years, and each of those four decades was dominated by one of the three big powerhouses: Newmarket, Clarecastle and Sixmilebridge. When Clare club hurling was at its peak in the 1990s, winning six successive Munster club titles, there were only four realistic contenders: Clarecastle, Sixmilebridge, Wolfe Tones and ourselves. Now? Twenty clubs enter the championship and at least 12 feel they can win it.

  The Clare championship has no regard for reputation or tradition any more. Tulla narrowly lost a Munster club final in 2007 and managed to win only one championship game out of four in 2008. Wolfe Tones, champions in 2006, also failed to emerge from that same group as Tulla in 2008. Inagh-Kilnamona topped that group and surfed into the quarter-final on a huge tide of optimism until we beat them by eight points.

  Nobody is untouchable. And if you’re really unlucky, you could end up in a group of death. One group this year contains Newmarket, Clarecastle, Wolfe Tones, Cratloe and Tubber. The first four have serious ambitions of winning the title, and yet only two can make it to the quarter-finals. Tubber won’t win a county title but they’re an emerging side who beat us and Sixmilebridge last year and they’ve developed a reputation as big-game slayers.

  On the opening weekend of the championship in the middle of May, Tubber were at it again, beating Clarecastle by eight points. A result like that in the past would have sent shock waves around the county and Tubber would have celebrated it like an All-Ireland. At the final whistle, their players just casually accepted the congratulations and walked off the field like it was any other game. The rest of the county just shrugged its shoulders.

  Our first game the following day, Sunday, 17 May, was a treacherous fixture. Ballyea had gone well in Division Two of the league and their side, packed with young players, had just won the U-21B title. Our form had been poor and, between exams, football and injury, the starting 15 had never played together before. But we’re not complaining because at least we’re beginning our championship in summer. And not in autumn.

  Last year was a joke. A complete joke. We started training on 16 January and didn’t play our first championship match until 15 August. There was a round of games played in early June, but we’d a bye that weekend. We were supposed to play our first game on Friday, 27 June, but the Clare hurling manager, Mike McNamara, went into a county board meeting the previous evening and requested that all club games be pulled that weekend. He didn’t want any disruption to Clare’s preparations before their Munster final against Tipperary on 13 July.

  That was understandable and we were made aware of McNamara’s intentions. But we still trained that evening, fully primed to play 24 hours later, because we’d believed that, as a compromise, the games involving the four clubs who had receive
d a bye in the first round would be allowed to go ahead. We were due to play Sixmilebridge and, since there were only three players on the Clare panel between the two clubs, we couldn’t see any reason why the match shouldn’t go ahead. We had been preparing for the game for months, but just as we were warming down and going through our game plan, we received news that all the games had been called off.

  It was a sickening feeling, but it wasn’t anything new to us. In 2005 there was a five-week break between the National League final and Clare’s Munster hurling semi-final, but the club delegates chose not to play the championship in that time frame. Our first-round championship match was then fixed for midweek, ten days before Clare were due to play Wexford in the All-Ireland quarter-final. The county hurling management were unhappy with that arrangement and they requested a meeting with the county board less than 24 hours before the game was scheduled. At 9 p.m. that evening, just after training, we were informed that the match had been postponed. Eoin Conroy was halfway back from Dublin when he got word. He had already taken the following day off work. In 2006, we played our first championship match on 7 May and our second on 29 August – a 112-day lay-off. We ended up in a play-off, and by October we were still slugging it out in a group that had begun in May; by that stage, guys were just burned out and fed up. In 2007, we didn’t play a championship match in July or August.

  It’s no wonder so many players walk away from their clubs each year: they just can’t handle the hassle. It’s almost as if county boards assume that club players don’t have jobs, they don’t take holidays, they don’t have family commitments, they all still live at home with their parents and there’s no such thing as divorce. The ordinary club player often exists on a week-to-week basis, not knowing when or if the county board has decided to fix a game.

  We’ve become conditioned to feeling like second-class citizens.

  Constant training with no matches is soul-destroying – and often damaging to a club’s ambitions. In 2004, the Clare hurlers didn’t play between 16 May and 26 June, but there were no club hurling games played in that time span. Clare were annihilated by Waterford in the Munster quarter-final and I remember Seánie saying to me afterwards that going back to the club for a few weeks would have been the perfect valve-release for many of the players, as opposed to continuously training with Clare. The championship didn’t begin until August and we eventually ended up playing five matches in six weeks in September and October. We lost the county final by a point.

  The constant grind eventually caught up with us. The week before that county final, we picked up a couple of serious injuries and guys had no time to recover. Injury is one serious issue with regard to condensing championships. If a player breaks an arm in, say, May, he’ll still probably be back in good time for the championship. If another player gets injured in September, he’ll probably miss the business end of the championship.

  The same principle applies to suspensions and travel. A player could get suspended in May for three months and he won’t be affected. Another player could get sent off towards the end of the season and end up missing three matches while serving a one-month suspension. Similarly, a student can go to the USA for the whole summer and not miss any games, while one of his teammates could book a one-week holiday, the county board changes the proposed structure of matches, and he ends up missing a key game. Or if he chooses to stay, his decision has wider ramifications on his personal life. That instability puts a constant strain on relationships. I know because I’ve been there.

  Six months before Olivia and I got engaged, we broke up for a week. I was minor coach and we had a minor championship quarter-final against Clarecastle the same day that we were supposed to attend a wedding in Mayo. I had promised Olivia that I would go to the wedding, but the match was rescheduled at short notice and something had to give. Jeez, we were playing Clarecastle. Anyway, my non-appearance at the wedding was the last straw from a summer of serial disappointments and cancellations.

  If you were to think about it for just a second, how could you rationalize it? You risk your future with your loved one because of a match? A match you’re not even playing? For a crowd of young lads, some of whom might not even bother to show up? You must be mad. But that’s just the pull that the club has over you. It consumes you.

  The commitment of inter-county players, and their wives and partners, is absolutely massive and it far outweighs that of club players. Given the nature of the inter-county championship, and its unpredictability over the summer, it’s often impossible for county boards to define a structured championship. Yet it is very wrong when the tail, which comprises the 4 per cent of players who play senior inter-county, wags the big dog, composed of the 96 per cent of players who don’t.

  In the last decade, the landscape of the inter-county championships has changed radically to accommodate the need for more matches, and the strain has been felt at club level. The treatment of club players has been a scandal in an organization that prides itself on amateur status and the equality of all members. The club player is repeatedly held to ransom by the interminable postponements and the now accepted imposition of asking club players to play midweek or under lights, regardless of work commitments or travel. He is often made to feel that he just doesn’t matter.

  The inter-county championships now are populated by players who think, behave and perform like elite athletes. By any reasonable understanding of the term, top-class GAA players ceased to be amateurs years ago. They deserve to be treated as the elite. Yet the reality is that such elite preparation also exists at club level. In an interview earlier this year, Portumna’s Damien Hayes said that ‘things are so professional here that we’re like a county team’. There’s no doubting that Portumna would beat any inter-county hurling team outside the top ten – and, on a good day, maybe the top eight. So would Ballyhale Shamrocks. Given their experience and style of play, Crossmaglen Rangers would beat at least six inter-county football teams, maybe more.

  Club players can reach exceptional standards without the structured apparatus that assists inter-county players. Club players don’t receive player grants or bursaries, while the vast majority of them don’t get travel expenses or meals after training. Many club players don’t even claim physiotherapy expenses, which leaves them out of pocket. And all they really want in return is to be treated properly by the county board.

  A decade ago, the report of a Club Fixtures Work Group recommended a modest target of 20 matches a season for club players. The group found just one county reaching that figure. Half of the counties were providing 12 matches or fewer and 27 per cent of club players were getting fewer than ten matches. At the time, GAA Director General Liam Mulvihill described the provision of fixtures for clubs as ‘shameful’. Revisiting the issue in 2004, Mulvihill said that there was ‘no evidence that the provision of regular games for the average club player has been improved in the 75 per cent of the counties in which this was rated a serious problem’.

  As things stand in Clare now, senior club players are guaranteed just 14 games per season – nine league and five championship matches. That number can increase with a better league and championship run, but the majority of senior players play an average of 15 games per season – still five games short of what was recommended ten years ago. Yet the central issue does not concern the number of games a club has in any given year – just when they are played.

  Of course, the problems derive from the GAA’s unique playing structure. The county team is the primary focus of county players for most of the year. Yet players are expected – and for the most part want – to play for their clubs as well. But that’s not all. Some counties have divisional teams and championships; most have dual clubs fielding hurling and football sides. Then there are underage and colleges competitions, which can place a desperate burden on some talented young players. New regulations regarding player burnout have been in place for the past two seasons, but all teams still need to be accommodated within the competitive structu
res.

  The problem has intensified since the advent of the All-Ireland qualifiers, which introduced a new level of uncertainty into the calendar. Increasingly, county managers look to have club activity frozen for the duration of a team’s involvement in the provincial or All-Ireland championships.

  The GAA authorities need to adopt a more interventionist approach to ensure that club players are not left on ice all summer. The whole mindset at local level has to change. County boards must ensure that matches go ahead within a certain time frame and clubs must realize that they can’t delay games because of injuries or suspensions. More importantly, Croke Park must issue a directive that inter-county players and managers cannot dictate to county boards.

  Much of what is wrong with the system is caused by the clubs themselves. Clubs pander to county boards because they want to ensure decent ticket allocations for inter-county matches, or because they may need a game switched. They are reluctant to play without their inter-county players, and as a result ordinary players’ schedules suffer. We’ve seen our inter-county players support a decision by their manager to call off a club game.

  With the competition among the three main sports (Gaelic games, rugby and soccer) more intense at grass-roots level than ever before, the inability of the GAA to plan their games properly at local level will cause more and more players to defect. Some rural clubs are haemorrhaging players to such a degree that they’re in danger of being wiped out.

  In 2006, Croke Park announced two new windows of opportunity for club matches to be played during any given season. Even the delegates present at the time couldn’t pretend that this time wouldn’t be eaten up by insecure county managers greedy for more time with their players. We’ve only got our window now because the Clare hurlers don’t play in the championship until 21 June. But if Clare go on a winning run over the summer, the timetable will just be ripped up all over again.