The Club

by Christy O'Connor

  Sixmilebridge are loaded with good hurlers but they’ll be a well-organized and super-fit side under Seán Chaplin. And they’ll surely take their heart and honesty from their manager, Rusty Chaplin.

  ‘We just need to be disciplined and honest,’ I said to Conny. ‘If we are, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll beat them. Because we’re better than them.’

  ‘Jesus, man, I’m getting goosebumps already, just thinking about it,’ Conny said, his voice straining with emotion down the phone. ‘Jeez, it just kills me that I can’t be around home on weeks like this.’

  Conny lives and works in Dublin but makes it home for training as often as he can. Then he spends half his week on the phone trying to keep up to speed on what’s happening in the club and the other half checking the mood and the mindset of the players. He doesn’t train with any club in Dublin because his work schedule doesn’t really allow it. So he trains early every morning and then hurls on his own as many evenings as he can, his only company being a wall – the back of the stand in Parnell Park – that he beats a ball back off, or a set of goalposts on a public pitch just off the Malahide road which he drills sliotars through.

  He used to have his own training unit in Dublin, because Joe Considine, Lorcan Hassett and I lived in Dublin for years. The isolation is hard for him now.

  The first time we ran into Conny in Dublin was in November 2000, when Hass and I were in that fine nightclub, Copper Face Jacks, one night. Despite the loud music and the squelching sound of bodies crashing against one another, we heard our names being called out on the dance floor.

  ‘Yeaaaaaaaaahhhh, the Doora-Barefield boys are in the house. Whaassuup, dogs?’

  It was Conny, hardly able to walk. Hass and I almost ignored him. Then he told us that he wanted to come training with us the following season. That’s when we knew he was totally inebriated from drink, so we just basically walked away from him.

  Although he was one of our biggest supporters, Conny hadn’t hurled in years by that stage. He’d been preoccupied by college, work placement in London and summers abroad. But he was keen to go back and play a bit of junior hurling, and since Joe Considine was playing with the Clare senior footballers that season, Conny fitted neatly into our training programme.

  Even though there were only three bodies, our attitude was to train like absolute dogs. No science, just sweat. One man in the middle of a drill for 90 seconds or a minute, annihilate yourself, then go back out and let the next man in. You’d just have recovered when it was time to go back into the middle again and torture yourself once more. The shooting drills were even more frantic. Bang, bang, bang.

  At the outset, Conny just wasn’t able for that relentless pace. The constant weekly trail to Copper Face Jacks had taken his fitness, and the years away from hurling had claimed his first touch. At times, Hass couldn’t handle him at all. The man at the end of the line was supposed to have three or four balls so that he could keep feeding the man in the middle with sliotars. Yet Conny would be off like a pet rabbit chasing balls that had already gone flying past him. And Hass would be standing in the middle, the drill having completely broken down, roaring at him like a lunatic.

  ‘Where the hell are you going?’

  Then Hass would turn around to me. ‘Is he gone home?’

  At the outset, Conny couldn’t hurl spuds to ducks but he gradually tuned in to what was required and the training really began to pay off for him. By the summer, he’d forged his way on to the senior panel.

  He’d also bought into the discipline that was required. One Friday night in the summer of 2001, the three of us ended up in another fine Dublin nightclub, Break for the Border, because Hass was chasing this gorgeous girl called Diane.

  As soon as we got inside the door, Conny took one look at Diane and turned to me. ‘Hass hasn’t a hope, he’s only wasting our time here.’ I don’t know whether Hass wanted us there for moral support or back-up, but we were warned to be on our best behaviour and none of us were drinking. We didn’t leave the place until 2.15 a.m., but the three of us were still back in Clare that morning for training at 9 a.m. That was the resilience and commitment that the team demanded that time and that secured us a county title that summer. And three years later, Hass married Diane.

  By the middle of the summer, after the Clare footballers had been beaten in the qualifiers by Laois, Joe Considine rejoined our pack. By that stage, Conny had got cocky about assuming Joe’s position in the group, so Joe decided to take him for ‘a trot’ one evening. The two boys went on a 5-kilometre run and Joe ran him into the ground.

  Conny never lost the run of himself again, and any time he hinted at doing so, Hass would keep him in check. In August 2002, the three of us went out in Dublin one Friday night. We’d arranged to train in Fairview Park the following day at noon, and Hass and I went home at a respectable hour, but Conny pushed the night into the real early hours and was in the horrors by the end of it.

  The following day was baking hot and the sweat was coming out of Conny before we even began the session. He must have been seeing three balls because his first touch was non-existent. After about 20 minutes, Hass couldn’t take it any more. He called the two of us into the huddle and lambasted Conny. And then sent him home.

  Before I’d even realized what had happened, Conny was traipsing off Fairview Park with his tail between his legs. And Hass and I just continued the session.

  Apart from linking up with St Vincent’s – who were brilliant to us – for a couple of months in early 2003, we never trained with a club while we were in Dublin. We just felt that we could control and regulate our own sessions better and push ourselves that bit harder. At that time, some former inter-county players had organized a training camp for country-based players, where you paid a small fee to take part in a well-drilled session. But we still wanted to maintain our own identity as St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield players.

  One of the main difficulties with that approach was getting someplace to train. We were like nomads and we trained everywhere: Fairview Park, the Phoenix Park, Bushy Park in Terenure, the back field in Scoil Uí Chonaill, Dollymount Strand, Clonliffe College. The back field in Scoil Uí Chonaill would be partially lit from the floodlights of a tennis club; the bullring on the Clontarf road had plenty of space and really good street lights; the field adjacent to the long-term car park in Dublin Airport was always lit up well enough for ball drills.

  We were like private detectives trying to locate these places around Dublin. We trained on the grounds of a convent in Clontarf for a while until a nun ran us out of the place. When we chanced it again a few weeks later, she threatened the cops on us.

  We had to continually improvise. If the huge space in Fairview Park was covered by a blanket of local soccer games, we’d use the timber hoardings that sealed off the works on the Port Tunnel as a ball wall. We used the huge Railway Wall at the corner of the Nally End and the Hogan Stand in Croke Park for the same purpose. One evening outside Croker, Hass made a suggestion.

  ‘Come on, we’ll break in, get some goal-shooting done and be gone before anyone spots us.’

  ‘Have you gone completely nuts?’ I asked him. ‘You’d get locked up for that kind of a stunt. We’d end up out in Mountjoy for a night sharing a cell with a crowd of drug-addicts.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Hass. ‘But Jeez, it would still be nearly worth it.’

  Hass is one of the most intelligent people I know, but the man was almost possessed when it came to hurling. He pushed himself to the limit, and the harder, the more miserable, the more excruciating training was, the more he loved it. He used to come up with these small grid-drills where the three of us would just basically leather the shit out of one another. A friend of Conny’s – a former All-Ireland U-21 medallist – came out training with us one evening, and Conny had to come between Hass and myself from going at one another’s throats. We were training on the field beside the airport car park, just days after the place had been ploughed to ribbo
ns from staging a cross-country race. It was impossible to strike the ball along the deck, but during one striking drill Hass told me to ‘do it right or fuck off home’. Conny’s buddy must have thought we were totally mad because he never came near us again.

  We built up a really strong bond, which will always be there. When we lost to Ballygunner in the 2001 Munster club quarter-final, it was probably Hass’s greatest hour. He scored 1-5 from play in the 1999 All-Ireland club final against Rathnure, but that day against Ballygunner he delivered the most honest performance I ever saw from a Doora-Barefield player. Joe Considine had been harshly sent off after eight minutes and it was Hass who rolled up his sleeves and put in a double work-shift. The man literally ran himself into the ground. Watching him during the match that day, I knew where his drive was coming from: the nomadic training trek around Dublin during the dark winter.

  Hass collapsed with disappointment on the pitch afterwards, and he was so shattered he never made it to the team meal in the Granville Hotel on the quays in Waterford. He went across the road on his own for a walk and was so broken-looking that a woman approached him and asked him if he was all right. She thought he looked suicidal and was about to jump into the river. And then a text message beeped through on his phone. ‘You were immense today – an epic display. At times, I just wanted to pick up my hurley and go out and carry you on my back.’ It was from Conny.

  At times, we felt closer to each other than we probably would have done if we lived together at home. We needed one another in Dublin. And that intensity made us better players. Before the 2004 county semi-final against Clarecastle, Hass pulled his hamstring and couldn’t really run on it in the lead-up to the game. Ten days beforehand, he and Conny went training in Bushy Park and Hass concocted an acclimatization drill for Conny. It was a shooting exercise which basically entailed Hass hitting a ball at Conny and then Hass belting him with the hurley as he passed him.

  ‘What are you trying to do to me, kill me?’ Conny asked him after the first assault.

  ‘I’m only trying to toughen you up,’ responded Hass. ‘Because this is what the Magpies [Clarecastle] will do to you.’

  So on a lovely balmy autumn evening in a south Dublin park, with kids playing near by, old couples out for a leisurely stroll and more people walking their dogs, they were greeted by a vision of a demented lunatic chasing after someone with a stick. When Conny got home an hour later and took off his clothes for a shower, he had welts and red marks all down his back and legs. It was like someone had given him 30 lashes with a horsewhip.

  Winning with the club had just consumed Hass, as it had all of us. When we were in Dublin, that camaraderie and those training sessions were often all that kept us going. As young people in a vibrant capital city, we probably didn’t make the most of life up there, primarily because we came home every weekend for training or matches. Dublin was just where we worked, because our lives were in Clare and with St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield. And that’s what ultimately brought Hass and me back to Clare. Although Conny is still in Dublin, his heart is 150 miles away. And always will be. He has been courted by several clubs in Dublin but he just can’t turn away from St Joseph’s.

  One of my sweetest memories in hurling was after the 2004 county semi-final win against Clarecastle when Conny, Hass and I embraced tightly at the final whistle. Four years earlier, Conny couldn’t make our third team; that day, he was one of our best players. And the journey we had all taken together just added to the purity of the moment.

  On Friday evening, 29 May, after we completed our puck-around in Gurteen before making our way to Clarecastle to take on Sixmilebridge, Conny stepped into the middle of the huddle and set the tone for what lay ahead.

  ‘The match the last day only began at half-time because we were bullied by Ballyea. Well, there are two types of people in life: the guy who bullies and the guy who gets bullied. Well, we’re the fucking bully today and we lay down the law from the first ball. We hit them with everything we have, we dominate them from the first ball. A crowd of fucking young lads aren’t going to come up here and dictate to us. We make it into a battle and then we’ll swallow them up.’

  It was a beautiful summer’s evening, perfect for hurling. I had a chat with Patsy beforehand about the way we’d play. The sun was high in the sky but was glaring straight down the pitch from the west and was going to dip lower in the second half, which can make it a nightmare for a goalkeeper. But the wind was also blowing in that direction and I said that we should play with it in the first half: ‘Let’s get on top of these boys early and knock whatever optimism they have straight out of them.’

  The dressing room was busy: guys stretching, getting taped up and rubbed down, some players hopping a ball off some part of the wall they had claimed for themselves. Ken Kennedy and I talked to the backs in the showers before Seánie and Conny addressed the forwards in the same space we’d just vacated. The mood was nervous and edgy. But positive. Really positive.

  ‘It’s a fucking disgrace that this club is waiting eight years for a championship and we want to have two feet in a county quarter-final this evening,’ said John Carmody. ‘That’s what’s at stake here now.’

  All week, we’d been driven on by the lash of Patsy’s tongue. Now, he was preparing to hunt us out of the dressing room by the sharp stick of his insight. A year earlier, as coach of Corofin, he had been in exactly the same position that the Sixmilebridge coach, Seán Chaplin, was in now. Facing down his old crew.

  ‘All I’m hearing about all week is Chaplin and his inside knowledge on us. That he knows us inside out. Well, what did I know about ye last year? What inside knowledge did I have? I knew everything about ye and it made fuck-all difference. It made fuck-all difference because yere heads were right. When I met ye the previous year, yere heads weren’t right. Greg [Lyons], you broke my heart last year and there was absolutely nothing I could do with you. You ran the game on your own. There was nothing I could do with any of ye because yere heads were just right. And if yere heads are right today, what Chaplin knows about us will mean fuck-all. Well, are the heads right?’

  ‘YEEEAAAAAAH.’

  We gathered in a huddle to the familiar big-game pose: arms wrapped tightly around one another. The words said at that moment often don’t register; the real truth is in the body language or behind the eyes of the men staring back at you, who nod to confirm the mental readiness of the group.

  The last words we hear before we hit the field are delivered in bullet-point format.

  • Cool heads.

  • Composure on the ball.

  • Discipline.

  • Workrate.

  • Savage intensity.

  And then somebody roars: ‘Let’s give them fucking hell.’

  The ’Bridge waited in their dressing room until just before the whistle. Then they won the toss and elected to play with the breeze, clearly looking to take the game to us from the first whistle. Their goalkeeper was booming his puckouts over the head of our centre-back, Davy Hoey, but our cover defence was coping well with the tactic and we soon got a foothold in the game.

  We were three points up after the first quarter and had extended that lead to five points by the 25th minute. They had completely restructured their attack by that stage and had switched Niall Gilligan to free-taking duties after Caimin Morey had missed three frees. They surged back into the game before half-time, but that was more to do with our indiscipline than their creativity. In a three-minute rush before the break, Gilligan slotted three frees to leave us ahead at the interval by 0-8 to 0-6.

  The dressing room was calm and measured. It was sticky and humid, even for a goalkeeper, and after towelling down I went over to Seánie. He hadn’t started but was sure to be coming on. ‘If you’re inside in the full-forward line,’ I said to him, ‘be on your toes the whole time because that ball is flying through the half-back line with the breeze and the hard ground. It could bounce literally anywhere.’

  ‘I’m going in
now,’ he said to me. Deccie Malone was coming off with an injury.

  I hit Seánie a dunt into the chest. ‘Boss those fuckers around the place, use all your experience. Dictate the play in there for us.’

  When our puckout stats came through, I wasn’t that disappointed with how poor they’d been, because the wind was so strong that it was often a matter of just trying to clear our half-back line. It was more important now that we used our heads on our own puckout in the second half.

  ‘I’m going to be able to reach the full-forward line but the half-forward line can’t get dragged down the field and allow them to condense it inside,’ I said to the group. ‘If their half-back line go back, make the run and I’ll pop it in front of you. But our midfielders have to come down the field and the half-back has to hold the line. If you’re free, I’ll find you.’

  We were on our statistical target for our hooks-blocks-tackles category, but there was clearly one area where we were falling behind. ‘How many scoreable frees have we conceded?’ I inquired.

  I heard somebody say nine.

  ‘Too fucking many, lads. We’re killing ourselves. We’ve got to stop diving in and we’ve got to get our timing better.’

  Then Damien Kennedy made a basic but important point. ‘Look, they didn’t do any shooting from distance and they’ve had no wides from out the field with that breeze. They used their heads for a lot of that half and we need to do the same now. No stupid stuff with the ball.’

  Some guys still had their jerseys off and everyone was loading up on fluids. As we all got to our feet and got ready to go again, Ken Kennedy had the final words. ‘We were in exactly the same position against this crowd last year at half-time and we went out and won the game in the ten minutes after half-time. We fucking buried them. Now let’s go out and bury them again.’

  Against the breeze, they were the ones who had clearly upped their work rate. They had the first score in the 33rd minute and nearly had a goal two minutes later, but it was tipped over for a point. By the 40th minute they were back in front with another Gilligan point, which was their sixth without reply. They should have gone further ahead two minutes later when they had a clear point which was waved wide.