Groundhog Day for Clare County Football Final

by Joe Ó Muircheartaigh

GROUNDHOG Day.

This is the biggest clash of Clare football cultures in nearly 60 years. That’s a bold enough statement, but it’s true.

You have to go back as far as 1955 for the county final between Doonbeg and Ennis Faughs for a day that’s as potentially significant as this one.

Those were the days – there was a draw an replay – where two different eras collided head on in a clash that with time assumed far greater importance than a county final itself.

It was a territorial war as much as a football one, with Doonbeg emerging out of the west as totems of their parish and a community that you could say took all the territory of the old Kilrush Union.

The side to take on the giants of the day from the capital – the team that everyone west of Edenvale called the League of Nations.

The Magpies were representing west Clare, because football was a west Clare game – it was up to them to enforce this notion and prevent the Faughs from winning a fifth county title in nine years.

West versus East.

It was a tipping point in the history of the club game in Clare – Doonbeg snuck a draw the first day thanks to a late Francis Killeen point and then charged to a 0-8 to 1-2 win in the replay on the back of a five-point haul from Jimmy Carney.

The Doonbeg Dynasty was born and the Faughs died.

Doonbeg v Cratloe is the most significant West versus East clash since.

End of story.

Doonbeg are the giants – they may have only one county title to their name since 2001, but they’ve won 17 more since that breakthrough year in ’55; they’ve been the most successful county championship team in Clare since ’55; the first team from Clare to win a Muntser club; the team to provide four starters to the Munster final winning team of ’92, the captain of that team and much more.

Cratloe have been nothing. Hurlers who took up football – as in that’s the gospel west of Edenvale. Thing is, nothing could be further from the truth and going to school on some recent football history tells us this. The Under 14 and Under 16 A titles; the minor and Under 21 titles; the couple of intermediate titles, but quite apart from that, the team they have on Sunday has as much county football experience as any that has contested a final this past generation.

Thirteen of the starters have been on Clare panels, whether it’s minor, Under 21, junior or senior – the exceptions being Conor McGrath and David Ryan – while there’s county experience among the subs too.

So, let the ráiméis about Cratloe’s interest in football end there – put it in the same bosca bruscair as the notion that a Cratloe win will offer nothing to Clare senior football. Over a third of their team have played senior in the last couple of years – the two Collins’, Conor Ryan, Liam Markham, Martin ‘Ogie’ Murphy and Barry Duggan – while they’ve given the game in Clare new manager Colm Collins.

And make no mistake, they’ll want the Jack Daly as much as they did the Canon Hamilton in 2009, or 2010 and 2012 when they also reached the final frontier.

It sets up a real bonfire of vanities clash – the old traditional power that are the Flying Magpies against the coming power striving to make the big breakthrough.

County final day couldn’t ask for better and that’s why it’s 55 all over again, albeit the roles are reversed somewhat.

You know what you’ll get from Doonbeg.

Those Magpies – even the two who have flown all the way into the nest from Newmarket-on-Fergus – bleed black and white. They’ll die for it, because that’s what Doonbeg do and because that’s the spirit of old that carried them to many a county title and one that seems to be inculcated into them once more by Kieran O’Neill.

They have that seam of experience from stalwarts and legends at the back like Padraig Gallagher and Conor Whelan through to the younger brigade like Colm Dillon, Brian Dillon, Shane Ryan, Frank O’Dea, Shane O’Brien and more who have their county medals.

Then there’s David Tubridy. He who oozes class off left or right. His performance in the semi-final is already the stuff of legend and one that will be magnified even more if Jack Daly breaks through the border with Cooraclare out Mountrivers way and pitches up in the Long Village for the year.

In Tubridy’s Bar of course, given Tubridy’s captaincy of the team, given that it’s one of the spiritual homes of the game in Doonbeg and wider west Clare.

They believe, nay are fully convinced, that the Jack Daly is coming home.

But Cratloe believe in themselves just as much, as they take the final step in a journey they’re four years into at this stage.

In 2010 they were the team to expose a tiredness in Kilmurry Ibrickane at the quarter-final stage when pushing them to a point – it was Doonbeg who took advantage when taking the ‘Bricks in the semi-final that year on their way to claiming the title.

In 2011 Cratloe should have put Kilmurry away in the final moments of their semi-final in Lissycasey, but didn’t have the killer instinct that Johnnie Daly proved himself to have down the other end in the dying seconds.

In 2012 they had nothing left to give against Kilmurry in the quarter-final, having been taken to extra-time on four days previously by Liscannor.

They’re a different animal this year though. They’ve a new midfield in Fergal Lynch and Cillian Duggan under the same isolated player rule that allows Shane O’Brien and Ronan Goode play for Doonbeg.

And they’ve a forward line – the six that started against Éire Óg in the semi-final all have All-Ireland medals. Add in midfielder Lynch and there’s seven senior medalists in the side – no team ever contesting a county final in Clare (it could even be the country) could boast such an arsenal as this.

And that’s why this is a huge, huge chance for Cratloe to make history. They have the forwards – they’ve scored eight goals in their last three championship games – and they have the confidence.

What the don’t have is county football final experience; what they don’t have is the experience of facing off against heavyweights like Doonbeg who have super-heavyweight experience when it comes to winning county titles.

Then again, back in ’55 emerging Doonbeg landed their own knockout blow against the super-heavies from the Town. That’s what Cratloe will be doing if they win here.

Cratloe can create history, but it’s hard to back against and buck tradition. That’s what Doonbeg have, and David Tubridy, but Cratloe might just get there.

Who knows it could take a last minute goal like Padraigh Chaplin got in the hurling final in 2009, or maybe even old warhorse Padraig Gallagher playing a county final 20 years after his first to stop it on the line.

Who knows. It’s East versus West. Anything can happen.

Football is Doonbeg’s DNA

If Doonbeg win the 2013 county final it won’t be the first time that a Doora-Barefield man has trained them to the biggest prize in Clare football, as you can see in this trawl of the Magpies’ back catalogue.

by Joe Ó Muircheartaigh 

THE ‘Bard of Bansha’ Padraig Haugh passed away earlier this year and at once the Magpies lost one of their great pioneers – a member of that special group of footballers who blazed a trail for their parish and their people.

The larger than life Haugh was a rare breed, one of those who did so much to put football DNA into Doonbeg.

They’ll dip into that DNA on Saturday, it’s the Magpies’ way of using their history, using the deeds of the past – much of which is commemorated in song and story penned by Haugh – to go to the county final well once more.

It’s the being present being reinforced the past, being awe-inspired by it. It’s part of the DNA as much as the football is.

“We were just doing what was expected of us,” the great Senan Downes told The Clare People in July, when the two three-in-a-row teams either side of 1970 had a ‘Gathering’ in Tubridy’s Bar.

“We were winning championships,” he added.

They’ve been doing it since 1955, the famous year that the Magpies started to fly, with the gauntlet thrown down before a ball was kicked. Who else could be, but ‘Big’ John O’Gorman who took on the Clare County Board.

“A motion was put to the county convention to reinstate me,” wrote O’Gorman in a letter to The Clare Champion early in the year. “The motion was not put to a vote, notwithstanding that it was supported by delegates from all over Clare, by men whose national record is second to none.

“The dictatorship which exists in the GAA in Clare can overrule the majority,” he continued. “If the powers that be are afraid of constructive criticism I say to them to keep them out and if they are willing for penny postcards from me they are destined to wait a long time,” he added.

Clohanes man O’Gorman meant business, so did wider Doonbeg, with things beginning to fall into place a few weeks later, as Bealaha’s Joe Hurley, who went on to captain the 1961 winning side, recalled.

“We had a curate in the parish and in the spring of 1955 he brought the three clubs together in the hall in Doonbeg and he hammered some sense into all of them,” revealed Hurley.

“He was adamant about it and said: ‘We will have one team and we will play with that team’. It was agreed that the name of the club would alternate. We could play with Doonbeg in 1955, Clohanes in ’56 and Bealaha in ’57, but after winning in ’55 we decided to stick with the Doonbeg name,” he added.

There the revolution began. They were organised and united at intra-parish level, while the same soon followed at underage when another priest, Fr Hayes, donated a cup to be played for between the five schools in the parish.

Then in the early 1960s the Magpies got their own field, having purchased nine acres of the old Studdert Estate from the Land Commission for £300 and then being put to work by another priest, Fr Taaffe.

They drew sand, built walls, dug holes and leveled the field in a massive meitheal oibre that was empire building at the same time.

“Football was not the game in the Doonbeg area,” revealed Hurley. “Athletics was the sport and the number one and athletes from the parish won Munster and All-Ireland titles. The Bealaha Sports was one of the biggest day of the year, but football took over after 1955.”

Just as Doonbeg took over after that first win in ’55 and the 18 titles in all that they have claimed in the intervening 58 years – that’s a strike rate of a championship every three and a half years, something that no other team in the county comes close to.

“John O’Gorman, Joe Hurley and Padraig Haugh were the guys who made the breakthrough with the championship win over Ennis Faughs in ’55 and they were the foundation on which all this success was built,” said Senan Downes.

“They were the trailblazers for football in Doonbeg, they started it and we were under pressure to keep it going. We felt that we had to keep it going, that the obligation was on us to do that,” he added.

“I remember that 1955 team well,” said Michael Haugh. “They used to train in Bealaha on Downes’ field and that’s where I really picked up the interest in football. MJ Greene and James Power were two lads who were on the Clare minor team of 1953 and they were kicking football there.

“I remember going up to the ’55 final against Ennis Faughs in Miltown and I remember Jimmy Smyth coming out on the field and there was an almighty smell of embrocation off him. They used to coat them embrocation at that time. They were a fine bunch of guys with great players like captain Matt McDonagh, Joe Hurley and Jimmy Carney who was a giant to me,” he added.

Haugh became one of the great Doonbeg captains, so too Downes as Doonbeg’s dominance stretched all the way to the dawn of the new millennium when the Clare legends from 1992 in captain Francis McInerney, Padraig Conway, Gerry Killeen and Kieran O’Mahony landed their last medals.

Now it’s the new generation – they already have their county medals from 2010, but as ever with Doonbeg it’s always the next title and the next mountain.

“We didn’t know how to win a championship,” recalled Joe Hurley from his youth before the dam was burst in ’55. “It was all new to us and we didn’t know what to expect. Mick Hayes was in goal for the Clare hurlers at the time and Jimmy Carney got him to come out and train us before the ’55 final. He did a fantastic job and we won the championship.”

Time moves on, but some things are the same. Mick Hayes from Doora-Barefield was the man in ’55; Kieran O’Neill from Doora-Barefield is the man nearly six decades later.

Just to win the championship, like Hayes did before him.

Below: A Doonbeg team from the early 1970s celebrate a county final win.

Eastern promise for the big ball

  

Passion for football in Cratloe runs deep, you can see that by sifting through the pages of club’s history since the 1970s when the seeds of their big ball revolution were sewn and has helped them reach a first county football final in 126 years.

by Joe Ó Muircheartaigh

IT’S January 1977 and Cratloe Gaels are gathering for their annual general meeting in the old schoolhouse. And there’s positivity in the air.

On the broader sphere of Clare GAA things, Cratloe’s prized asset, Jackie O’Gorman is flying the flag for the club on an emerging county team on the cusp of something big.

Things are good locally too, thanks to the Junior A Championship final win over Inagh in ’76, which represents the new beginning towards Cratloe’s long march to the top of Clare hurling.

Then there’s football. Extinct, dead and buried in Cratloe for more years than anyone could remember, but in the words of then club secretary John Ryan “there was a football tradition there all the same”.

So it was that Ryan – a Sixmilebridge man who hurled with O’Callaghan’s Mills but now immersed in all things Cratloe – decided to sew some new seeds. Kickstart football’s re-birth in an enclave that was once a bastion for the game.

“It was at that AGM in January 1977,” recalls Ryan travelling down bóithrín an smaointe, “and I put it down on the agenda in my secretary’s report.

With that Ryan, who served a club secretary from 1974 to ’79 before moving on to the County Board in 1981, goes rummaging through his files and unearths the line that would spark the second coming of football in Cratloe.

“It was a question I put down,” says Ryan, asking ‘Is there a need for a junior novice football team in the club, primarily to facilitate new parishioners’.

And so it began. Two months later it was back to the schoolhouse once more for a special meeting being called to establish a football club in Cratloe that would be called St John’s.

“We kept it as a separate club from the hurling,” recalls Ryan, “because we wanted Martin Murphy to play hurling for us, while playing his football with Kilmihil. We got clearance from the county board to do that.”

Seven people attended that first meeting about football. They were: John Ryan, Jim Enright, Sean Keyes, Vincent Laing, Declan Mulcahy, Ray Keogh and Johnny Boyce.

“To keep the whole thing legal we had to have separate officers from the hurling club, so Gerry Considine became chairman, Sean McNamara the vice-chairman, Willie O’Leary treasurer, Sean O’Shea registrar and Vincent Laing was secretary,” recalls Ryan.

“We played four or five games that first year. Our first game aginst Our Lady’s Hospital in Shannon on April and we lost by 0-5 to 0-2,” he adds before naming Cratloe’s first 15.

Sean McInerney, Pat Ryan, Christy Carew, Ray Keogh, Declan Mulcahy, Sean O’Shea, Seamus Reidy, Michael Gleeson (uncle of Shane Gleeson), Seanie Killeen, John Boyce, Vincent Laing, Tom Mulcahy, Jack Liddane, Michael Geary, Jack Chaplin, Jim ‘Benji’ Browne, Tony Kelly.

“I don’t remember much about it,” admits Jack Chaplin, who is now the club chairman. “We played no home games because we had no home pitch and we weren’t very good that time – at hurling or football,” he adds.

But on they went.

“We played Clonlara in Kilkishen on April 20 and lost by a point,” says Ryan, “but we then gave a walkover to Croabh Rua in the next game. Our best game was against Whitegate when we beat them 6-11 to 3-10 when Harry Galvin scored 5-5.

“In July we played Meelick at Shannon when we only at 14 and were beaten 3-12 to 0-2 and in August we got our comuppence in the championship against Clarecastle. We only had 11 that day and gave a walkover. That finished us for ’77. How did we keep going at all,” he adds.

But keep going Cratloe did – the old adage of where there was football there was hope as Ryan’s report to the AGM in January 1978 proved. “The past year 1977 saw our affairs broadened somewhat with the fielding of a football squad,” he wrote. “At the start it was very worthwhile and some great games gave great satisfaction and enjoyment.

“It must be continued and with new signings and a bit more help from natural footballers on the intermediate team, we could be could be quite a force with the big ball. Its value for fitness purposes to players of either code cannot be over-emphasised.”

Below: Members of the Cratloe club looking forward to the 2013 county football final.

THESE were the formative months of modern day Cratloe football, 90 years after the club first flirted with the game when reaching the county final in its maiden voyage. They weren’t thinking county finals this time around though – the more modest goals of fielding teams was the summit of their ambitions back then.

Sometimes it was hard, as Martin Murphy recalls from the early days of his involvement after his playing days with Kilmihil ended in the mid-1980s. “There was always a bit of football with people coming in from different counties, but it was hard to field teams,” he says.

“It wasn’t serious, but there was pure enjoyment out of it – we loved it because we were playing for enjoyment more than competition. I remember one Sunday we went down to Clonlara to play Junior B and we were trying pick lads to make a team. I couldn’t go the same day, but they got a team together, won the game and we went on to win the championship that year,” he adds.

That was 1991 when they beat Ballyvaughan in the Junior B final in Cusack Park with Murphy as captain, their 1-6 to 0-8 win coming thanks to a goal three minutes from time by Ronan O’Hara when he crashed a penalty to the net.

“I started corner back that day,” recalls Murphy, “but moved up centre-forward. You had lads like Mike Deegan, Conor and Keith Galvin, Jody O’Connor and Damian Considine on that team.

“I gave it up after, but I remember playing a league game when I was 54. We were up in Crusheen and we only had 13 players. ‘Feck that,’ I said, ‘give me a jersey’. I went out with my shoes and stockings just to make up a team and we won the league the same year. It was a summer’s evening and a few lads hadn’t turned up. My sons Ogie and Sean were playing the same evening,” adds Murphy.

Struggling to field teams, but by then things were beginning to move – the real impetus  having come in the late 1980s when Clare Football Board supremo Gabriel Keating set up an East Clare Board, with his former parish priest on the Loophead peninsula, Fr Seosamh O’Dea as the chairman and driving force.

“That was a big thing,” says Michael Houlihan, a football man from Knockerra who came to live in Cratloe in the 1980s. “Fr O’Dea was involved in all things Gaelic and through that East Clare Board that was founded around 1987/88 we started fielding juvenile teams for the first time – at under 12, under 14, under 16 with the co-operation of club.

“That it was an East Clare Board was very important,” continues Houlihan, “because we didn’t have to travel very far for games. We were playing teams like Parteeen, Clonlara, Meelick, Killaloe and Whitegate.

“We won that east Clare championship a good few times at under 12, 14 and 16 and it qualified you to enter county championship at quarter-final level. Then we won division 3 of the ocunty in all grades as the years went on with players like Barry Duggan, Michael Hawes, Ogie Murphy and David Ryan coming through from there.

“There was football in the school from the time Jody O’Connor came and then when the moved to secondary school they were in Shannon and Limerick and there was more football there,” he adds.

Houlihan was the early driving force, with others like Jody O’Connor, Joe Ward, founder member John Ryan and Jack Liddane, who played on that first team in 1977, also playing key roles.

Then came the Kilmihil connection that fired enthusiasm for football at underage level even further. First it was Martin Murphy, then Colm Collins, both of whom had soldiered together on Kilmihil’s championship winning team in 1980.

“Myself and Sean O’Dea were asked one night down in Setwrights would we take over the Minor C team,” recalls Murphy. “We started there and we won two minor Cs titles which was an early base. Then Colm Collins got involved and the whole thing took off, ” he adds.

“Colm came in and he was obsessed and that’s the reason why where we are,” says Batt O’Connor, yet another member of Kilmihil’s class of 1980 to throw in his lot with Cratloe. “He brought all those young lads up through the ranks. He was brilliant.

“He took coaching of football to a new level and was gifted with the group of players that came on board,” says Michael Houlihan. “They all came at the one time and all gifted footballers, natural talents and the level of fitness superb,” he adds.

“We were lucky to come across a fantastic bunch of lads and we played a lot of football,” says Collins of Cratloe rise. “These fellas have a lot of football played – even though they have to divide their time between football and hurling they have a lot done and they love it.

“When we started first I remember being beaten by Miltown in a B final – it was under 12 or 14. Our first victory was an Under 16 A against the giants Kilmurry Ibrickane in 2005.

That gave us fantastic self-belief and we had a great run at Under 16 A after that, contesting five finals and won three of them. The minor win in 2008 was huge. We had been unlucky a few other years, being beaten by Ennisytmon in a semi-final one year but eventually we beat them in that final and it was a big lift,” he adds.

“What they’ve won at underage shows you that they haven’t arrived from nowhere,” says Houlihan. “A minor, two under 21s at A grade. This has been coming for the last seven or eight years,” he adds.

Everyone has played their part, even a former Doonbeg manager in Laoisman Ger Lawlor who worked with Collins at underage an intermediate level.

It shows what can be achieved when the work is put in.

Cratloe football has come a long way from that AGM in January 1977. 

They’re 60 minutes from going all the way and bringing Jack Daly down the N18.