Sports Rec Ireland

All Ireland Club semi-final 2009

“How important is this for the club?” O’Neill adds flatly. “Today, they have to die out there.”

Why hurling is the the fastest field sport in the world – and part of the fabric of Irish culture.

Portumna 5-11 ....... Ballyhale Shamrocks 1-16

Just an hour to go before the start of the match, and in the corner of the stadium, a small boy, no more than seven or eight years old, is hitting a thickly-ridged ball back and forth to his father. As he swings his half-size hurley, he keeps having to shove the sleeves of his shirt up his arms. His small frame is swamped by the outsize blue and yellow team jersey, the colours of Portumna’s hurling club. The back is covered with scrawls from a variety of marker pens. Black and blue, green and red, each one the mark of a hero.

In just under 60 minutes the owners of most of those names will take to the pitch here in Thurles’ Semple Stadium – Gaelic Games’ self-styled ‘Field of Legends’ – to contest the semi-final of the All-Ireland Senior Club Championship. For now though, the dull smack of the ball hitting the end of the boy’s hurley is the only sound in the empty stadium.

“He got that shirt after last year’s All-Ireland,” says his father. “He got everyone at the club to sign it. All the players. And the management too, and the selectors. Great day.”

The boy is the son of Oisín O’Neill, physio for Portumna. The Galway side are defending club champions, have played countless matches to get to this semi-final, have won two of the last three finals, but today are underdogs. Their opposition, Ballyhale Shamrocks, hail from Kilkenny, hurling’s heartland, the county that currently defines the standard in this ancient sport. On the Ballyhale team are some of the finest players currently gracing the game.

Ballyhale centre half-forward Henry Shefflin is reckoned by many to be the greatest player in the sport’s recent history, the 29-year-old poised to eclipse his own predecessor DJ Carey and perhaps even the storied Christy Ring, a Corkman so revered that disputing his pre-eminent status is akin to heresy. But that is the weight Shefflin carries into this game. If he’s on form, he could win this single-handedly for Ballyhale. Lining out against that kind of reputation means that, today, for Portumna, it’s an uphill battle.

“This is huge,” says O’Neill. “For club players this is the biggest day of their lives. This is like the FA Cup final. It’s D-Day.”

There’s nothing flippant in the statement. In fact, there’s something almost maniacal in the intensity with which it’s delivered. “How important is this for the club?” O’Neill adds flatly. “Today, they have to die out there.”

This is what it means to be involved in hurling in rural Ireland. From the outside, it’s easy to see the sport as almost comic. Take 30 grown men, arm them with 40in lengths of solid ash and throw them into combat on a muddy field in a small town buried in countryside that still largely owes any prosperity it enjoys to farming. On the surface it’s a crude stereotype, a bad joke to be used to define the backward ways of the ‘Fightin’ Oirish’. It’s a lazy cliché, one that bypasses the significance of sport as a function of culture, of a game that has been played here since the history of the land was first written, since the rules which governed these fields were first codified.

The fifth-century Brehon Laws, the orally transmitted code of Celtic Ireland, mention the sport as an approved method of settling disputes between villages. By the seventh century, when the country’s mythology was first written down, the game features in the stories of this land’s heroes. The boy warrior Setanta, invited to attend a feast held by the blacksmith Culann, arrives late and is prevented from entering by a monstrous wolfhound. The beast is slain by a young hurler, who hits a ball down the dog’s throat.

That, though, is myth, a hoary old reminder that hurling is a sport built in mists of antiquity. Good for the tourists. The modern reality is that, against the odds, hurling still represents some kind of spirited identity and a kind of unshowy individualism. You grow up representing school and parish club and then one day, if you’re lucky, your county. And if you are very, very lucky, it could take you from a small town in Galway to Croke Park, a shining 80,000-capacity concrete and steel cathedral of the sport in Dublin, the home of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Here, you might play in an All-Ireland final and write your name in the history books of your county, club, parish, all the way back to the family who first shoved a stick in your tiny fist and intoned the words “keep, hook, block” in your ear.

In a homogenised, commercially calculating world, where children everywhere are brought up to idolise untouchable perma-tanned Premier League celebrities, to dream of Ferraris, tabloid notoriety and a sprawling mock-Tudor ‘crib’ in Cheshire, a game like this has no right to survive.

Yet it does. And thrives. Portumna is a tiny town on the borders of Galway and Tipperary. There is no major industry here beyond farming and the tourism that comes from being located on the banks of the Shannon, on the shores of Lough Derg. It has a population of just 2,000 people. Here, the idea of anyone getting paid a hundred thousand a week to play sport is simply ludicrous.

In towns and villages like this, you are handed a hurley as soon as you can stand, you turn out for your parish club for the love of playing a game that is woven into the fabric of society. In towns like this, heroes are real, tangible. They fix your car when it breaks down, manage your bank account when you deposit your wages, grow the food that eventually winds up on your plate. Hurling, the fastest field sport on the planet, a game that marries almost balletic grace to the speed and aggression of an international rugby three-quarter and the hand-eye co-ordination of the fighter pilot, is a sport grounded in a reality and in community. So much so that it is still resolutely amateur.

Today, in Thurles, the mirror for Ballyhale’s Henry Shefflin is a Portumna kid called Joe Canning. Twenty years old and he’s already being called the future of hurling, the one who will take on the Kilkenny player’s mantle. It’s easy to see why. Midway through the game, he intercepts a loose pass, shoulders aside a challenge and, twisting his almost-too-large frame with incongruous speed, spins to unleash an almost-blind hook shot that arcs some 60m to land between the posts for a point. It’s an astonishing display of skill, and one he repeats numerous times during the furious 60 minutes of play. The sort of skills that get rewarded with contracts, sponsorship deals, celebrity. Not here though. Tomorrow, on Monday, nursing bruises the colour of egg yolks, he’ll go back to college in Limerick to continue his business and marketing degree. That’s the job. Hurling is simply the passion. An unavoidable one.

“People say that because it’s an amateur sport and you’re not getting money, you might tire of it,” he said recently. “I think, if anything, that drives you on a bit more. Because you’re standing for something, you’re representing something. You’re part of a parish, a small-knit community. And you’re even prouder to be part of that. You’ve a sense of identity. That’s something I never get sick of.”

That much is clear from the moment Canning and his team-mates take to the field. Ballyhale appear blinking into the low winter sun as if emerging from hibernation. There’s something almost lethargic about the way they settle onto the bench set up in the middle of the park for the team pictures. By contrast, Portumna burst from the tunnel like cartoon animals, frenzied, fidgety, itching to get to it. Damien Hayes, the team’s right corner forward, has the word ‘energy’ scrawled down his forearm. It’s a motivational foible repeated throughout the team.

Across the backs of hands, on the inside of wrists are penned a variety of phrases: ‘work like a dog’; ‘inspiration’; ‘teamwork’. When the team photo is done and the squad briefly huddle for a last thought before the 2.30pm throw-in, the words of their physio come echoing back and, indeed, they do look ready to die for this.

The game has been over for 40 minutes. The pale sun is beginning to drift towards the horizon, but there’s no sign of anyone leaving the pitch. No one from Portumna at least. Ballyhale have been demolished. The scoreline is emphatic: 5-11 to 1-16. Canning has scored the lion’s share of those five goals and 11 points, racking up an individual tally of 2-5.
In the morning, the papers will be full of ‘the king is dead, long live the king’ eulogies to the arrival of Canning as a superstar and the (temporary?) passing of Shefflin. Just at this moment, however, the superstar is busy chatting with the mother of a team-mate.

She breaks off the conversation to greet a friend, enquiring after her kids. Canning waits patiently for the exchange to be over before continuing. It’s the same all over the pitch.

These players have laboured through to a great victory. On Sunday morning, pundits had reckoned this to be the ‘real’ final. What will take place at Croke Park on St Patrick’s Day will be a formality. You wouldn’t know it. The atmosphere on the pitch is like a church social. Kids skitter between the legs of adults, half-sized hurls flashing past their ankles. Others dutifully line up to be introduced to the players to get their programmes signed, while the grown-ups chat. The players ruffle the hair of kids who are their neighbours. One kid makes a smart remark to a player and receives a playful kick in the pants as reward.

If it seems strange that sports stars, men whose faces are plastered across the sides of buses and on billboards in the capital, do this, that they linger for close to an hour on a pitch invaded by the faithful, then that’s because it is. But this is the special quality of hurling. Its inextricable link to community.

There is a sense of something being passed on. When kids are still able to walk up to their heroes and congratulate them for making their own dreams come true, when a seven-year-old boy can practise his skills on the pitch on which those idols will later play, then there is a real feeling of connectivity, of a sport being handed down from generation to generation in a way that seems organic, real and inspired by the place in which the players grow up. There is nothing Hollywood about the passion it inspires, about the essential quality of the game as a cultural touchstone. It simply is.

On his way back to the dressing room, right half-forward Niall Hayes, still fizzing with adrenaline, is intercepted by reporters and delivers the message – family, town ,county. “This is a great day for Portumna and a great Galway day,” he says. “A great day for the county. I have no problem saying it: I’m from Galway and I’m proud of it. We are the best team in the country.”

Back out on the pitch, Portumna’s veteran fullback Eugene McEntee, making his way through the crowd to the dressing room, is slapped on the back by a supporter.

“Good man, Eugene,” he roars, a rough hand smacking the former captain hard around the shoulders. “That’s hurling, boy! That’s f***ing hurling!”

It certainly is.

(Red Bulletin Magazine)