Flooding destroyed a lot, but not Sarsfields’ community spirit

The main entrance to the Sarsfields grounds is blocked with panels of Harris fencing, like a building site. Only a fraction of the flood damage is visible to the naked eye. Even the dead pitch looks green and viable from a distance. The devastation was below the surface. Everywhere they looked, water had cut the ground from under their feet.

Since the beginning of the week structural engineers and loss assessors have been sifting through the washed-up remains of their complex in Riverstown, five miles east of Cork City. Ten days ago, at the height of Storm Babet, the river that skirts Sars’ grounds burst its banks upstream and doubled back on the village in a surging, indiscriminate torrent.

At Sars it reached a tipping point. Their defences held firm for a while, mostly because litter and leaves from the water had collected at the base of their gates and sealed the first points of entry. But as long as the water was delayed at Sars it was building in the housing estate across the road. Once that picture became clear the decision to open the gates was made quickly.

“If we didn’t open the gate, the houses were going to get it,” says Keith Mulcahy, the Sars chairman. “Not just the houses across the road from us, but the businesses next door to us.” To the club, those consequences were intolerable.

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Once the gates were opened the water ran amok. The pitch and the astro turf area were submerged, like Atlantis. The clubhouse sits a few metres above ground level, but everything in its basement was swamped: the cellar, the cold room, the gym, the spinning room, the office. The surface on the internal roadway around the complex was destroyed. After an inspection, the floodlights were condemned.

“The lights were the last thing that came to mind,” says Mulcahy. “The power boxes were on the ground, rising up about five feet. We had people out to look at them and when they opened the power boxes there was just black gunge inside. They were saying, if you turned those on now they’d probably go on fire.”

The drainage system under the pitch was wiped out by the sheer weight and force of the flood. The knock-on fear was that the turf had been contaminated by whatever toxic waste the water had deposited in its wake. The gravel under the astro turf was gathered up and combed towards the river, taking the mats with them. The perimeter wall around the pitch has been thrashed.

“It’s ruined, it’s absolutely ruined,” says Johnny Crowley, manager of the senior team. “You have structural damage. The pitch is contaminated. For the safety of everybody you couldn’t go near cleaning it up, there’s no question or doubt about that. It’s incredible the damage that’s done.”

They have no idea how much it will cost to put everything back together. Will six figures run into seven figures? They can’t say yet. The GAA’s central insurance won’t cover everything. The Tánaiste, Micheál Martin, visited the club last Saturday and said that Government funding would be made available, but no figure was mentioned.

“I understand that there has to be limits on everything in terms of the insurance,” says Mulcahy. “How much it’s going to cover, I don’t know. I think the limit for cover on the pitch is €110,000 and it’s €300,000 on the astro. But sure we wouldn’t even get the drains done for €110,000. Even the thought of it sickens me.”

The flood arrived three days after Sars won the senior hurling championship in Cork. Some players’ gear bags were still in the gym, abandoned in the celebrations on Sunday. A few players’ cars were parked near the club on Wednesday morning after another knees-up the night before. There was still no end to the blissful hangover.

Then the flood came.

Conor O’Sullivan remembers their first team meeting at the beginning of the year. At the top of the room, a group of surgeons outlined how they were going to implant steel in the body of the team. It would be an invasive process. No anaesthetic.

“The one thing Johnny said was, ‘We’ll be taking ye out of yer comfort zone,’” says O’Sullivan, a former Cork player and Sars captain. “He was saying, ‘Ye have the best of facilities here, the best of gear,’ but he said, ‘in January, February and March ye can come down here and ye’re walking off with no mud on yer gear.’ I don’t think it was a slight on us, it was just the reality. It was the environment we were in.”

The schedule was laid out. On Tuesday nights they trained on a sand gallops used for training racehorses, the deep surface grabbing at their legs. “It was out in Ballindenisk,” says O’Sullivan. “I often thought it was like a geographical anomaly. You’d be driving up the road and the sun would be shining. Then you’d get there and it was freezing, the wind would be cutting you in half and you were sinking in to this sand. That was hard. Brutal.

[ Flood forecasting system delayed due to problems recruiting expert staff ]

“Then on Thursday nights we were in Riverstown Boxing Club. That was shocking as well. It was absolutely shocking. We weren’t fighting each other but we were doing a bit of hitting each other and other exercises as well. Will Kearney broke his rib there. Brutal.”

On a couple of Saturdays the players were taken to a field owned by the club’s sponsors, O’Connell Transport, and subjected to a drill straight from Ultimate Hell Week. After a series of hill runs they were brought to a mud pit for bouts of wrestling.

“I assume they made it [the mud pit],” says O’Sullivan. “It was too perfectly rectangular to be natural. Then we had to run back to Sars carrying heavy stuff – tanks of water, tyres, big logs – and, like, you were in no form for it. We got back to the river that runs behind the astro turf and they had ropes to take us down to the water. We had to go into the river and lie down underneath it. I’d say it was just to see who’d do it. Everyone did it.”

When O’Sullivan first broke on to the Sars senior team as a teenager, 15 years ago, they reached seven county finals in eight years – won four, lost three. Every year they were the team to beat. In front of their eyes that status withered.

“We had some bad years. At the start it was the land of milk and honey – county final, county final, county final. It was ridiculous. But then we had lean years. We had some bad performances. I remember in 2017, we lost to Imokilly in a replay, and it was the one time over those years that we died with our boots on. The other ones [losses] were just embarrassing. It was shocking.”

They played Imokilly, a star-studded divisional team, in the semi-final this year and trailed by four points in the third minute of stoppage time; from the bottom of that hole, they forced a draw and won the game in extra-time. The softness had been eliminated.

Before that game CJ Stander, the retired Irish rugby international, visited them for a chat. One of the experiences he shared was about a match against New Zealand, years ago. Ireland were defending a lead late in the game and Stander said they had so much confidence in their defensive system that they were happy for the All Blacks to have the ball.

On a different planet, that’s what Sars were striving for: absolute trust in how they wanted to play, regardless of the scoreboard or the tide of the match. In the county final they trailed Midleton by six points and were outplayed for a long stretch; they didn’t change a note. To win the county, Sars had beaten the teams that had won the last six championships. That was the ladder.

Immediately after the county final they took the cup to Teddy McCarthy’s grave in Rathcooney. It was just the players, the management and Mulcahy. Nearly 50 people, and yet private.

McCarthy’s sudden death in June was the other asteroid to hit the club. He was just 57. In the dressingroom for the county final they had a Sars flag carrying his name. Not that they would have forgotten.

McCarthy had been the greatest player in the history of Sars, but more than that, he was a constant presence around the place. There were spats and tiffs over the years, like there are in every club, and McCarthy famously never backed down from a row. But those arguments were perishable too: fall out, fall back in; carry on.

His nephew, Donnacha McCarthy, was the Sars goalie this year and he led the players in to the graveyard. Crowley and Mulcahy said a few words.

“One of Teddy’s biggest regrets was that he never won a county on the field of play with Sars,” says Crowley. “He was a selector when we won it in 2008. He definitely would have given up one of his All-Irelands with Cork for a county with Sars. I had it in my head that if we did win that I’d love to bring the cup back to Teddy – just to say thanks from everybody. It was a small thing for us to do.”

Mulcahy grew up as McCarthy’s neighbour in Riverstown Terrace. There were 12 years between them in age, which was more than enough separation for McCarthy to be a giant in a child’s imagination. “He was my idol growing up,” says Mulcahy. “We lived in number one [in the terrace] and they were in number five. In 1986 I watched Teddy’s first All-Ireland in his front room, with his mother. His mother wouldn’t travel to matches. She was too nervous to go.

“When I took over as chairman I had it in my head that I’d love to have Teddy as my vice-chairman. I remember at the time people saying to me, ‘I don’t know will Teddy be good at that. You know, he’s not the administrative type.’ Honest to God, he was a superb vice-chairman. He looked after me.

“Going up to the grave with the cup was one of the most emotional things I was ever involved in. He’s a huge loss to the club. He’s a huge loss to me. It was an awful shock. I still feel it.”

[ Teddy McCarthy a darling of the Cork terraces for good reason ]

At lunchtime on Monday the players gathered in The Castle pub, next door to Sars, settling in for a long occupation. At one stage, at the height of the bedlam, Donnacha and Myles Gaffney climbed up on the bar counter to sing Teddy Boy, a song Gaffney had written in honour of McCarthy. “It was the only time all day,” says O’Sullivan, “when there was silence.”

[ Flood forecasting system delayed due to problems recruiting expert staff ]

They carry on. On the night after the flood the senior hurlers gathered for a gym session at the nearby Silver Springs hotel. Neighbouring clubs had already been in touch to offer their facilities. The Cork County Board made Páirc Uí Rinn available. The Mardyke Arena opened its doors. Just days after they had met in the county final, the Midleton chair John Fenton called Mulcahy to see if there was anything they could do to help.

Last Sunday, the Sars camogie team won a brilliant county final; next Sunday the senior hurlers will play Ballygunner in the Munster championship. All that stuff has been compartmentalised, at arm’s length from the destruction.

Before the flood reached Sars it had invaded a housing estate called Copper Valley, less than half a mile away. Last Saturday morning Crowley put a message into the senior team’s WhatsApp group, suggesting they meet there.

“We just went around knocking on doors to see if there was anything we could do,” says Crowley. “It was heartbreaking, to be honest. The river broke its banks there and literally destroyed the area. I was talking to one lady and it was her second flood and she was in an awful way because she won’t get insurance again. She was trying to dry out carpets and dry her couch, and f**king hell ...

“We moved a few couches and washing machines. In the scheme of things what we did was tiny. If we could have done more we would have done it with a heart and a half. The houses are in an awful way.

“Obviously your club is your club and we’re devastated because of the work that people before us had done in developing the club over 50, 60, 70 years. But when you walk down there last Saturday morning you think, ‘God, it’s still only a field. It’s still only sport.’ That’s their families, their lives.”

They reckon it will be a year before the pitch is restored to life. The astro pitches will take months. The clubhouse bar should reopen within weeks. About 30 teams will need somewhere to play and train in the new year. They’ll cross that bridge.

“We’ll bounce back,” says Mulcahy. “We will bounce back.”