By five o’clock on Sunday evening, over one million people will have tuned in to watch at least some part of the All-Ireland senior hurling final. Last year’s hurling showpiece was watched by a peak audience of almost 1¼ million and if that figure isn’t reached on Sunday, it will probably not be too far off.
Many of the people in that seven-figure TV audience will have never played the game themselves. While most people watching the following week’s All-Ireland football final between Donegal and Kerry will have kicked a football at some stage in their lives, the same just cannot be said of hurling.
It is true that more people are playing hurling today than have ever played the game, but it also remains stubbornly the case that there are as many GAA counties who undermine the sport as there are counties who uplift it.
Games have always been on TV, in broadly the same numbers as the far more popular (in playing terms) Gaelic football. But when it comes to making inroads into counties that historically have not taken hurling seriously, that TV audience has counted for very little. Hurling has never lacked for exposure. What it lacks is a plan to develop the game beyond the confines of those counties south of the Dublin-Galway railway line.
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There are nine counties who, in the regular run of events, would consider themselves possible champions at the start of every hurling season. I was fortunate enough to be born in one of those counties, but I missed out on the chance to play the sport because the north-east corner of Galway that I grew up in is football-only. Hurling barely makes an imprint. We would have to travel 20 miles towards Athenry to reach a senior hurling club.
When I was 11, at what might be the most impressionable time of a young person’s sporting life, my own county played in an All-Ireland hurling final. But I never had a chance to pick up a hurley and play a sport that I watched religiously. I watched hurling with the same fervour as I did Gaelic football – which was the sport I played 10 times a week, at school, with friends and in my local GAA club.
So I spent my entire adult life playing Gaelic football. But I always had hurleys around the houses I lived in in Dublin. When I’d wander out to the Phoenix Park on sunny days in the summertime, I’d bring it along and puck around with other friends of mine who’d never had a chance to play hurling growing up either.
We got a dog and I took my hurley out on walks with her. When Covid came, watching her chase a sliotar around the GAA pitch close to my home was as much exercise as I was getting. But an idea started to percolate. As I started to aim sliotars over the bar for her to chase, I’d idly wonder what it would be like to do it for real, just once.
And in the end, last year (the year I turned 42), I decided to jack it all in, move to Waterford and join my father’s club, Old Parish, and play hurling for a summer. If this sounds suspiciously like a midlife crisis, it at least had the advantage of being a lot cheaper than a sports car.
It might also sound like the sort of thing a man would write a book about. And that’s exactly what I did. Old Parish - Notes On Hurling, published by Penguin Sandycove, is available to pre-order from today.
What ensued was a year-long crash course in what it feels like to take a whack from a hurley on the shin in the rain; what it feels like to catch the ball so often your hand feels like it’s turning to mush; the frustration of knowing what you want to do and being entirely unable to make it happen. Finding out what hurlers look for in their hurleys; and why the game is played where it’s played, and why it’s not played where it isn’t.
Last year, for the first time, I attended the All-Ireland hurling final as a hurler. It would be over-stating it to say that I was able to admire for the first time the skill and bravery of the best hurlers in the country. That had been obvious long before my first abortive attempts at playing the sport they’d dedicated their lives to.
But getting an insight into how hard even the simplest manoeuvres on a hurling pitch are (lifting, striking, hooking, blocking), meant my admiration for the hurlers we get a chance to watch at the top level is now deeper, more informed, and yet somehow even more bewildered than before.
To watch Tony Kelly’s goal against Cork last year and to have as a frame of reference my own pathetic attempts at controlling the ball in the most leisurely of settings is to be brought face to face with real genius. Everyone who watches the All-Ireland final this Sunday, hoping for more moments of transcendence, should have that same frame of reference.
Ger Loughnane once famously said that if you haven’t started hurling by the time you’re seven, it’s probably too late. In my case, he was proven right. But it’s never too late for the GAA to start giving more people the chance to play the most thrilling, frustrating, beautiful sport in the world.
♦ Old Parish - Notes On Hurling by Ciarán Murphy will be released by Penguin Sandycove on September 18th, and is available to pre-order now - https://linktr.ee/oldparish
