Towards the end of 2021 Johnny Pilkington was asked to get involved with the Offaly minors. He says he knew nothing about them, or the fragments he knew didn’t add up to knowledge. He was open to first impressions.
They played Tipperary in a challenge match in November, the kind of preseason game that should be consumed quickly and forgotten, like a packet of crisps. The taste is still in Pilkington’s mouth.
“I couldn’t get over the intensity of their tackling and the way they fought,” he says now. “And because I didn’t know them they even seemed to be a little bit cocky. Lads on the sideline saying, ‘Bring me back on, bring me back on’. And I just said to myself, ‘Jesus, these lads need a bit of manners’.
“But I was watching them and I said to the boys, ‘We’re going to win the All-Ireland’. Now, listen, we didn’t but you just knew they had something. Their warm-ups still bloody amaze me, the way they ping this ball to each other from 10 yards away – their control, their eye, the pace they do it at, the reactions and that. I was looking at the Kilkenny and Wexford warm-ups on Sunday [before the senior match] and they’re not hitting the ball to each other the way these lads are.”
Pilkington had managed the Offaly minors for a couple of seasons, more than a decade earlier. In those years they lost to Carlow and Westmeath. When he came on board for the second time, Leo O’Connor from Limerick was the manager. But before that O’Connor had been part of Declan Loughnane’s back room team and in their first season they were eliminated by Kildare.
All of those outcomes were unpalatable for Offaly and yet none of them deviated from the mean. Over the years, Offaly’s peer group had changed. They had fallen to the level of their competence. Laois had not beaten them in the minor championship for 40 years and then Offaly lost to them four years in a row. One of those defeats was by 15 points.
This group of players were estranged from Offaly’s recent past. If that was the stark context for their brilliance, it was none of their doing. As 14-year-olds they had contested the final of the Tony Forristal, the annual intercounty tournament held in Waterford. Before anybody was paying attention, that performance marked them as different. The evidence already had an empirical value.
On Saturday the core players from that group will contest their third All-Ireland final in as many years: one minor, two under-20s. Demand for match tickets caused Ticketmaster’s system to crash. It is the kind of thing that Taylor Swift does. The biggest attendance at any sporting event on the island this weekend will be in Nowlan Park: a full house of 26,000.
The energy around the team transcends hurling. Their massive following hails from far outside the hard-core and the long-suffering. Many of their supporters are school kids and teenagers and the mullet/wolf-cut generation. Most of them weren’t born the last time Offaly contested a senior All-Ireland final, 24 years ago.
“I’d say part of it is the younger generation are sick of listening to the likes of me and my generation going on about the great teams of the past,” says Paul Rouse, the UCD historian and author, and former manager of the Offaly footballers. “And now they have a team of their own.”
The roots of this mass movement can be traced to the Leinster minor final against Laois, two years ago. The counties tossed for venue and Laois won. The novelty of the pairing was bound to draw a crowd in any case, but in a master stroke the Offaly County Board funded a supporters’ bus from every club in the county.
“All these young lads and girls came to the Leinster final and there was a 15 minute delay,” says Pilkington.
“You had a big atmosphere and they saw Offaly winning and they wanted to go again the next day. I see parents there and I’d refer to them as soccer people. They’d go over to Old Trafford quicker than they’d go to O’Connor Park, but their young kids want to go to the match, so they’re going to the match.”
Offaly hurling has been tortured and beaten since the turn of the century. Relentlessly. While their senior team remained in the top tier of the championship they stumbled from one catastrophic defeat to the next, mistakenly identifying each one as Ground Zero. In 2005 Kilkenny beat them by 31 points; nine years later Kilkenny beat them by 26 points; two years after that Westmeath beat them by 14 points. Laois beat them for the first time in 43 years.
In 2018 Offaly were relegated from the Leinster championship and a year later they were relegated from the Joe McDonagh. In their first season in the third tier they didn’t even reach the Christy Ring final.
Along the way, sincere, serious-minded attempts to make things better were spiked. In 2015 a review group published a 39-page report entitled Offaly Player Pathway; it was allowed to gather dust. When the review group kicked up an implementation committee was established, but they soon flew into conflict with the county board too.
Brian Cowen, the former Taoiseach, facilitated one failed mediation attempt but by the end of 2017 that committee had folded. Parts of the report were implemented but most of it died on the vine. For this team to emerge from that vortex of self-destruction is a wonder of the world.
Brian Carroll, the RTÉ analyst and former Offaly player, played on the last Offaly team to win a Leinster minor title in 2000. He also held the role of director of hurling for 18 months with the county board. He has been in the trenches.
“Since Michael Duignan and Colm Cummiskey have come into Offaly GAA as chairman and secretary they have changed the landscape,” Carroll says, “in terms of finances, the way it has been run at county board level, the provisions that are given to the development squads – all the things that are needed for teams to develop.
“Have we had struggles? Of course we have. They were times when we struggled to identify coaches who were willing to put their hand up and get involved at development squad level. We were blessed that we got a crop together at under-20 football who came forward and won an All-Ireland [in 2021]. In the initial stages they have struggled to make the step up to senior.
“So, we’re very realistic in Offaly about this bunch of under-20 hurlers. We know that it is going to take a lot of work and we need more than just one team coming through to sustain this at senior level.”
The under-20 footballers had a colourful and impassioned young following three years ago too and the minor hurlers kept them on the road a year later. For Offaly’s senior teams, though, there has been no spin-off yet.
A week after Offaly’s under-20 hurlers attracted about 17-18,000 supporters to Thurles for the All-Ireland final last summer only a fraction of that crowd were in Croke Park for the Joe McDonagh final. In recent weeks a crowd of about 8,000 watched the under-20s beat Kilkenny, while only about 1,300 attended a home game against Kerry, which was effectively a Joe McDonagh semi-final. It is a different crowd.
“There is a correlation there with top tier hurling,” says Carroll. “Tier two hurling or Division Two hurling simply does not capture the imagination of the general public. It never will – in any county – it’s as simple as that.’
“The big thing about this group is that they have captured the imagination of the Offaly public. Not just because they’re winning but the style in which they’re hurling. They’re hurling with huge bravery and determination and humility and honesty. They’re moving the ball fast. They’re playing with a bit of flair, and we have flair players there.
“We don’t necessarily have the biggest players but they’re fully committed and you can see that they’re just being brave. We’re identifying with that. There’s a serious connection there. They’re inspiring a new generation. We’ve been starved of success for so long that we were just looking for something to hold onto and they’ve given us hope.”
A handful of the 2022 minors started in the under-20 final against Cork last year; for this year’s final against Tipperary that cohort has swollen to nine. The hugely talented Dan Ravenhill would make it ten were it not for his hamstring injury. Even for the grade, they’re young.
“People say that we overachieved last year in getting to the final,” says Leo O’Connor, “and in some ways we probably did. But in other ways, were we good enough hurlers to be there? Yes we were. Did we give it everything on the day? Yes we did. That’s what we do. The lads always turn up.”
Half a dozen of them are already on the Offaly senior panel. Pilkington reckons there could be a dozen next year. Everything is happening fast. Speed brings hazards. They know.
“You’d hear stories and you’d have a word in their ear,” says Pilkington. “You’d try to keep them grounded and pull the rug from under them. I can’t say it’s been a big issue. In terms of attitude, they’re the best bunch of lads I’ve ever been involved with – and that includes our team [that won two All-Irelands in the 90s].
“They have a focus on bigger things. They want to hurl for Offaly. They want to hurl for the Offaly seniors. They want to win everything.”
The voyage continues. Wind in their sails.
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