Having finally bridged a long gap of 28 years since their last senior county title, Gort are determined to maintain the proud recent record of Galway clubs on the national stage, reports KEITH DUGGAN
WHEN GORT won the Galway county hurling championship after a 28-year gap last November, it was difficult to know which team was the happier: those celebrating on the field or those members of the 1983/84 vintage watching in the stands.
Six of the Gort team are sons of men who played on the town team that reached the All-Ireland final in the GAA’s Centenary Year. They lost that match, after a replay, to Ballyhale Shamrocks of Kilkenny and little did they know then they would have such a long time to repent and muse over it.
“We were always aware of it,” said Aidan Harte of his father’s defeat on a bitter night after a team get-together at the community school.
Official training was fixed for Saturday morning but players were using the floodlit astroturf for some light hitting and others were taking part in photographic duties to promote the semi-final.
“Since we started hurling at eight, my father Josie and Joe Regan and Mattie (Murphy) and Sylvie (Linnane) and Gerry (Lally) were over us,” Harte recalled.
“Even now, talking to lads you would meet in the pub or on the street or even our mothers at home would be talking about it . . . it was such a big time when they won those finals and what it brought to the town.”
It is easy to understand why. Gort were the kingpins during the height of the Galway hurling revival. Castlegar had presaged the maroon revolution by winning the 1980 club title and the emotional All-Ireland success by the county side duly followed in September.
Gort won the county title in 1981 after a 47-year absence: they returned to prominence when the fascination with hurling in Galway was intense. There was no other show in town.
Mattie Murphy was in a position to appreciate that more than most. He had experienced a county final in 1972 when he lined out for Turloughmore but then had to wait a full nine years before he made it back to that place, now wearing the green and gold of Gort.
Murphy would go on to influence generations of Galway hurlers through his staggering success as the county minor coach. He moved straight from his latest All-Ireland minor success last September to the resumption of his coaching role with Gort. But like all players, the games in which he was involved are never hard to summon up and he spoke vividly about those lost years with Gort.
“There are similarities between that team and the present team,” Murphy said, standing in the doorway of an empty dressing room after the others had left.
“In 1980 and 1981 we won U-21 titles, just as this team won titles in 2009 and 2010. And it was the same mix of young players and fellas that had been there. Myself and Josie Harte . . . three or four like that that, were moving out to grass, as they say. It was last chance saloon for us. There was a 47 year gap – 1934 until 1981 – between titles.
“We should have won more because it was an exceptional team but we didn’t appreciate that until it was too late. The one thing about this community is that it is almost totally hurling. It is a good sporting town but hurling is very important.”
But it was equally vital to other parishes. Like many teams, Gort found the slog of the 1984 All-Ireland run punitive and Turloughmore won the Galway title the following year. Then they watched as other clubs began to carve out their own dynasties in successive periods. Kiltormer. Sarsfields, Athenry. Portumna. These became the names through which the omnipotence of Galway club hurling was identified.
Gort were never quite forgotten because the club stayed competitive in the decades since. But they could never separate themselves from the pack either.
“We were in 15 quarter- or semi -finals and just could never make the breakthrough until 2008,” Murphy says. “It wasn’t as if we went off the radar.”
Gort contested six semi-finals before they made it to that 2008 Galway final against Portumna. As fate would have it, the county board decided it would be an appropriate afternoon to honour the Gort team of 1983/84 with a pre-match parade. And so the fathers were suited and booted and again held up for direct comparison with the latest generation. It was as if there could be no escape.
“That was a funny one,” Aidan Harte acknowledges.
“We were three years younger. A bunch of 20-year olds going into the stadium. . . it felt like a day out more than anything. That team was paraded before it and we went out then a small bit naïve. But then we were up against one of the best club teams ever in Portumna. We learned an awful lot from that match.
“So we realised on the morning of the county final this year that there was a game to be played despite all the talk around the town. It was all about the game this time.”
Andy Coen, the team captain, had almost given up the idea of ever winning a county medal after 10 years of trying. It was his free that gave Gort the decisive edge in the final against Clarinbridge.
When the full-time whistle went, he was almost uncertain of how to feel after the initial burst of elation. Coen had been through the wringer after so many near misses and had become accustomed to watching other Galway teams against whom Gort could hold their own somehow snatch big wins here and there before going on to storm the All-Ireland. It was as if a glass ceiling separated Gort from those elite teams.
“Personally, I didn’t feel I could get to that level because I didn’t think I’d ever see the day when I got out of the county,” Coen says.
“That thought never came to my head because I wouldn’t think like that until I had won a county final. But when you think about the teams that came before us and they won All-Irelands, the pressure is on us a degree.
“But we are taking this one stage at a time. In 2010, I was 10 years playing and we hadn’t won anything. It didn’t bother me at that stage whether we did or didn’t because I felt we wouldn’t win it. But then in 2011 we got going and had a bit of luck here and there and finally got one county title anyway.”
Only when it arrived could they begin to assess why it had taken a full 28 years. Coen is honest in his assessment.
“It is hard to know. There were a lot of very good teams around – Kiltormer, then Sarsfields, Athenry and then Portumna. There were times we did come close. But in that time I played in six semi-finals and lost four of them. There were many factors involved; Player preparation. Drink. Attitude.
“A lot of that changed when the younger players came in. They tended to mind themselves a bit more. And then the attitude changed and things began to work out for us. We always felt there was more in us. We came away from a lot of games very disappointed, thinking that only if we had copped on earlier in the year that things could have been better. We were sorry afterwards, which was too late.”
And on another level, the experiences of the 1983/84 team were so deeply felt they may well have placed a weight on subsequent teams.
That All-Ireland run was something of an odyssey: in an ill-considered trial, the semi-final and final were played on a single weekend.
So Gort played Midleton, the Cork champions, followed by Ballyhale. As Murphy remembers, they had more than enough chances to win the final but failed to convert them, with 11 wides in the first half alone. Liam Fennelly’s introduction, after a long lay-off with injury, was a huge boost for Ballyhale. It finished 1-10 apiece.
Farcically, the teams had to wait for over a month before the replay and this time, the Kilkenny men won comfortably.
“The whole thing was very unsatisfactory,” Murphy recalls. The system caught us.”
The club was optimistic after the U-21 wins of the past two years but hard experience has taught Gort men never to hoist their hopes too high.
Portumna have proven an intimidating hurdle for all contenders in recent years. Murphy is candid in his admission that the suspensions incurred by Andy Smith and Joe Canning in the quarter-final “opened a door of opportunity for everyone. Then Clarinbridge had a lot of miles up having won the All-Ireland,” he says of the county final.
“So we felt we were in with a chance and that if Gort could negate the couple of big players they had – keeping a close eye on Mark Kerins because he was so influential in everything he did and I think Brian Regan kept him reasonably quiet in the final.
“Barry Daly had been plagued with a groin injury. And we knew that if we sent puck-outs down on him that they would be back down on top of us so we kept a lot of ball away from him. So it was a case of trying to sidestep their stronger players.”
Even so, it took a huge free from Coen to swing the game.
Clarinbridge may have been exhausted – the game took place in the first week of November – but they weren’t about to cough up the title easily. Mark Kerins, who had a brilliant game, might have won it with a long range free but his attempt drifted wide. Then came Coen’s moment.
“I just put it down and hit it and that was it. It did look set up for them after they got the goal because that made it a level game. And Mark Kerins had his chance to win the game. That was how the luck went on the day. Mine went over, his didn’t. Or the game could have been done and dusted by the time that free came around. So I think the luck fell for us on that one day.”
And like that, the sky cleared. Ollie Fahy, nationally remembered as a ball-winning full forward in the Eugene Cloonan era of Galway hurling, won his first senior county medal at the age of 35. He had been playing senior hurling for Gort for half his life. And just like that, they could move the clocks on from 1984.
In the days and weeks afterwards, though, they did talk about the lessons from that last Gort championship-winning team.
Today, Gort have a chance to return to the final when they meet debut Leinster champions Coolderry in Limerick. They know chances like these do not come around every year.
“The one thing we have taken from that time, from any of the fathers we have spoken to, is they have a serious regret about the way that it finished up and that they didn’t win their All-Ireland,” Aidan Harte says. “So we feel it would do justice to the power of their team if we could go on and win an All-Ireland.Anything we can do is as much for everyone in the club as it is for the players on the field.”
