Locker Room / Tom Humphries: Funny thing. I met Eamonn Clancy in the supermarket the other morning. Eamonn was sorting out some controversy over a pot of marmalade and I was half asleep, wondering (as you do) about the Dublin Colleges and how they'd get on this afternoon against St Flannan's in Carlow in the All-Ireland final.
Eamonn's family call him Squire and the name suits because he is a tall, straight-backed man who carries himself like he should have 250 acres of good land to his name. We fell to talking and Eamonn mentioned he'd just gotten a copy of an old photograph. Eamonn, it turns out, was full forward on the last team from a Dublin school to reach the colleges hurling final. Lord help us, but that was some time ago.
The photo is yellowed now and was taken on May 5th, 1946, before the game in Croke Park. O'Connell's CBS versus St Flannan's of Ennis. The programme cost 2d and the curtain-raiser, as is proper, was the football final between St Jarlath's of Tuam and St Patrick's of Armagh. One Iggy Jones was centre forward for Pat's that day.
Looking at the young boys ready to do battle for O'Connell's is remarkable on two levels. Firstly, there are several players who went on to greatness, and secondly, the snap comes from a time when Dublin wouldn't even have thought to have an inferiority complex about hurling.
Sure, St Flannan's were winning their third title in a row that day but the national colleges competition was in its infancy and the Flannan's domination of the early years didn't seem alarming. Not to young Dubs.
The previous year St Joseph's of Fairview, near neighbours and fierce rivals of O'Connell's, had gone to the All-Ireland final and played the mighty St Flannan's also. That summer the Dublin minors went all the way and beat Tipperary in the All-Ireland final. They would do the same again in 1946.
The young faces peering out from above the O'Connell Schools jerseys on that May day 60 years ago aren't clouded by doubt. Jim Lavin, the full back, and Dennis "Danno" Mahony at wing back look pretty much the same today as they did then, give or take a few lines on the faces, and both went on to make names for themselves as Gaelic footballers. Terry Jennings is there too at right corner forward, presumably still some years off his Leaving Cert as he was still playing minor hurling (and football) for Dublin in 1948.
And in the front row, like an Italian centre forward of the 1950s, is Brendan O'Kelly, who would go on to play League of Ireland football for Bohemians.
There are three Clancys on the team: Eamonn at full forward and two lads unrelated to him, Seán and Brendan.
Brendan played for Eoghan Ruadh and won minor All-Irelands in 1945 and 1946. Seán played top of the left for O'Connell's, and one of Eamonn's more pleasing memories of the day was that Micheál O'Hehir, who was commentating, mentioned the Clancy name so often it seemed to certain listeners that he, Eamonn, was running the game for O'Connell's.
That was all of 60 years ago and there was no reason to suppose the world would ever change. Dublin reached the All-Ireland minor football finals of 1945 and 1946, winning the first and losing the second. Several of the O'Connell's boys (and the Joeys lads from 1945) played in those football matches. These were Dublin-born-and-bred kids, just about all Northsiders who were reared to believe in the art of the possible.
This afternoon in Carlow a combined Dublin Colleges team plays (naturally) St Flannan's in an All-Ireland final with an odd look to it. Odd in that although Dublin Colleges reached a final five years ago no Dublin school has played at this level since 1946. You have to go back to the 1950s (and another O'Connell's team) even to find a Leinster win by a Dublin school competing on its own.
St Flannan's are the holders and a win today will put them within one victory of levelling with St Kieran's, Kilkenny as the most successful hurling school in the country. Nowhere else, not even the famed North Monastery, comes close to this pair in terms of success.
In Dublin everything has changed since 1946 - and not just the pattern of achievement. The power base of today's team is solidly and overwhelmingly Southside. The great hurling clubs of Craobh Ciarán and O'Toole's are not represented at all. St Vincent's have just two players, Cian McBride and the sublime Dermot Connolly, on the field. There are a couple of Na Fianna lads and after that you're into Ross O'Carroll-Kelly country. In fact there's even a Ross O'Carroll playing.
That trend suggests a lot of things but mainly it tells us changes in the teaching profession have left Dublin fairly high and dry over the decades and the clubs and the county board are only now reacting.
The pre-eminence of hurling on the Southside is due in huge part to the work of Colm Mac Sealaigh in Coláiste Eoin in Stillorgan. Mac Sealaigh brought the Dublin Colleges team of 2001 to a Leinster title and his graduates flesh out the team sheets of so many top Dublin clubs that you can't but wonder what the situation would be if the city had half a dozen of him.
Because that is what is needed. Dublin hurling has in character been different from Dublin football over the years, and one consequence is that the game in Dublin produces fewer teachers who will do the hard, missionary work on the ground in schools. And when they do, they see players being abducted by football.
So many of Mac Sealaigh's 2001 team, but most notably Conal Keaney, have been lost to football that the only solution it would appear lies in ceasing to entertain the notion of dual players beyond the age of 16 or so.
There is a strong case, as Dublin hurling develops, for encouraging the formation of separate hurling sections within clubs who have a love for the game. Perhaps there is a case also for changing the grades at which clubs compete. It would be preferable to play at just under-14-16 and minor if at that stage a club could get enough young players to focus on hurling and those players could be given 25 to 30 meaningful games a year.
I remember speaking to Johnny Pilkington years ago about how Birr came to be at the heart of the revolution in Offaly hurling and Johnny reckoned that all through the years when players like himself and Brian Whelahan were developing they got at least 40 games a year between school and club.
In Dublin a young lad can plant himself an ash tree and fashion a nice 36-inch hurl from it between games so seldom do they come along. Often specialising in hurling means finding something else to do at weekends. Usually that something else is football.
This afternoon St Flannan's will have dyed-in-the-wool hurling men like James O'Connor and Con Woods patrolling the line. In many ways the school blows all the above out of the water. They had a clatter of dual players, including Séamus Hickey and Colm Madden, as they threatened to do the hurling and football double in Munster this year. Their footballers beat Tralee CBS in the provincial final, an extraordinary achievement for what is essentially a hurling college. Perhaps the key is just to have hurlers who play football in their spare time rather than the other way around.
Back in 1946 when the young lads from O'Connell's had such facility with both games nobody could have guessed the famine to come or the measures we would be forced to consider in dealing with it.
As for today's descendants of Eamonn, Danno and the boys of 1946, nothing for it but to follow them up to Carlow.
