Adrian Mahony flew in from Amsterdam during the week and immediately made his way home to Crotta in north Kerry. There was a family car to be commandeered for the weekend.
Amsterdam GAC, founded in 2003, don’t exactly have a kit van or a team bus, so one must improvise. Being player-manager of the European hurling champions isn’t about the pizazz, it’s about cobbling together imaginative solutions.
Most of the Amsterdam players arrived to Dublin on Friday evening, many calling upon the decency of friends living around the capital for a place to crash for the night in advance of Saturday’s Leinster junior hurling championship fixture against St Fechins of Louth, in Drogheda.
Now, it is fair to assume that as Michael Cusack and the lads thrashed out their vision of the GAA in the billiards room of Hayes Hotel in Thurles 140 years ago this month, at no point did anybody pipe up and wonder, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to one day see a team of hurlers from Termonfeckin play Amsterdam’s finest?’
Neither Louth nor Amsterdam would exactly be hurling strongholds, and yet Drogheda on Saturday hosted the very essence of what a GAA occasion should represent – when stripped back this was two villages playing knock-out championship.
Amsterdam’s starting team included players from Kerry, Cork, Offaly, Kilkenny, Galway, Limerick, Tipperary and Dublin. A lot of life choices had to be made for all those players to end up standing shoulder to shoulder in the black of Amsterdam on a pleasant November Saturday in Drogheda.
“I said it to the lads in the huddle beforehand, it’s a home away from home and we are a family away from family,” says team captain James Daly.
In the stand at the Gaelic Grounds were members of their actual families, folk who had travelled from various parts of the country. Eoin O’Donovan’s dad had come over from Galway, Mahony’s dad had taken the bus from Kerry because his son needed the car.
“I basically put everything in the car: hurleys, sliotars, cones, the lot. I drove up to Dublin then on Friday,” explains Mahony.
There was no group travel or luxury coach bringing the players to the game. Lifts were arranged, pickup spots organised, leave no man behind. There weren’t too many players spilling out of those vehicles sporting Bose headphones either. The Amsterdam team stuffed cars and travelled the way thousands of players do every weekend, as an eclectic band of brothers.
“Some lads might have taken a half-day off work, but most came late on Friday. You find that work managers in the Netherlands don’t have a whole pile of empathy for championship,” says Daly with a smile.
Barcelona made history recently by becoming the first European team to win a Leinster club championship match, beating Conahy Shamrocks of Kilkenny.
Amsterdam travelled to Drogheda wanting to become the first hurling team from the Continent to do so. They qualified for the provincial competition on the back of winning the European Championship.
Some outstanding long-range shooting from Galway’s Graham McDermott pushed Amsterdam 0-3 to 0-2 ahead early on but in the last 20 minutes of the first half St Fechins hit four goals.
With the momentum clearly in their favour, the shout came in from the line for the home team to “hammer down”. By half-time they led 4-11 to 0-9.
To Amsterdam’s credit, they railed against the inevitable outcome, with Offaly’s Damien Murphy and Tipperary’s Luke Ryan rifling home second-half goals. Still, St Fechins ran out comfortable 6-23 to 2-13 winners.
As for the perks of being player-manager, Mahony was the Amsterdam goalkeeper on Saturday – which was his first time playing between the sticks.
Shane Corridon, the team’s first-choice goalkeeper, has been struggling with injury this season. For the European Championships, former Galway hurler John Hanbury filled the role, but the All-Ireland winner subsequently got injured playing American Football.
“We were pretty stuck today, so I had to kind of step up,” adds Mahony.
It wasn’t to be for the Amsterdam hurlers, not this year. But not all victories are recorded on scoreboards.
At the edge of the pitch after the game, Amsterdam players introduced family members to their team-mates. Several conversations started out along the lines of, ‘Ah, I’ve heard a lot about you’.
They usually train in Eendracht, with most players arriving to the pitch in classic Dutch style.
“We cycle, it’s very Amsterdam,” smiles Daly, whose home club is St Rynagh’s in Offaly.
“One of the lads drives from around Rotterdam, William Mullally, but the rest of us are living in around the city so we cycle – but there are a few lazy lads who get the electric mopeds.”
Mahony’s cycle commute to training is 50 minutes each way but the team is his release, it’s his hobby, his home from home.
Daly is a software engineer while Mahony works in cell therapy technology, a second-line treatment for cancer patients where cells are engineered to target particular cancers. That’s real life, that’s heavy, important stuff.
Not that it makes hurling unimportant. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Daly has also doubled over the years as the club secretary. He has witnessed the real power of this GAA village in Amsterdam.
“Every time a family member passes away, it is nice to send something on behalf of the club,” says Daly.
“There have been team-mates who have lost parents or siblings or grandparents. With the club, you see it, people row in, they help out, they care.
“I have seen a lot of players facing difficult challenges over the years because these things happen, lads get ill or lose their job and stuff. That’s when you see what a club is about, people step up to help out, it’s a ready-made community.”
A community of players that will inescapably be scattered to the wind eventually as life takes them in different directions, but on Saturday they stood together, they hurled together. There is something in that.
“Hopefully one year maybe ourselves or Luxembourg or one of the other teams will come back and create history like Barcelona achieved in the football,” says Mahony. “We’ll keep trying.”
As they did on Saturday.
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