There is one element of the club championships this year that is hard to escape, and that is the rise of the dual club.
Loughmore-Castleiney were outgunned and outclassed in the end by Dr Crokes of Killarney in the Munster club football final last Sunday.
But the idea that a club with such a rich recent hurling history would be going toe-to-toe with so storied a football outfit as the Kerry champions is really extraordinary.
This weekend, it’s the turn of Slaughtneil of Derry and Na Fianna of Dublin to take centre stage in the All-Ireland hurling semi-finals.
Na Fianna became only the second team in the history of the Leinster club championships to win provincial titles in hurling and football . . . and they were only beaten into second in that race by about 90 minutes, as double All-Ireland hurling champions Cuala’s football victory in Croke Park two weeks ago meant they were first in with that achievement.
Cork and Galway are consistently the two strongest dual counties in the country, but they’re in the ha’penny place this weekend. Their hurling champions, Sarsfields and Loughrea, are hurling-only (there is a football club in Loughrea, but it’s not affiliated with the hurling club).
Na Fianna’s achievement in winning the Leinster club hurling championship is exceptional given the fact that, as their manager and new Dublin boss Niall Ó Ceallacháin said after the provincial final, hurling barely existed in the club in the 80s and 90s. Their win over Kilcormac-Killoughey was a tribute to a quarter-century of hard work building the game in the club from the bottom up.
In the middle of the last decade, Slaughtneil did the double in Ulster hurling and football in two successive years, 2016 and 2017, and won the Ulster camogie championship in those two years as well.
The only All-Irelands they’ve won so far were in camogie, but they did a three-in-a-row there between 2017 and 2019, and their men’s teams are no doubt itching to join that team in the national winners’ enclosure.
That’s four of the 14 hurling and football teams who reached provincial club finals this year who had also previously reached at least the same stage in the other code too. This suggests that offering both sports is not a hindrance to any club’s chances of success, but that’s nevertheless not a particularly widespread view.
Na Fianna have the numbers to field two entirely different teams in hurling and football and so, while their achievement in building hurling up from nothing 30 years ago is incredible, it’s a different kind of incredible to the stuff we’ve grown used to seeing from Loughmore-Castleiney and Slaughtneil.
With those two clubs in particular, it has been about longevity and durability, playing week after week after week, switching from one sport to the other, seemingly seamlessly.
When Loughmore-Castleiney won the double in Tipperary in 2021, they ended up playing for 19 weekends in a row, all the way to the Munster hurling semi-final, alternating week-on-week for almost all that time.
That year they won the two Tipperary finals by a point, having lost the two county finals by a point the year before. They’d done the county double before, in 2013, but by 2021 it seemed almost impossible to conceive of them doing it again. And yet they did it once more this year.
Not alone do Slaughtneil promote hurling, football and camogie and achieve extraordinary success in all three, they also promote the Irish language and have used the GAA club almost as a conduit to create a mini-Gaeltacht in the Sperrin mountains.
Which leads us to an existential question. Are Loughmore-Castleiney and Slaughtneil what all GAA clubs could be, if they put their mind to it? Or are they glorious anomalies – to be celebrated, but not to be replicated?
I remain convinced that every child in Ireland should get a chance to at least pick up a hurley and see if they enjoy the game. But when I was mouthing off to a friend of mine about this recently, he said something which rather stopped me in my tracks.
“Isn’t it a miracle”, he said, “to get one indigenous sport played by kids in every small village in Ireland? Trying to get them to play two seems a little . . . ambitious.”
When you consider the forces acting against one such sport being played, with the attractions of professional sport on your doorstep (rugby), or the world’s richest, most glamorous, most successful sports league a couple of hundred miles away and on every TV screen (the Premier League), he might have a point.
But I still think the ambition should always be there. When Na Fianna were trying to rebuild their hurling from the ground up, they had Jason Sherlock, Dessie Farrell and Kieran McGeeney playing football for them. If ever a club had an excuse to prioritise one over the other, it was them.
Today, if you were drawing up a list of the 10 best footballers in Ireland, Shane McGuigan and Brendan Rodgers might both be on it – that two such brilliant Derry footballers have an excellent shot at winning an All-Ireland club title in hurling is pretty unbelievable.
Like the Na Fianna volunteers who resurrected hurling in the club in the 1990s, instead of wondering how they’ve got this far, they might be thinking they’ll never get a better chance.
