By far the best thing about the club finals is that they’re always unique. The mix always changes and the novelty always keeps the recipe fresh. Big clubs, small clubs, city clubs, parish clubs. Clubs that set out at the start of the year to win the All-Ireland, clubs that weren’t sure last summer if they had the beating of the hoors five miles out the road.
On this weekend last year, Na Fianna supporters marched en masse from the closest club to Croke Park to take their seats for their day of days. The walk took no more than 15 minutes, assuming you didn’t get waylaid in Fagan’s halfway down. This time around, Dingle supporters have, if they’re lucky, a nine-hour round trip to make to HQ and back. With traffic, food and pit-stops, it’s probably closer to 11.
Two more different clubs you couldn’t fathom. Club finals day makes kings of everyone, regardless. Dingle, from the farthest reaches of the Kerry coast. St Brigid’s from Kiltoom, a sort of sleeper parish on the Roscommon side of Athlone. Loughrea, from deep in Galway hurling country. Ballygunner, on the edge of Waterford city – or maybe that should be Waterford City on the edge of Ballygunner.
That’s the foursome for 2025/26 and, like every foursome that has gone before it, it’s unique. This Sunday will see the 55th All-Ireland club hurling final followed by the 55th club football final and in all those years down through a half-century and more, never once has a line-up been duplicated. Plenty of clubs have made it back to Croke Park, some of them in alarmingly short order. But the same four teams have never shared a bill twice.
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Mostly, this is because repeat fixtures are so rare in either code. Ballyhale have played in more deciders than any other club in hurling or football. Yet in their 11 All-Ireland finals, they have met 11 different opponents. Same goes for Crossmaglen – seven football finals, seven different teams waiting on them when they got there.
It does happen occasionally that clubs in the middle of a glorious run find their way back to meet each other. Nemo Rangers played Crossmolina in the 2001 and 2003 finals. In hurling, Birr and Dunloy ran into each other in the final twice in eight years, in 1995 and 2003. Close, but no cigar.
Nemo also played two football finals against St Vincents, albeit they were a generation (or three) apart, in 2008 and 1973. And way back when, Blackrock of Cork and St Anne’s of Wexford faced off twice in three years for hurling finals in the early 1970s. But getting the two sides of the house to match up at the same time is all but impossible. There’s never been three clubs on the same bill twice, never mind four.
The point is, there’s a recurrent magic to the club finals that is based solely on the fact that this day will almost certainly never happen again. The people of Dingle, Kiltoom, Ballygunner and Loughrea have never descended en masse to Croke Park before and the odds are minuscule that they ever will again. It all adds to the one-off feeling of it all.
Down through the decades, 52 different hurling clubs have played in a final, while Dingle are the 54th football club to make it to the dance. In hurling, 28 clubs have been to one final in their history and have never made it back. In football, that number is 29. You better do it this weekend because it’s just so unlikely you’ll ever get the chance again.
Little wonder, then, that Loughrea spent time and energy this week successfully appealing Cullen Killeen’s suspension. The Galway club knew two things. One, their only appearance in an All-Ireland final was 19 years ago. Two, Killeen is 19-years-old. This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime game so if there was a way to get him a place in it, they were duty-bound to try and find it.
That’s the thing about the club finals. When they’re over, you slide all the way back to the bottom of the board. Neither of last year’s football finalists made it as far as their own county final this time around. Both hurling finalists won their county title but neither survived their first match in the provincial championships. So much has to fall into place for the journey to stay alive all the way to Croke Park.
And so, each club lands into the club finals this weekend telling themselves stories that feel entirely their own but which are all really just versions of the same yarn. Here’s St Brigid’s, hellbent on avenging their last-kick defeat of 2024. Here’s Ballygunner, trying to replicate their last-puck win in their only final appearance in 2022. Here’s Loughrea, riding the wave of their first ever back-to-back Galway titles. Here’s Dingle, first-time winners of Munster, first-time All-Ireland finalists.
Early on Friday, a clip did the rounds of a news report from 7News in Australia. It showed three of Mark O’Connor’s Geelong teammates pulling wheelie cases through Melbourne airport, on their way to Dublin to see if Dingle can win the All-Ireland club final.
O’Connor’s just-one-more-boss journey through this club season has been such a glorious story, a poem to the power of love and roots and home. The unique pull of the club finals in action.
A precious, precious thing.
