One of the great attractions of the All-Ireland club championships is that you can have new winners in any given year. Half of this decade’s champions were winning for the first time.
For any club it’s a seismic experience and your name can never be erased from a roll of honour but equally, it is only natural that teams wonder, where can we take it from here?
There is a subset of champions, who go on to win a second All-Ireland, even though the vast majority get just one day in the sun. Even on the mountain top, there is a pecking order.
There are generational clubs, like the most successful, Ballyhale Shamrocks or Nemo Rangers, who have won All-Irelands with different teams throughout the competitions’ 56-year history, and there are teams who have an exceptional cohort and make the best of it with more than one title.
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On Sunday, both Ballygunner in the hurling final and St Brigid’s in football are in pursuit of a second senior club championship title, whereas their opponents Loughrea and Dingle have yet to win a first.
The Roscommon football champions’ first win came in 2013. Of those players, Senan Kilbride and Ronan Stack came on as replacements in the All-Ireland semi-final against Scotstown and Cormac Sheehy is also on the bench, but their big motivation is how close they came just two years ago.
Having looked likely winners all afternoon, Brigid’s lost a four-point lead with just five minutes left.
Manager Anthony Cunningham, who guided the club to their first provincial title 20 years ago, reflected on that success after last November’s Connacht final.
“The club has gone from strength to strength since then. They probably would be disappointed to not have won a second All-Ireland.”
That disappointment fuels them on Sunday as they look to become a generational club, capable of winning with more than just one team.
Waterford hurling kingpins Ballygunner, county champions for the past 12 years – five of which they have upgraded to Munster titles – arrive in a slightly different situation.
They have never lost an All-Ireland final, even if their 2022 win, retrieved with a last-second goal struck by Harry Ruddle, came very close.
They have, however, been subjected to plenty of queries as to how a team utterly dominant in their county and frequently successful in their province hasn’t managed to stick more than one Tommy Moore Cup on the mantelpiece.
There have been reasons. Two of their seasons as Munster standard bearers were ended by Ballyhale Shamrocks in All-Ireland semi-finals, as the Kilkenny aristocrats took home four All-Irelands in nine years – and they did beat Ballyhale in the 2022 final.
Still, making an impact at this level is about taking opportunities as they arise and Ballygunner have struggled for a commensurate conversion rate.
At the other end of the scale, Dublin’s Cuala turned two provincial titles into back-to-back All-Irelands. Harry Roberts, a former player and manager with the club, was one of Matty Kenny’s selectors in those successful years.
“What Matty did was, he packaged everything very well. He separated it into three competitions: win Dublin, win Leinster and then win the All-Ireland’s. Don’t be thinking about anything except winning the one you’re in. You’ve got an opportunity to do something.
“We were lucky. We had a bunch of lads who came along that you only get once in a lifetime. That’s what happened with us.”
The first Dublin club to win an All-Ireland hurling title, Cuala became the latest of six to achieve back-to-back championships.
If that provided an almost reflex achievement with little time to agonise over how hard adding a second was, the opposite was the experience of Galway’s St Thomas’, winners two years ago.
For context, the club’s first title came in 2013 on the same afternoon that St Brigid’s took the football crown.
Eleven years later, an almost completely renewed Brigid’s came close to winning a second, a couple of hours after the Galway hurling champions hit that target with more than half of the players who had won their first.
Their experience was closer to Ballygunner’s but with an even longer period of regretting missed opportunities. Kenneth Burke played in 2013 and was manager two years ago.
“It was our first county title as well, so it was a bit of a whirlwind at the time and you win the All-Ireland and you’re thinking, ‘this is going to go on all the time,’ but it doesn’t work like that. We were brought back to reality fairly quickly.”
Like Ballygunner, Thomas’ had plenty of chances after a joint-record six consecutive county titles from 2018-23.
“It’s definitely an ambition of the whole squad and it might not have been spoken about that much, obviously because you have to get through Galway, which is fairly tricky as it is and hard to win. But it was definitely a long-term goal to get back and try and win a second one.”
They reached a final in 2019, only to be dogged by injury and get overwhelmed by Ballyhale in a match during which nothing went right. Boris-Ileigh beat them a year later in the semi-finals. Then Covid wiped out the following year’s All-Ireland.
Kevin Lally led them to three Galway titles before Burke assumed the reins. Further frustration followed.
“In my first year as manager [2021],” Burke recalls, “we played Ballyhale again and they pipped us.”
That’s a fairly restrained way of putting what happened at the end of a match in which St Thomas’ had transformed their challenge from the 2019 final and looked set to avenge that defeat until TJ Reid stuck a late free to the net in Thurles.
“We were probably playing our best hurling at that time. We really thought we had a great chance and nearly had it, if we had got over Ballyhale, but obviously it doesn’t work like that. So, it was back on the horse the following year.”
Another defeat, this time to Ulster champions Dunloy, knocked them out of the saddle.
“We just didn’t perform. After that, looking at having to get back through Galway again, I think a few of us were probably thinking, ‘that might be it’.”
There was though, a happy ending one year later when their path crossed Ballygunner’s in the semi-final and Thomas’ won a penalty shoot-out on the way to edging out O’Loughlin Gaels in the final with an otherworldly point, conjured from the left sideline by the manager’s brother, Éanna Burke.
“We worked fairly hard and eventually got there, thanks be to God. It took a while – but a lot of pain along the way.”
Ballygunner know all about the pain and once more they encounter a Galway club, Loughrea, who have won both county championships since the Thomas’ six-in-a-row.
By Sunday teatime, will they still be characterised as the team that should have won more, or will they become the team that did win more?
