They had Wexford on the ropes in Ballycran, shipped a few uppercuts from Clare in Ennis and today they’ll trade blows with Dublin in Parnell Park. This is where Down wanted to be for the last two decades, hurling with the heavyweights.
Ronan Sheehan is in his eighth season as Down senior hurling manager – his first in 2019 included a trip to play Warwickshire in Solihull. In hurling’s top two divisions, only John Kiely has been on the beat longer.
Just a couple of kilometres from Parnell Park, at the other end of Griffith Avenue, is the Mobhi Road base of Na Fianna – the home club of Dublin senior hurling manager Niall Ó Ceallacháin.
Na Fianna’s official X account bio states the club has 4,000 members and 200-plus teams. The Down intercounty side pull from a pool of around 300 adult hurlers.
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Being a unit on either end of that disparity has its challenges, but if it was simply a numbers game, Down would have traded their hurls for abacuses years ago. Plus, how do you measure desire and resilience?
Still, the reality is that for last weekend’s Division 1B league clash against Kildare, the Down 26-man match-day squad was made up of players from just six clubs.
Dublin’s starting 15 against Antrim on the same afternoon had 10 different clubs represented. Within the squad there were players from a total of 15 clubs.
“It makes a big difference in a number of ways,” says Sheehan. “For instance, if a player doesn’t want to commit in Dublin or doesn’t commit fully, you just move to the next player up.
“Whereas in the likes of Down, there’s probably a wee bit more coercion required at times because you need the players almost as much as they need you, if that makes sense.”
And yet here they are, playing Division One hurling for the first time since 2007.
Sheehan’s club is Newry Shamrocks. But he’s of Cork stock. His mam and dad were both from Banteer and moved north to work as teachers in Kilkeel. His late dad, Jerry, served as chairman of the hurling board in Down. The game has always been there.
Sheehan observed the motions at last week’s Congress with interest, in particular the decision to introduce a Uefa-style high-performance licence for county teams and the discontinuation of the All-Ireland hurling preliminary quarter-finals.
He supports both. The licence seeks to introduce regulation around the black-market economy of manager payments and curbing supersized back-room teams.
“Putting some kind of structure around that to protect our amateur status is the right thing to do because ultimately we’re in danger of losing the whole ethos of what we’re about, or what we should be about,” he adds.
“We have a duty of care to pass it on to the next generation. Because that ethos of being a volunteer, doing it because it’s the right thing to do, there’s too little of that in society now and we need to protect one of the best parts of it that we do have, which is the GAA.”
Before he took charge of the seniors, Sheehan worked with several Down underage teams. During all his time coaching the county, he hasn’t taken a penny. Never claimed his legitimate expenses, never asked to be renumerated, nor does he want to be.
It was just a natural byproduct of his upbringing that when it came to hurling; his involvement would be based on affection for the game. Ash, not cash.
But he doesn’t want to make himself out to be holier than thou on that front. It’s a personal choice. He makes sure the Down selectors claim their expenses and that the players are looked after.
“I’m lucky to be in a good enough job [with Lloyds Bank] that allows me to do that. I have no issue with people being recompensed for genuine expenses, and I would be very strong about that for my own players, I would fight very hard for them.
“But I think in general we’ve moved far beyond expenses in many aspects of the GAA and that’s what’s wrong.
“It’s very difficult to ask players to remain amateur when we’ve got back-room teams getting paid inordinate amounts of money. If you don’t regulate something, it becomes an arms race.
“And it’s not just the county, if you go round every club in Ireland and you say to the club executive, ‘We’re going to spend 30 grand bringing in a coach for our senior football team,’ there would probably be no objection.
“But if you were to turn around and say, ‘I think we should spend 30 grand to put somebody in coaching in the primary school every week,’ the reaction of the executive would likely be more along the lines of, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we can afford to do that.’
“And yet which would be far more beneficial to the growth of your club and the game in your area? In the long term, it would be funding a coach to go to the school.”
On the last day of February, Sheehan took to social media to post a message on his X account congratulating Conor Laverty and the Down footballers on securing league promotion. It might not seem like much, but in some counties such genuine public pleasantries between their respective senior managers would be unimaginable.
Refreshingly, Sheehan walks his own path. A proud republican, on the afternoon we talk there are messages on his timeline commemorating the Fenian uprising of 1867.
There are also recent posts on Celtic’s win over Aberdeen, the Newry Shamrocks nursery, unionist politician Jim Allister, and the possibility of Kurdish fighters entering the war in Iran.
Rarely does an interview before a National League match segue to a chat on the 1867 Battle of Tallaght.
Still, on the northside of the city Sheehan acknowledges relegation-threatened Down face an uphill battle against promotion-chasing Dublin today.
“We’ve been broadly competitive in almost every match with the exception of the Clare game,” adds Sheehan.
“We always knew it was going to be difficult to stay up in the division but we will fight to the very death.
“If we go down this year or next year, the reality is the team is young enough to bounce back up again. We’ve got a taste of it now and this is where we want to be.”
Down’s last game of the campaign will be an all-Ulster derby against Davy Fitzgerald’s Antrim, under lights at Páirc Esler. The occasion should tempt a decent crowd in for a gawk.
But, as in Parnell Park today, the game will be won or lost by those inside the white lines.
“Nobody comes to watch the manager,” says Sheehan. “They come to watch the players, they come to watch the game.
“Every manager or coach, what are we but a custodian? Ultimately we’ll be gone in a number of years and there’ll be somebody else. But the game will endure, the game will survive.”
Because of crusaders like Ronan Sheehan.
