Resilient St Senan's back on big stage

Munster club football final: Tom Humphries on the story of the resourceful Kilkee club who, despite relegation in the local league this year, contest a provincial final tomorrow

St Senan's of Kilkee venture to Limerick tomorrow wrapping their remarkable story in the swaddling of cliché. We just take each game as it comes, they say when you ask. Nemo Rangers will take some beating.

All true of course but for the Lazarus team of Clare football the challenge is daunting but not insurmountable. St Senan's were Clare champions as recently as 2003 when having escaped the county boundaries they went all the way to the Munster final only to be bumped out just before Christmas by An Ghaeltacht. Still a good year and more to look forward to.

Having trained in 2003 right up to the point where the turkeys failed to get their death sentences commuted the lads were a little sluggish in greeting the new year.

They made little allowances for themselves. They had experience and a county title. They were winners. They could cruise a little. Some injuries began to nag a little more insistently. Finally they cruised right out of the early stages of the Clare championship. They watched Kilmurry- Ibrickane go and win a Munster title and get wrapped in the affection of the nation.

Did St Senan's bounce back perkily? Nope! This June just past they got relegated from the first division of the Clare league. In Kilkee they love their football like fish love the sea. If a wind had come and knocked out a subsistence crop or if the weather had driven away the tourists it would have been a more bearable calamity.

So a meeting of players and management and club officials took place back in June. Kilkee is a parish of between 900 and 1,100 people. Not many houses would have been disinterested. The club turned to the man synonymous with the game and the town for these past three decades. When they came knocking they were lucky. Noel Roche, after over two decades as an army man, was moving on. He would have more time.

So having packed it in as a 40-something legend in 2001 he was back already. When Noel Roche signed on, everyone signed on. They knuckled down. They got used to taking each game as it arrived.

"We were never looking far beyond the next Sunday we were playing," says Roche. "This year 'twas a bit different for us than for anyone else. We couldn't know what to expect from ourselves."

That St Senan's find themselves in a provincial final just months after drawing together in order to find an escape route from crisis is tribute not just to Roche but to the subsistence level the club have adapted to. They have been living off scraps for decades. Roche grew up in the time of plenty. Back in the early to mid-1970s Kilkee cleaned up in the underage grades. They made four county minor finals in a row from 1973 to 1976, winning three of them and producing a crop of players who would add a couple of under-21 titles to the roll of honour before becoming a formidable senior outfit.

That and Roche's excellence and durability sustained them for a long time. In the early 1990s they managed a few little miracles at under-21 level again, cobbling together a few titles. But generally, despite the best efforts of good people, the underage section was struggling. The club's last underage win of note was in 1997 when a side which had been cossetted and hothoused all the way up won a county minor title.

The best of that team should have sustained the club for a decade. Just three of them (Barry Harte, Christy Kirwan and Michael O'Shea) play tomorrow. Players leave. Players drift. In barren times they do those things more quickly. And it has been barren. The 2003 county title ended an 11-year wait. When St Senan's contested a minor championship final this year it was in the B grade and their team included a few 15- and 16-year-olds.

That's the story. They've dropped back to play in B championships in some other grades in the underage level too. In West Clare they play a football championship for under-13s. This year St Senan's needed three girls to make up the 15 on the field. Luckily the girls were well able to play, but even if they hadn't been they'd have been asked to play anyway.

So when they all met together last June they had a choice. They could accept that they'd had a decent run, that they'd punched above their weight for a while, that the power centre of underage football had switched a long time ago to the Quilty area and the Kilmurry-Ibrickane club, and they could go their separate ways. Or they could put their heads down and keep going and see how far it got them.

St Senan's are back. Basically they have the same panel of players as they had two years ago. Thomas Galvin has come in at wing back, Kevin Larkin has made it through at midfield. Two new names in three years. They could spot them coming through at underage for quite a while. It's no conveyor belt. There's no magic. Just hard grind.

There are fewer people - young, old, male, female, sporting or disinclined - in the whole of Kilkee than there are in some Dublin GAA clubs but they are just finishing off the stand down at their grounds. The floodlights will be in within six months.

Perhaps it's a sign that times are hard when neighbours start offering kindness but St Senan's have moved through the last few months from late summer to tomorrow with the help of the neighbours Cooraclare and with some luck.

The luck first. In the county semi-final St Senan's were drawn against Doonbeg. If football is religion in Kilkee it finds it's expression as fundamentalism in Doonbeg. Noel Roche was apprehensive. The game was to be played in Cooraclare. On the Thursday night he took his side down to sample the pitch. They trained under lights and were bowled over by the quality of the illumination and the perfection of the pitch.

Sunday came and brought a storm with it.

"We scraped through against Doonbeg that day, 1-5 to 0-7," says Roche. "Our goal came from a high ball into the square that was mishandled and ended up in the back of the net. For one of our points David Russell kicked a ball from midfield and it just bounced over the bar. We were blessed."

The pitch was lucky and it was perfect and Cooraclare weren't using it so St Senan's asked if they might have the use of it for training until the county final. They have been training there ever since and played their semi-final against An Ghaeltacht on it.

"They have been incredible in Cooraclare," says Roche. "They have given us every support. They are bending over backwards for us. We meet on the field and we'd have a good hard game, no dirt, just a good hard honest game. They wear similar colours to ourselves so maybe the relationship perhaps goes a bit deeper. Their pitch is fabulous, as good a surface as you'd get anywhere at this time of year. I couldn't praise it enough or thank Cooraclare enough."

When the use of the pitch was granted back in September, nobody in Cooraclare could have envisaged that St Senan's would still have use for it in mid-December. The county final with Kilmurry-Ibrickane should have ended their run. A Jimmy Larkin goal with the last kick of the game stretched the margin to a flattering five points but that has been the way of things ever since. They celebrated their resurrection season heroically and then got back to the business of tight games and results that surprise.

Monaleen bowed out to them in a replay. Kerry's An Ghaeltacht, who beat them in 2003, were dispatched the last day with quiet efficiency. When Roche finished playing in 2001 he reckoned he owed the army a little. Through more than two decades of sodiering and playing he had been given leeway on the playing side. So he limited himself to terrace life and working. After 21 years in the army he decided to move on though and the club weren't long in coming to his door and asking if they could get further into Noel Roche's debt.

He wouldn't see it that way of course. He speaks reverently of the men who do the toiling and sowing in Kilkee out on the underage fields. They speak quietly of Noel Roche. Such are the fundamentals of any club's survival.