Vindication for the game that never went away

National Football League/Division One final: Tom Humphries on the ebbs and flows of Wexford's footballing and hurling fortunes, and a belated day in the sun for the big ball poor relations

You go to Wexford on one of those vague assignments, the traditional journalistic search for "colour". The county, novel participants in a football league final, will surely be en fête. All gay bunting and happy flags and grinning lads painting their old cars purple and gold. Off you go now and get a potful of colour. Bring us back some local characters and a stick of rock, why don't ya?

Motivating yourself, you recall fondly some previous epic expeditions in search of "colour", those handy jaunts to Clare and Leitrim back in the 90s when you could find a spot, normally a saloon bar, which was the epicentre of all things football and all things colourful. Tommy Tubridy's in Doonbeg. Gay Prior's in Leitrim. Ah.

You come back from Wexford, alas, with a notebook full of monochrome. The county is more curious than excited.

Men of a certain age can wistfully remember the more golden times of Wexford football. For now they'll wait and see. The current breakthrough prompts the paraphrasing of a Model son more celebrated even than Matty Forde. When it comes to football GAA people in Wexford, ask not why. They ask, sure why not.

Funny but the game has always existed on virtually an equal footing with hurling and once upon a time Wexford considered itself a football county first and foremost. That's not to say that in the last 50 years or so many a Wexford football manager hasn't moaned quietly about the treatment and affection dished out to the county hurlers but merely to state that geographically and numerically, in the clubs and in the GAA schools, well, football has been an unbroken thread.

It's a question of one sport ebbing while the other flows and then vice versa. People forget about 1956, for instance, because that was the year the hurlers won it all, whisking away one of the great All-Irelands and exploding into the consciousness of a nation. That team was so loved and so celebrated it often seems as if GAA history in Wexford began with a big bang just then.

But that summer, Paddy Kehoe from Gusserane played some of the greatest football ever seen. Paddy was a dual player of an accomplishment to rival Des Foley or Jimmy Barry Murphy. That summer Dublin, who had been beaten in a famous All-Ireland final the year before, and who had one of the great, great teams of the era, came to Carlow on a championship Sunday.

They went away on the wrong end of a 2-7 to 0-7 beating. Wexford! Typically, they marched into the Leinster final and lost by a similar margin to Kildare. Wexford football is full of those sorts of regrets. They held Meath to four scores in the 1946 league final but two of those scores were goals. Wexford managed just six points. Nicky Rackard missed a sitter late on.

Not an isolated miss either. Billy Rackard recalls his brother pulling one out of the bag in the 1953 Leinster final also.

"We went to the Leinster final in 1953. I remember that summer I played on the famous Tommy Murphy for a few minutes. Bill Delaney had just retired, I think. Mick Dunne, I think it was, said if Wexford beat Louth on Sunday I will eat my hat. We had Louth beaten but couldn't kick it straight. Nicky got a ball in the last minute on the fringe of the square and ballooned it out to the corner flag! That was that."

The Rackards, well Nicky and Billy, were, in a way, successful footballers before they were renowned hurlers but when the time came they knew where their priorities lay. The history of football in Rathnure isn't quite typical of the game's existence in Wexford but it is instructive nonetheless.

The club was founded in 1931 without a thought or a care for football.

"We were like Kilkenny are today," laughs Billy. "Football was something we did occasionally for a bit of crack and exercise. And you have to remember that in 1931 Wexford were only a few years past an era when they played six football All-Irelands in a row and won four in a row. "

The Rackards had carried a little rogue football gene in them. Their mother's brother John Doran had played on the great Wexford sides early in the last century but the family's sporting persuasion was perhaps determined or announced by the decision to send Nicky to St Kieran's.

"I don't know if it was our geographical proximity to Kilkenny," says Billy, "but we had no real interest in Gaelic football, we played only for pleasure. But Nicky got called onto the football team and they beat Offaly in the Leinster final in 1945."

By the mid-40s Nicky was well established as a star hurler. Billy remembers: "He bate Kilkenny on his own in New Ross one day. He was known as a hell of a player but hurling was going nowhere. He decided he'd try the hand at the football and of course he got picked for the Wexford seniors. As far as I remember he was picked for Leinster in football and hurling on the same day that year. Anyway, Wexford got through in 1945. He got a Leinster title out of it."

Cavan beat them in the All-Ireland semi-final. Wexford had taken a two-week training camp in Rosslare before the game and tired themselves out.

Somewhat typical of Wexford's luck, they were pressing for an equalising goal in the final minute of that game when Dan O'Neill (of Rathnure) had a rasping shot turned over the crossbar and Cavan won by a couple of points.

Anyway, slightly encouraged by the success of a few of their sons on the football field, Rathnure decided upon the novelty of making a football team entirely out of their hurlers in 1951. They went straight through and won the junior championship.

Intermediate football activities were undergoing a decades-long suspension and Rathnure went straight into senior and in 1953 went to the county final. They beat Volunteers, the club of Brendan Corish and Willie Goodison, in the semi-final and swept Paddy Kehoe's beloved Gusserane in the final. Rathnure's only senior football title was won by the men who left their sticks down for the afternoon.

So three Rathnure players were picked for the county that summer: Des O'Neill and Billy and Nicky Rackard.

"It's funny," says Billy, "I played three years of intercounty and people often say to me 'did you ever try the football?'"

They tried and then they gave the football up when it was decided that they were finally going places with the hurling.

The county had been coming slowly in hurling. On a Sunday in 1948, Laois beat Kilkenny in the Leinster semi-final and the door was open. Wexford had Dublin at home in Bellefield in Enniscorthy the same afternoon. They lost by a couple of points.

In 1950, Wexford lost a Leinster to Kilkenny by a goal. They were beaten against the run of play by Cork in 1954.

Something was brewing.

And not long afterwards when the hurling took off in a big way, football took a back seat in Rathnure. Nowadays they just field a junior team for the exercise.

"If you heard the singing of a football bouncing off the ground in Rathnure it would give you a bit of a start alright," says Billy Rackard.

Football was always there thriving in some part of the county, though, and some Yellowbellies were reared to the game.

Séamus Keevans played in days of promise not just for his native county but wherever his job as a garda took him. He represented a county in each province on the football field.

"Maybe it needed a little bit more help," he says now. Séamus has an almost photographic memory and can rhyme off the names of old teams without a pause. His heroes were the team of 1945. Séamus lives not far from the great Paddy Kehoe, who is in his 80s now. Not many of the names that stilled childish play are left. Tom Dodd, Mick O'Hanlon and Paddy.

Hurling was a virtual rumour. Keevans remembers being a youngster back in 1945 and the stir that was caused at evening devotions when a lad came back who'd been in New Ross to see the hurlers and they'd only lost by a couple of points and that was deemed a nice, encouraging thing for them to have done.

That same year, Wexford went to Portlaoise for a legendarily tough Leinster final against Offaly. Petrol was still rationed at the time and just about everyone cycled. The menfolk of entire villages put their caps on and made pelotons with their stern black bikes.

One car went from Séamus's parish. Somebody had a motor and somebody else had a coupon. It was a match made in heaven. In Portlaoise they met a hearse from New Ross. Petrol wasn't rationed for hearses. There were 10 live and breathing purple and gold bodies packed into the back of the hearse.

The football folk never really saw the hurlers coming. Season after season the footballers knocked on the door.

Hurling was out there somewhere but Séamus Keevans remembers the time when "St Peter's College wouldn't have had enough hurleys to play among themselves and they'd send into the town for a few sticks if they weren't playing football."

The hurlers didn't get lucky. You couldn't say that but things came their way. Mainly players. Nick O'Donnell gave up the chance to spend his career as the understudy to Diamond Hayden in Kilkenny and came and bought a pub in Enniscorthy. Tom Ryan from Kilkenny joined, taking a lot of the burden off Nicky Rackard in the full-forward line. Tim Russell from Cork.

The hurlers were waxing. The footballers were waning.

In 1949 the footballers lost by just two points to Meath. So many of these close encounters. The following year Meath and Wexford played a draw in the national league semi-final. The replay attracted 30,000 people. So it went. A score in it against Louth in 1953's Leinster final. Beat Dublin in 1956 but lost to Kildare. Haven't been in a provincial final since.

But they never went away, you know. Wexford has that strange tradition of double-barrelled club names. Often one barrel will be the footballing wing of a parish, the other the hurling wing.

In 1998 in an intermediate hurling final, Matty Forde scored nine points for Ballyfad when they beat Askamore. Ballyfad are the hurling wing of Kilanerin and a year or two before hurling had reached such a low ebb that the senior selectors had stepped down in depression. Kilanerin lost the first round of the senior championship to Gusserane, though, and Ballyfad stepped in and filled the summer.

Two years later, St Anne's won the county title in both codes. The overlap between the senior hurling team and the senior football team was so great the club used the same selectors for both panels. Everyone would arrive to the field for training ready for free-form jamming and improvisation. They'd play some hurling, segue into 20 minutes' football, then take up the sticks and helmets again and get back to swinging. The amount of time they gave to hurling was, they reckoned, about twice what they gave to football. You lose your touch quicker in hurling and, somehow, that seemed like a bigger deal.

St Anne's were more of a football tribe as well but they won the junior hurling in 1996 and the intermediate in 1999 and according to Darragh Ryan, "even the guys on the team began to realise that the real hype and the passion in the county is for hurling. We won the hurling last year and we're there still this year. We concentrate more on the hurling - we have to just survive there."

The ying and the yang of GAA life. At about the same time Good Counsel of New Ross went to the schools All-Ireland in 1999. Their toughest game along the way was their second-round match against St Peter's when they got a goal in the sixth minute of injury time to win by a point. Always there was enough there for football people to nourish dreams on.

The complexion of the county has changed also and the new tint is football. The population has swollen from 77,000 in the early 70s to 114,000 or so at the last count. Prosperous too. Football is attracting a new breed of player from the non-traditional GAA family.

The population growth brings change socially. Many of the new breed are from Dublin. There were houses built on an old field in which Séamus Keevans used to keep a few sheep. One of the neighbours for a while was an uncle of the Dublin midfielder Darren Homan.

David Murphy, Wexford's centre back tomorrow, handed over a -million cheque on behalf of his club, St Mary's of Rosslare, last week. The money was for a ground-development scheme. Some time before, Liam Griffin had stood up to punctuate an interminable meeting with a plea for some young blood to become involved in running the club and when it came to looking for names for the treasurer's job Murphy stuck his hand up.

"David would have no GAA background at all so it's wonderful to see a young fella come through into the association like that," says Griffin.

Redmond Barry, the county's only extant dual player, is likewise going places where no ancestors have gone before. He is rugby stock. And PJ Banville, an 18-year-old sub with a bright future, is a refugee from soccer.

"It's not really about football versus hurling in Wexford. It's about just running both sports as best as can be. And that can make a saint despair."

Last week Griffin had a meeting with his minor hurling side in the club. Last year he took them to the county final and they played eight games in the group stage, then a quarter-final, a semi-final and a final. An 11-game odyssey. You could see their skills improving almost by the week.

This year some genius cut the group stage to three games. So Griffin announced to a group of boys facing into a Leaving Cert summer and all it entails that they would have three matches. So the faces fell and one lad said Friday would be his last match and it was pointed out that if you played soccer for Rangers, the local soccer outfit, sure you'd get three matches in a fortnight.

And Griffin's lively mind sprang back to that odd day in recent history when the footballers got to a league final and the hurlers lost to Kilkenny by 30 points and some people wondered would it all change like it had back in 1956.

"What's gone wrong with the hurling, Liam?" people would ask him in genuine bafflement. He'd roll his eyes and think about joining a golf club.

Griffin, like Séamus Keevans, managed the football team for a while in the 70s. Griffin got them to a Division Two final delivering on some of the promise Keevans had mined. As the hurlers were pressing again for All-Irelands the footballers quietly reached two Leinster semis, 1976 and 1977. They should have beaten Meath the first time. Dublin were just exceptional the year after but Wexford beat Offaly in that summer of 1977. Offaly stayed together, beat Wexford in 1981 and went the distance the next year.

Whatever happens tomorrow hurling and football will just continue cheek by jowl.

"Hurling will always be dominant," says Billy Rackard. "It arouses passions in an Irishman. Horses and hurleys."

"Football is getting its old strength back," notes Séamus Keevans. "There would be tension between the games. You wouldn't get the same treatment in hurling as the footballers got. The county board would opt for hurling in the priorities but the footballers and Pat Roe can change that."

He adds quickly that Good Counsel beat St Pat's of Navan in the Leinster junior final this year, lost by a point to St Mel's of Longford in the senior semi-final and lost to St David's of Dublin in the under-14 final.

Not bad for a so-called hurling county where the story still circulates about former football manager JJ Barrett having to book team meals under the name of the Rathgar Historical Society.

There's always light and hope, though. Séamus was down in the club last week and a big, tall Dublin man walked in with a gang of little young fellas tailing him. They got the kids playing and encouraged the Dub to begin helping out.

Séamus noticed one of the young fellas.

"Ah this fella, he wasn't anymore than five years old but he's a little dinger."

Ebb and flow - always the same. Football's day to flow has come again.