Before last Sunday, only two counties had provided the winners of both the All-Ireland senior club hurling and football championships in the same year – Cork in 1973, when the finals were played on separate days, and Galway in 2006.
So the only previous time both titles had been won by the same county on the same day was when Salthill-Knocknacarra and Portumna followed each other up the Hogan Stand steps, on the coldest day I have ever experienced in Croke Park.
Hypothermia aside, it was hard not to take it as a major show of strength by the two major GAA sports in Galway. In the end, the county’s footballers wouldn’t even make an All-Ireland final for another 16 years, and despite having the young star Joe Canning who won man of the match for Portumna that day, the hurlers would go 11 years before finally winning Liam MacCarthy.
So maybe it would be premature to read too much into what this means for the upcoming intercounty season. But it says enough about the strength of the clubs in Dublin for us all to take heed.
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Wins for two of the biggest GAA clubs in Ireland, and by extension two of the biggest amateur sporting clubs in Europe, is not often or even ever a cause for general celebration. I wouldn’t dare speak for everyone, but I feel reasonably confident in saying that, on the whole, we prefer our Caltras to our Kilmacud Crokes on club final day. The smaller the place, the bigger the romance. That’s the equation.
So what is it about Dublin superclubs that make them so unpopular? They are different from what advertising companies have decided is the ‘regular’ GAA club, but does that make them any better or worse, or are they just different?
The first thing to say about Cuala and Na Fianna in particular is that they offer both sports, hurling and Gaelic football, and make absolutely no bones about parity of esteem.
They may have the playing numbers to run two almost entirely different squads, and so perhaps they are more accurately dual clubs rather than dual teams. But they fulfil the GAA charter to promote both our national games, and that immediately puts them ahead off at least 95 per cent of the clubs in Ireland. They offer both, and they promote both – more or less equally. Fewer clubs than you think can say the same thing.
They provide games to children who wouldn’t otherwise get exposed to the games, and they keep those kids away from damaging behaviours like drink, or drugs, or rugby (that’s a joke, by the way – I know there are men of a certain age in South Dublin whose angry-letter-writing muscles start tensing around this time of year, what with the Leinster Schools Cup on and everything.)
Speaking of rugby, the issue of just how middle-class Dublin GAA has become is interesting too. I’m not sure that necessarily feeds into any antipathy people from outside Dublin might feel towards them though – although there’s no doubt that antipathy is felt by some Dublin clubs towards other Dublin clubs.
The crowd at Cuala games might have sounded more like a crowd at an aforementioned schools rugby game than your regular club GAA audience, but that’s hardly a crime. And getting the Dart isn’t exactly a hanging offence either. It strikes me class is more of an issue inside the Pale than outside.
Affluent though they may be, they’re not so rich that they can buy up vast tracts of green land in our nation’s capital for their club facilities. No matter how successful they are, they still have to face down chronic pitch shortages. They have massive numbers, but that brings its own problems. Do you prioritise winning, or making sure that everyone gets a game? Or indeed that every kid will have a relationship with the club past their 18th birthday?
And that doesn’t even broach the subject of what you’d do with them if they really did all want to keep playing in their 20s. You wouldn’t have the teams, the mentors, or the pitches to cater for them.
It is obvious that these superclubs, such as Crokes or Ballyboden St Enda’s, are too big. In the catchment area of those two clubs alone, there could easily be five or six smaller clubs, giving more people more meaningful games, more chances to play into adulthood, and more personalised coaching.
But when clubs of that size can’t find pitches for the teams they currently have, even with all the soft power they would wield, it hardly stands to reason that it would be any easier for a freshly-formed club to find green space.
All this is to say that the problems might be totally different from what committee members in clubs up and down the country might have to face, but they’re still problems. Country clubs often have all the facilities in the world, and no players. The problem is the exact opposite in Dublin.
So they have had their own hurdles to jump to get to where they got to last Sunday, and it would be churlish to gainsay it.
Taking the city club down a peg or two has always been a major motivation, whether that’s in north Galway or west Limerick, north Antrim or west Waterford. Every club in the country now has that chance next year.
