Sean Power met Stephen Bennett for coffee at the beginning of last year. Bennett was on his way to a physio appointment. Not looking for miracles. Osteoarthritis had long since nested in his hips and very little cartilage remained. Until his hips are replaced, every treatment is transient now. Relief comes and goes.
The medical advice was to stop hurling. Coming from different sides, neither party could dress it up as a cure. Stopping would just be a different kind of suffering.
“I said to him, ‘Stephen, you owe the county nothing. You have to listen to your body,’” says Power. “He was laughing at me. He said, ‘Sean, I can’t walk from here to there.’ I said, ‘Look, do what’s right for your body.’”
Bennett was still a teenager when the first surgery was performed on his hips; he was only 20 when he went under the knife again. Around the time of those procedures, Power and Bennett were in each other’s orbit. Power was manager of the Waterford team that won the minor All-Ireland in 2013 and the under-21 All-Ireland three years later. On those teams, Bennett was a glittering vision of the future.
But how long could he go on for? Nobody wanted to contemplate that. “Because of the injuries, it wouldn’t have been disrespecting himself to say, at 20, ‘Do you know what, I’m giving it up’,” says Power.
In those All-Ireland winning campaigns, Bennett scored 15 goals in 12 championship matches. In both seasons, he scored more goals than points. “Everybody was thinking, ‘Jesus, he keeps on going for goals, would he not put a few over the bar,’” says Stephen Frampton, the former Waterford player and selector. “But it won a lot of games for Waterford.”
On his 100th appearance for Waterford last Sunday, against Clare, Bennett scored the 37th and 38th goals of his senior career. In the second half, those scores were the wind in their sails.
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Of the team that won the under-21 All-Ireland in 2016, a core of them have stayed the course. Against Clare last Sunday, six of them were on the field at some stage: Stephen Bennett and his brother Shane, as well as Patrick Curran, Austin Gleeson, Darragh Lyons and Conor Prunty. The phantom member of that group is Billy Nolan. He had played in goal for the under-21s in 2015 as a 17-year-old, but then a rule came in forbidding minors from playing in that grade at inter-county level. By that cruel twist, he missed out on the 2016 campaign.
On that under-21 team, Shane Bennett, Prunty and Lyons were just teenagers. Curran was the joint captain, the free taker and the top scorer. Gleeson was Harry Potter.
In his post-match interviews after the 2016 final, Power expressed what everybody was thinking. “The ultimate question is the next one,” he said. “If you call this the very top of the development squad pile, then obviously the next one is a Munster senior hurling championship and an All-Ireland championship. That’s what we’re aiming for next… It’s mesmerising the amount of talent we have at our disposal.”
Twelve of that squad were already on the senior panel. The question was how far could the elastic stretch? The Limerick team that dominated the senior championship was founded squarely on two All-Ireland under-21 winning teams in the space of three years. The Clare teams that won senior titles in 2013 and 2024 leaned heavily on three All-Ireland winning under-21 teams.
The current Cork senior squad, who have yet to win a championship title of any stripe, is drawn from three All-Ireland winning under-20 teams, and two others that lost All-Ireland finals.
Waterford didn’t have that weight of numbers. There wasn’t another wave of talented players to back up the golden generation. Alarmingly, since their All-Ireland title, the only match that Waterford have won in that grade was against Kerry in 2022. A couple of games went to extra-time over the years, while this year, they carved out one draw.
At senior level, Waterford oscillated from the head of the chasing pack to the tail. Over the last decade there have been a couple of All-Ireland final appearances, and three summers when they finished bottom of the Munster round-robin. They needed players who could stomach the dips and swells and the capricious tides.
“I’m not being smart about this,” says Frampton, whose Waterford career lasted 11 years, “but you’re either into it or you’re not. Either you enjoy it or you don’t. You’re not in it for the medals. Hopefully that will change some time soon, but that’s just the way it is. It is a tough station and I do feel that players and supporters in other counties don’t understand that.
“I’m not complaining. Everybody says Waterford have been there or thereabouts for a good number of years. But our status is still kind of also-rans – and it will be until we win something.”
The graduates from 2016 have all been resilient in different ways, but Patrick Curran is a particular case. As a young player, he was precocious and spectacular. In 2013, he was man of the match in the biggest games he played: the All-Ireland minor final, the Munster final and the Dr Harty Cup final for Dungarvan College.
For a few years, his career stayed on that trajectory. When Waterford lost the National League final after a replay in 2016, he scored 1-9 in the second match and was their outstanding player.
I could never see why people didn’t see what I saw in him all the time
— Sean Power
“I won’t say he was in All Star territory around that time,” says Derek McGrath, who gave him his senior debut, “but he wasn’t far off it. What he had to deal with over the years was whether he was an inside man or an outside man. Most of his life he was either full-forward or corner forward, but he played wing-forward under Liam Cahill and he played centre-forward under us.”
Mostly, though, he had to deal with being left out. According to Leo McGough’s encyclopaedic records, Curran has made 38 championship appearances for Waterford over the last 10 years, but 23 of them have been off the bench. In the All-Ireland finals of 2017 and 2020 he played for less than half an hour.
“He would have been seen, and probably is seen by many, as a player that will come in and give you an impact as a sub,” says Frampton. “But I would say he is the stand-out player on the Waterford panel at the moment. Of all the Waterford players, if you give him a ball in his hand it’s a score 90 per cent of the time.”
Power’s first impressions of Curran were never revised. “I could never see why people didn’t see what I saw in him all the time,” he says. “If I’m picking a team, Patrick Curran is in my 15 every day. I’d say a lot of the time he was disappointed, but he got a name for being a player that comes on and makes a difference. It takes a serious character and a serious man to be able to deal with someone’s indifference towards you and still be able to get on with it.”
Curran never flinched. Others took time out over the years. Shane Bennett went travelling for a while. Austin Gleeson took a complete break last season.
His comeback has been slow, but expectations have been recalibrated over time. As a 21-year-old in 2016 he was Hurler of the Year and Young Hurler of the Year, one of only two players to achieve that feat, three years after Tony Kelly. Waterford played him in a variety of positions from number five to number 14, trying to catch lightning in a bottle. His only constant role was wizard. For a long time, that pressure was ceaseless.
It doesn’t exist now. Gleeson missed the league, essentially, and on the Thursday before a warm-weather training camp in Portugal he injured his hamstring. Against Clare last Sunday he made a token appearance when the game was in safe keeping. Whatever they can harvest from his brilliance now might still make the difference, but they can’t afford to count on that.
“I know Austin well enough to know that it was the right decision to take a year out because it was his decision, if that makes sense,” says McGrath. “It’s always a good thing if a young fella is making a decision for himself. If he doesn’t go well this year it mightn’t be because he took last year out. He loves it enough to be back there.”
It’s like Paul McGrath back in the day, managing his knees and not training from match to match
— Paul Flynn
Over the years, though, nobody gave more than Stephen Bennett. After the Clare game, Waterford manager Peter Queally reflected on how conservatively they used him in last year’s championship. In a couple of games, they replaced him after 50 minutes. His training had been restricted and they believed he had emptied himself.
“I said to Dan Shanahan and Eoin Kelly (his selectors), ‘We ain’t doing that this year’,” said Queally. “I don’t care how bad he’s going, there’s no end to this fella.”
Paul Flynn coached him as part of Sean Power’s management team in 2016 and has been glued to him ever since. “It’s like Paul McGrath back in the day, managing his knees and not training from match to match,” he says. “Stephen is obviously just play and recovery, play and recovery.
“For a fella that doesn’t train a hell of a lot, he still has great go in him. He carried the ball up the line against Clare and he must have travelled 60 yards. Despite all the injuries, he’s not afraid to play with abandon.”
At their best, that was the mark of them.
