Intra-Club Success

The Intra-Club league has turned out to be an inspirational idea. I’m not quite sure who conceived the idea first but Eoin brought it to a reality in the end. With teams picked roughly on a provincial basis, we effectively succeeded in creating four club teams.

After the Benelux series I took a relaxed attitude considering the long gap before the next tournament. However, as Leinster ploughed into us in the opening league game, I realised there was a hell of a lot of pride at stake. Fellas were discussing tactics, positional moves etc in the build up to the games. There were proper kits, warm-ups etc. This was no jolly. The fuse was lit.

We beat Leinster on a night when it became obvious that the panel which we were given had a lot of dead rubber in it i.e. lads either injured or not interested. I was asked to make a big effort to get a full team out for the game against Dublin the following week. So I went into a recruitment drive.

Recruited were a tenacious Kenyan, a midfield dynamo from Limerick, a Cavan soccer player and a young fella from Cork who went to the same school as me at home. We beat the Dubs with a forceful performance and the tension started to surface in the last ten minutes. To say I was personally abused by my marker would not be too much of an overstatement.

I was totally obsessed with winning at this point which I openly admit may not have been in the spirit of the whole thing but lads were putting it up to us big time and I didn’t want to come out the wrong side of any battle. Hudson had the most amusing reaction. We exchanged a few ‘polite’ emails on the subject but after we beat his Dub team we went for a few pints. He got home around 04h in the morning and swore he would never play for the team again, largely because I was such a bollicks. He swore to himself that he would remember how he felt when he woke up the next morning. Needless to say, his anger subsided and he re-told this story with a big smile on his face.

There were other blow-ups too. All the games were refereed by players and that led to inevitable rows. We did get the last round of games done by qualified ref Willie Cashin and he did a good job in fairness. However, to lads’ credit, everything stayed inside the white lines and there have been no lasting issues.

After beating the Dubs we ended up hammering Connaught. I was surprised at the size of the gap on the score line as they have some very good footballers. We were rocking that night though and the familiarity between the players shone through. There were strong links in our team. All the soccer ones play on the same FC Irlande side and all the GAA ones socialise together a lot. We also got guys out consistently.

After Munster won all group games by increasing margins it was decided to declare us the winners after last weeks round. Tonight we will have a finale whereby we will join with fourth place Dublin to take on 2nd/3rd place Connaught/Leinster. We charged everyone to pay €5 to participate and that money will be used to buy trophies and medals (and beer!) which will be presented in The Old Oak tonight.

It will finish off a fantastic few weeks of football. It was a great feeling to be sitting at my desk in the last weeks; nervous about the evening’s game, wondering would we click, thinking about how to hurt the other team. Every game was punctuated with post-match analysis in a Schuman pub. Debates raged, friends fell out but in the end we all walked out the gates on the same side once again.