Still A Chance To Look Forward, Not Back

It’s a great time of the year to be reading through the sports pages. Club Championships are coming to the final Sunday and there’s no shortage of remarkable success stories and outrageous individual feats to be reading about. It’s fantastic that sport at such a local level gets such coverage.

In the Examiner yesterday, two articles caught my attention. The first was about the Carbery Rangers SFC semi-final against St. Finbarrs. We tussled regularly with Carbery Rangers back in the late 90’s and early 00’s when we were both in the Junior ranks. They went a step further than we did and went on to claim the County and quickly followed it up by winning the Intermediate. Now they are on the cusp of their first Senior final which is a remarkable achievement for a place of its size.

Ballygarvan’s story also drew my attention. We had some very tight battles with them in the SE JHC. They probably came out on top slightly more than us but we were always there or there abouts. I think it was 2004 when we clashed in the semi-final of the Divisional Championship.

It was played out in Riverstick, a cracking spot for a game of hurling. I think the game finished 0-14 to 0-14 with them scoring a late free to get the draw. I was in form that year in goal and that day was one of my better ones. However, one score they got in the second half rankles with me. They had a speedy forward called Muggsy. He took a shot midway through the second half and it came in through a crowd. There was no power on it but it was dipping under the crossbar. I deflected it over to be safe. If I was more confident (or taller!!), I’d have put up the paw and grabbed it. I didn’t though and the game eventually finished level.

I cut my holiday in the US short to come back for the replay out in Ballinhassig. That day was not decided by such fine margins and they beat us with a bit to spare. Ballygarvan went on to survive numerous more replays and win a remarkable County. I can still remember the headline in one of the national newspapers on its sports year in review. It started something like; ‘From Boston to Ballygarvan....’. They ended as a big story whilst we were barely a by-line it.

Today, Ballygarvan play in the Intermediate Hurling final in Cork. When I read about themselves and Carbery Rangers I have many varying feelings; admiration, envy, jealousy to name a few. Mainly though, I’d be just p1ssed off cause they drove on in a way that we never did in Kinsale.

I don’t think enough of our lads would read yesterday’s papers and realise or even believe that could have been us. We won football South-East in ’99, ’01 and ’05 but never back-to-back even though we were the top team in the Division at the time. The hurling came our way in 2006 with a young team but we’ve faded badly since.

The list is too long to analyse all the rights and wrongs but a couple of things are probably notable. One was the disastrous under-age structures (the Dunderrow academy aside) in place. For years, very little came through and what did relied on natural talent more than coaching! Thankfully that has been largely remedied now with some good people involved.

The second is the town factor. Ballygarvan and Rosscarbery are villages. No soccer pitches, rugby pitches or boats. No three nightclubs or streets laden with pubs either. The distraction of drink and women is great craic. How you balance and weigh that against Hurling and football is important though. Too many of us got the balance wrong.

This year Kinsale won the U-21 South-East A Football on B Hurling. The young crop are still young enough to shape their playing careers. They are too young to realise that in ten year’s time they could be sitting in some city in the world reading those articles and thinking about where it went wrong and what they could have done to change it.

Now though, they should be reading those stories thinking, right, we can be playing in County finals up in the Pairc. Let’s get cracking.