Club championship hurling can be capricious. On Sunday, perennial Waterford champions (well, the past 12) Ballygunner head to the TUS Gaelic Grounds for the fourth successive year. It will be their third crack at Na Piarsaigh in the last four years and their seventh consecutive meeting with Limerick champions.
It is a sequence they haven’t dropped since 2017 when Na Piarsaigh beat them in that year’s Munster final but Patrickswell, Kilmallock and Doon have also had a go with no better luck.
For all that dominance, there is a similarity between the clubs. Both have carried off one All-Ireland in the past 10 seasons and both have plenty of regrets about lost opportunities along the way.
In the past 15 provincial championships, the clubs have won four titles each. The Limerick club have a slight advantage in that they lost a replayed All-Ireland final in 2018 whereas Ballygunner have been thwarted at the penultimate stage on three occasions.
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Damien Quigley played in the first of Na Piarsaigh’s wins in 2011 and has been part of management in more recent years. He accepts that they might have had more.
“You’d like to think they might have had another one. The Cuala final (2018) is the obvious one. You need a bit of luck to win these things as well and I don’t think we were blessed with luck that time. We probably should have won in Croke Park.
“[Shane] Dowling missed a free, 40 metres out from goal – most unlike him. You can’t hang your hat on that and it went to a replay, so the best team wins once we’re in the replay.
“But we were a bit unlucky in that Mike Casey was sick for the replay. So, he played the first half, couldn’t come out in the second half and we hadn’t looked like we’d concede any sort of a goal from play, really, in the preceding 90 minutes.
“And then they get two goals in 12 minutes and Mick isn’t on the field. That’s not a coincidence – he won an All-Ireland later that year. So, from that perspective you’d say, yeah, Cuala had a little bit of luck and we didn’t have any.”
He is quick to point out that the razor’s edge of providence can cut both ways. When the club won its All-Ireland, they had plenty of trouble getting there in the semi-final with Wexford’s Oulart-The Ballagh.
“We were a bit lucky against Oulart because we would have had a thing about getting to a final – would you believe, mentally. We’d lost two semi-finals, one to Portumna and one in extra time. It would have been a thing, yeah.
“It’s not as easy to break those glass ceilings when you’re an amateur, hurling away, as it is maybe a professional who’s getting advice or getting all sorts of sports psychology. It was a big deal for us to beat Oulart so that was our turn to go at it.”
Like Ballygunner, they lost their semi-finals to clubs who went on to win the All-Ireland and in most cases, convincingly.
Quigley makes a very relevant point about club competition – its rigours can vary from year to year.
“It depends on the field as well. You can be a bit unlucky with who’s out there and who’s not, at a given time. You know, Ballygunner were probably a bit unlucky on their side. They bumped into Ballyhale once or twice and were a bit unfortunate in one or two of those games too.”
[ Limerick SHC final: Na Piarsaigh pull clear in extra-time to down DoonOpens in new window ]
The shadow of Kilkenny giants Ballyhale Shamrocks – five of their nine All-Irelands have come in the period under review – falls across the championship, nearly every time they win the county title, as they did again last week. It has been Ballygunner’s challenge to cross swords with them three times.
One ended in the Waterford club’s only All-Ireland in the electric 2022 final, decided by the last puck of the match – Harry Ruddle’s goal. They lost two semi-finals to the same opponents in 2019 and when defending champions.
The win, though, created higher demands on the club’s ambition. Stephen Frampton played for the club and Waterford and was on the first Ballygunner team to win Munster, 24 years ago. He has been a county selector and a broadcast analyst in the meantime.
He also sees his club as having lost opportunities to do better.
“Absolutely. We’ve eked out a decent record in Munster. Up to last year we had won three in a row, which means for better or worse, our barometer really has moved. The Munster thing has been broken, and okay, it’s not every year, but we’ve been doing quite well in recent times and our sights have been more focused on getting to Croke Park.
“It sounds almost entitled, which isn’t the way the club feel about it at all but the older guys – and I count myself as one of them – certainly see it as we’re on the crest of a wave at the moment and want to hang on for as long as we can because we won’t be doing it indefinitely.
“It’s not a bad statement to make that Ballyhale have kind of been our nemesis in the most recent of times because they just happen to be one of the most successful, or maybe the most successful, club team ever in the country.”
Frampton knows that despite the narrowness of the semi-final defeats – a possibly crucial goal getting stuck in the mud of a Thurles goalmouth in dire weather against Ballyhale seven seasons ago, and a unique penalty shoot-out defeat against St Thomas’ on an endless night in Portlaoise in 2023 – there are dismissive narratives.
“People around Waterford would suggest – and maybe in the local environs of South Kilkenny – that we’ve kind of underachieved, but there’s been little or nothing between us and the best teams in recent years. It’s just that the drop of the ball hasn’t gone the right way. The penalty shoot-out, the ball sticking in the mud – that’s two separate occasions.”
He also points out that for any teams from Waterford, winning is a specific challenge. This is because the county hasn’t the same tradition of winning as others.
“I now do understand the psyche from working with Liam Cahill and Mikey Bevans (this year’s All-Ireland winning management with Tipperary) when they were with Waterford. You got that sense that, well ‘we’re Tipperary here’; we’re going up to win this. It was a bit of an eye-opener to me even, but they didn’t quite understand our psyche.
“For a county like Waterford, that sort of thing is a hurdle. You’d try to be pig-headed about it, but you’d be lying if you said it wasn’t a challenge.”
Ballygunner and Na Piarsaigh meet this weekend and the winners will take a definite confidence boost into the rest of the Munster championship. After that, who knows?
