Haven 2013

Castlehaven and Passage are small communities which take on city clubs with infinitely greater resources and try to make up the disparity through heart and soul and belief’ EAMONN SWEENEY – 20 OCTOBER 2013 As last Sunday's Cork senior football final entered the final quarter and the cries of 'Haaaven', 'Haaaven', accompanied by some lusty thumping of the back wall of the Blackrock Terrace rang round Páirc Uí Chaoimh, it was clear this was one of those unmistakable moments when a team has bent the game in its direction and victory is within its power. ALSO IN THIS SECTION 'Go home and wash yourself' - Sean Og O hAilpin reveals struggle against racism Murphy leads Ireland to first blood in muted encounter Colm O'Rourke: National games worthy of special place on curriculum €10 Mortgage Protection Mortgage Protection from €10 month. Compare 7 Companies. Instant Quote. InsuranceJunction.ie/instant-quote Stop Snoring, Now € 49 100% Guaranteed. Free Shipping! Recommended by Doctors. No fitting. SnoreMenders.co.uk/StopSnoring Ads by Google Castlehaven had just moved three points clear of a Nemo Rangers team that had threatened to blow them away in the first half, full-forward Brian Hurley was proving unmarkable, Seán Dineen was utterly dominating midfield and the West Cork team were driving for home. You might have thought, given Castlehaven's status as reigning champions, that there was something inevitable about that moment. But it wasn't like that at all. New beginnings After the 2012 season which ended in December with Munster final defeat by Dr Crokes of Killarney, Castlehaven had to come to terms with the kind of losses rural clubs expect in the current economic climate. By the start of 2013, Alan Cahalane, Mark Cahalane and Timmy O'Donovan had emigrated, David Burns retired and manager James McCarthy, considered to be the craftiest club boss in Cork, announced he was stepping down. James Mc seemed to a certain extent irreplaceable. At the AGM the club plumped for Finbarr Santry, the kind of invaluable official who's taken a turn at more or less every job going but an unknown quantity as manager. The fodder crisis This spring saw the nation's farmers in terrible difficulties. The dire weather meant that feed stockpiles were used up and the grass-growing season was severely shortened, a combination of circumstances which left farmers struggling to keep their cattle alive. Seán Dineen is a young farmer. He's also the best club midfielder in Cork. If it wasn't for the farming, he'd be an inter-county player and a good one. But the man works the kind of long and tiring hours which just don't fit in with inter-county commitments. And this year's added set of problems made it difficult to give the commitment at club level. He couldn't make league matches and the club wondered when they'd get him back for the championship. Because of the fodder crisis. This is the kind of thing Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola seldom have to worry about. Brian Three years ago, Brian Hurley was the best minor forward in Ireland. This year he was the best forward in the All-Ireland under 21 championship, scoring a goal of the most sublime quality in the final Cork lost to Galway. When I take my three daughters to Haven matches, I tell them to keep a close eye on Brian because he'll do things worth watching. On St Patrick's Day, we saw him score 14 points in an under 21 game. Everyone agreed it was something special, the kind of thing even Brian wouldn't do again in a hurry. He got 14 points again the week after. Everyone agreed it was the kind of score you'd hardly get in a senior match. Foreboding Nemo Rangers were firm favourites to win back the county title. They would also be Haven's first-round opponents. And going into that game on a week night in Bandon, Finbarr Santry found himself planning not just without Seán Dineen and the four guys who'd left the panel but without another five injured players. Castlehaven seemed set for defeat that night. Instead they drew 0-16 to 1-13 after extra-time. The replay went to extra-time too and Haven won by 4-10 to 1-12. Brian Hurley scored 2-7 and, like Achilles emerging from his tent to scatter the Trojans, Seán Dineen came on to start his season. The crisis was over. Damien, David and The Bricker Damien Cahalane knew he'd be going in for a hip operation once the team were knocked out. Until then he was going to play through the pain barrier. The semi-final opposition were Carbery, a divisional team some of whose constituent parts are bigger clubs in their own right than Castlehaven. Damien gritted his teeth, man-marked a succession of forwards who've played for Cork at different levels and got up the field for three points from wing-back. Haven trailed by one with a minute left and won by one. Without Damien and without his pain they were goners that day. These are the extremes that players who will never see a bob out of the game go to. Nothing is bigger than a GAA heart. Hearts like Damien's or like that of Liam 'The Bricker' Collins who played his first county final back in 1997 along with Damien's father Niall or that of David Limerick, who has come back from variouis injuries which cost him an inter-county career but couldn't stop him doing it for the club. Men who've paid a cost in pain but judged it worthwhile. Men who restore the proper and proud meaning to the word 'manly.' Connection The day before the final I bring my eight-year-old daughter Lara to the pitch for under 10 training. And it strikes me that connection is what makes the GAA special. Because Lara is playing on the same pitch where the senior players do their thing. OK, this happens in other clubs in other sports. But she and the other kids are also playing on the same pitch where Damien Cahalane's father Niall, his uncle John Cleary, Mike Maguire and Larry Tompkins trained when they won their All-Ireland medals in front of a packed Croke Park. And that is something different about the GAA, that link between the highest heights of the game and the humblest underage training session. Your kid may support Manchester United but he or she is unlikely to be kicking the ball around Old Trafford at the weekend. Who are Nemo Rangers? They are seven All-Ireland titles, 15 Munster titles and 18 Cork titles, all record-breaking totals. Eighteen wins out of 20 county finals, some of them massacres. The time to catch them is in an early round at a country venue because when they play games in Páirc Uí Chaoimh they are supreme. The idea that a team could beat them twice in the one championship seems far-fetched. And in the first half of the county final they are at their most Nemoesque, moving the ball at pace with the likes of James Masters and Paul Kerrigan kicking spectacular points and producing the kind of onslaught which threatens to destroy Castlehaven as it has destroyed so many teams before. Hanging in there But Haven are not destroyed. Instead they seem to draw strength from the challenge Nemo have presented, the challenge to play Gaelic football in its purest form. Roland Whelton, Steven Hurley and Shane Nolan each kick perhaps the best points of their careers, all of them outrageous angled efforts from distance. And even when an Alan Cronin goal puts Nemo four points ahead, Haven rally straight from the kick-out and hit three points on the trot to trail 1-9 to 0-11 at half-time. Twenty scores in 30 minutes of football, wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time? Dineen and Hurley Inc Only one Haven player didn't play well in that first half. Seán Dineen gave the ball away for the goal and couldn't seem to get his hands on the ball. But from the beginning of the second half he took hold of the game at midfield, fetching high ball, winning breaking ball, driving forward with the kind of power which perhaps only comes from those hard and long hours in the fields. And he provides the ammunition for Brian Hurley to run at Nemo and hoist a couple of the most unlikely points over the bar, struck on the run under pressure with defenders hanging off him and homing in over the black spot like guided missiles. Those chants of 'Haaaven' 'Haaaven' begin and continue when the final whistle goes and the game ends 0-16 to 1-11 to Haven. Brian Hurley has 12 of those 16, five of them from play. You'll be seeing more of him. Foundations Why do I think Castlehaven are so important and worth writing about at such length? It's not simply because they're the club of my children, it's because they stand for something good and important in both Irish sport and society. So much of the time journalists have to write about controversy and complaint and cynicism and incompetence. Think of Budget day. But a club like Castlehaven, or like Passage whose first ever Waterford senior hurling title last Sunday must have been every bit as emotional an occasion, is based on values of hard work and pride and love. It's love above all which drives people on to build clubs which can produce days like this for their parishes. Castlehaven and Passage are based around fishing villages, small communities which take on city clubs with infinitely greater resources and try to make up the disparity through heart and soul and belief. They, and the people from the clubs who'll do themselves proud in another set of county finals today, don't regard the huge amount of voluntary work they do as a sacrifice. They think of it as a privilege. We travelled down on Sunday night and saw the bonfires and then the surreal spectacle of copious tables of fine whiskey and schnapps laid out by the side of the road by West Cork Distillers, co-founded by a former fisherman named Denis McCarthy whose son David won a West Cork minor title with the club just the week before. And as we piled out to sup it in the rain and sing, I thought of how much unseen work is needed to keep the Haven show on the road. Who are Castlehaven? The TV viewers saw Brian Hurley on Sunday but didn't see Brendan Deasy doing the stats, Martin O'Mahony and Dan O'Sullivan carrying the water, Niall and Dinny Cahalane advising Finbarr Santry, their brother-in-law, the quiet man who was the right choice in the end. They didn't see everyone who drove those players to games when they were kids, who put out the cones at training, who fetch the balls from the bushes behind the goals at the pitch and go out in the rain to sell draw tickets on wintry nights, or Jerome Geaney writing his county final song and Brendan O'Neill and Paddy Mullins singing it, or Fidelma Hurley, mother of midfielder Dermot and a woman who has fought serious illness this year with as much bravery as any player ever needs to summon up on the pitch, or Tom, the man from Cape Clear Island who has travelled in and out across that rough stretch of water for decades by boat for games and spent last week tending his cattle in a new Castlehaven jersey. Or Eilish Collins, a terrific young woman who played the organ in the local church and died in May after battling cancer and who the captain Seánie Cahalane mentioned in his speech because she supported the team and he knows how the club is about what happens off the pitch as well as on it. And all of it going back to the 1970s when the seven Collins brothers drove the club from Junior B to a senior county final in less than a decade and taught the parish that anything is possible if you dream big enough. Any club can learn from that. Any person too. Sophie Three days after the final, Seán Dineen became a father for the first time when his partner Gina gave birth to little Sophie who had wisely decided against making an appearance during the county final. And there was a beautiful picture on Facebook of the big hands which have driven cattle and carried bags of feed and caught such an amount of ball at midfield cradling his baby girl. Life goes on in Castlehaven. And so does football. It's hard to tell them apart sometimes.