| A hurling life |
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Dr Willie Walsh, bishop of Killaloe, has a life-long involvement with and love of hurling. He talks here to John Scally about it.
Despite his long association with Clare hurling, Bishop Willie Walsh is a Tipperary man. Born in the parish of Roscrea, his interest in hurling was stimulated by Tipp’s All-Ireland triumph in 1945, which heralded the start of a long era of success for his native county. His playing career was advanced by his arrival in St Flannan’s College in Ennis at a time when Jimmy Smyth was the uncrowned king of the hurling nursery. He never quite made it on to the Harty Cup team but hurled with the school’s junior side. His hurling career continued in the seminary at Maynooth but came to an abrupt halt when he was sent to Rome.
Hurling coach With the curate’s success at school level came opportunities to take on new coaching challenges. In the mid- 80s he became involved with the Clare minors and later the under-21s and also the local club team in Ennis, Eire Og, which went on to contest a Munster club final, losing by two points to Limerick champions, Patrickswell. Then came the call to become a selector on the Clare senior hurling side. "Len Gaynor arrived as trainer in autumn 1991 at a stage when morale in the county was at an all- time low. I was asked to become a selector when it was very hard to find anybody to agree to take the job. Morale was also very low among the players and my first job was to persuade Ger ‘The Sparrow’ O’Loughlin not to retire. I was involved with Len for a year and a half: firstly, with Tony Kelly as a selector, but Tony dropped out after a year and Ger Loughnane succeeded him. Then Ger and I stepped down for a year. "I’d regard 1992 as very significant for Clare hurling. Ger was manager of the under-21 team that was beaten very narrowly by Waterford who, in turn, beat Offaly in the All-Ireland under-21 final in a great match. I’d be very clear in my own mind that while Clare and Offaly had a few older players to balance the new talent, Waterford really didn’t, and that was why they never made the breakthrough. In 1993 Clare got to the Munster final, beating Cork and Limerick on the way, but they collapsed in the Munster final losing to Tipperary by 20 points." Answering the call "In the autumn of 1993, it was still difficult to get selectors, so Ger and I returned. The players felt humiliated by the scale of the defeat to Tipperary so the whole focus in 1994 was to beat Tipp in the Munster Championship. We had a meeting early on that year and agreed to do that and we beat them by two points. But I always felt that we put so much effort into beating them that we could never rise to it again afterwards. We collapsed again against Limerick in the Munster final. During the Minster championship I had been appointed bishop, so I had to step aside and, after the Munster final, Len Gaynor stepped down." At that time nobody could have foreseen that the most successful era in Clare hurling was about to dawn. The appointment of Ger Loughnane as manager was the catalyst. "I’ve great admiration for someone like Justin McCarthy as a coach and a lover of the skills of hurling but I’ve no doubt that Ger Loughnane is the best coach I’ve ever seen by a long way. He has a fantastic capacity to take a training session and get players to train very hard and at the same time enjoy it. Every training session is planned to the last minute and it was always clear he knew what he was doing, which gave confidence to the players. The gospel he was preaching all the time, once he became manager, was that Clare hurling was too slow, that players weren’t moving the ball fast enough and were playing at a slower pace than the top counties like Tipperary, Kilkenny and Cork – and he reversed that. "In 1995 we had a very fine bunch of players who had distinguished themselves at under-21 and Fitzgibbon level and great management, and all the pieces came together. We got the breaks that year with late goals against Cork and Offaly but I feel the breaks went against us in 1996 and 1998. I don’t think we could say that about 1999 because, of the six matches we played in the Championship, we only deserved to win two of them. With the commitment that is required nowadays it is very hard to stay on top. The whole scene has changed in Clare, though, since 1995 and that can be seen in the great success we’ve had at club level since." Stories from the past "I went back to Clare and some people said to me, ‘Ah, you can’t beat those Cork guys. Now, if that was Clare we’d have panicked and taken Jim Cashman off but the Cork guys were wise and knew what was best.’ Of course, that was a bit hurtful to me as a Clare selector, so I went down to Cork a month later and I went to Dr Con Murphy and said, ‘Up front now, what happened with Jim Cashman and why didn’t you change him?’ So he replied, ‘Well, we all agreed that Jim was being beaten and we’d have to change him. The problem was that none of the selectors could agree on who we would replace him with. So we decided to do the usual thing and give him five minutes in the second half." When it comes to hurling, Bishop Walsh has also been known to breach conventional liturgical practice. "There have been a few times when the theological purists would not have been happy with the way funerals of hurling personalities have been dealt with. I particularly recall the funeral of J.P. Ryan. He was a selector on the Limerick hurling team from 1957 to the mid-80s and when he was no longer a selector on the hurling team, he became a selector on the Limerick football team. Hurling was his life. J.P.’s funeral was extraordinary. Hurling people from all over the country came. Sliotars and hurleys were used in the offertory procession. ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ was sung and there were addresses from the secretary of the local club, the chairman of the East Board, the chairman of the County Board, and the hurler’s prayer for the Communion reflection." Great hurling characters "I worked with a character in Ennis called Paddy Duggan. ‘The Duggie’ we used to call him. Duggie’s whole life was hurling. When he became ill, I went to see him in hospital and he had got the news that day that he only had a short time to live. He said, ‘I’d like you to do the funeral Mass and make all the arrangements.’ I agreed. Then he came back in immediately, ‘That’s fine, Willie. I still believe that we’d have won the county final last year if they’d listened to me at half-time.’ As soon as the funeral was arranged, he was straight back to the most important thing in life – hurling! "I’ll never forget another incident with him. We were playing a club match and, all of a sudden, I saw this young lad, Tomas Fogarty, being introduced as a sub on our team. I was amazed and ran up the sideline to ask the secretary who had given the order to bring him on and he answered, ‘Was it not you? The Duggie came up to me and said, ‘Fr Willie wants him in!’" This article first appeared in Reality (September 2001), a publication of the Irish Redemptorists. Willie Walsh has got to know many great characters through his love of hurling. Bishop Walsh takes great pleasure from stories about past games. "One of the things that always struck me in hurling was about the strange way positional switches were made in a match. Straight away, I think of the 1990 hurling final between Cork and Galway. After about 15 minutes I was wondering what the Cork selectors were going to do about Jim Cashman. Joe Cooney was destroying him, and I couldn’t understand why they left Jim there. They went in at half-time and I said, ‘Well, Jim Cashman won’t be centre-back in the second half.’ But, amazingly, he was, and he went on to win his battle with Joe Cooney in the second half, and Cork won the All-Ireland.Clare’s most prominent clerical figure found himself answering the call to again assist the fortunes of the county team.Fr Willie returned to Ireland in the sixties, and found himself teaching in St Flannan’s. Immediately, he got involved in coaching hurling teams. A holy hurling trinity was formed as he worked closely with Fr Seamus Gardiner, who has been a prominent member of the Munster Council for years, and Fr Hugh O’Dowd. Flannans had been going through a lean period since the late-50s. In the early 70s, Fr Willie took charge of the Harty Cup team and in 1976 they won the first of their five All-Irelands under his stewardship. |