brosna wrote: ↑Mon Sep 22, 2025 1:27 pm
I don’t post here often but as a Durrow club man (supporter) I feel compelled to come on and defend our lads as no one else seems to be sticking up for them. I’m an equal fan of Ballinamere hurlers as I am of Durrow footballers and have taken great joy in the progress of the hurlers over the last few years.
We have a tiny pick of footballers in the Ballinamere / Durrow area and only for the county hurlers playing with the Durrow footballers we’d probably be intermediate level at best.
The reality is these lads are hurlers first caught between a rock and a hard place by being obligated to tog out with Durrow due to the precarious arrangement in place.
Is it right that our lads would’ve been playing a dead rubber against Rhode last weekend while KK were off playing a hurling challenge match against Oylegate?
And this is the core of my anger about this whole thing. Our tiny clubs are doing their best to compete at Senior A in both codes and getting nothing but grief for it.
K/K, a club with traditional football areas, have completely given up on football as part of their efforts to dominate hurling in Offaly / Leinster. They’d an all-Ireland u20 winner midfielder from 2021 who had to transfer clubs to get an adequate standard of football.
Maybe instead of articles about Durrow, our local journalists could investigate why a massive club like KK who provided all Ireland winners to Offaly minors in 64, seniors in 82, u21 in 88 and u20 in 2021 have been allowed to burst all the big balls in the parish. And maybe take a look at Rynaghs and Birr too.
L
I do appreciate the genuine sentiment behind this post, so please don't take this as picking a fight, but just an alternative point of view.
(1) In any given club, there is at least one code that could be going a lot better, if more energy and resources were diverted from the other. What you say of Kilcormac-Killoughey is no less true of Birr, of Kinnitty, and plenty more clubs besides. If they really knuckled down and put a huge focus on being as good as they can be at football, they'd probably be a lot better than they are. The same could well be said of somewhere like Edenderry, except the other way around. And even in somewhere like my home town of Ferbane, where the two sports have parity of esteem, there are still those who think that Belmont would have won a hurling title by now if they were allowed go all in and not make allowances for football, and there are people who think that Belmont won't ever win the Seán Robbins, so lads would be as well off to commit entirely to football. (Just to be clear, those people are wrong - the way things operate now is the only way either club has a chance of winning the big prizes they covet).
(2) You cannot force players to commit to something they don't want to commit to. Kilcormac-Killoughey put a team on the field, and if it was the case that Conor Mahon, James Gorman, Adam Screeney, Cillian Kiely and four or five more very talented footballers all wanted to commit to playing football and weren't being allowed to do so by management, then that would be a problem. But I don't believe there's any such desire there. Some hurlers are happy to tog out for occasional games when it suits them, but their primary commitment is hurling, and it's an amateur game, that's their call to make.
In time, if there was a core group of players who wanted to take football seriously and the club was blocking their efforts by not giving them training time on the pitch or what have you, again that would be a problem in that it would be going against the GAA ethos completely. But I've never heard one person say that.
(3) St. Rynagh's certainly can't be castigated for this. The club is not as high up the pecking order as it was in the big ball world, but there is a St. Rynagh's football club whose sole function is to promote gaelic football. There's no way there are lads going to club executive meetings in Cloghan telling everyone to pull the breaks because it's a hurling parish. Moreover, for all their struggles at adult level in recent years, the Cloghan team that won an U-15 A title three years ago was largely St. Rynagh's players, albeit with a few players from other clubs. There are plenty of football-only clubs that haven't won an underage "A" title in a long time, so there's no "investigation" to be done there either.
(4) I'm sorry, but I can only cringe at the description of either Ballinamere or Durrow as "tiny" clubs. Even if the two clubs fielded their own teams in football and hurling so Durrow were picking from Durrow only and Ballinamere picked from Ballinamere only, they still wouldn't qualify as "tiny", in fact they'd probably be somewhere around the middle in terms of population to pick from in the list of Offaly's 41 clubs. And given that right now, every Durrow football team, every Ballinamere hurling team and every Ballinamere/Durrow team picks from both those territories, my guess is they're absolutely in the top ten and probably in the top six or seven, behind the Tullamores and Edenderrys of this world but not too many others.
The likes of Seir Kieran, Lusmagh, Doon, Clonmore Harps and a few others might have cause to use the descriptor "tiny" if they wanted to, but they'd have more about themselves than to do that. Look at the renovation plans in Shannonbridge, a club that could well describe themselves that way but to their credit, they're thinking big.
There are some clubs that are genuinely small clubs in relative terms, absolutely, but using words like "tiny" about yourself is a surefire way to develop an inferiority complex, and I really hope that nobody in a position of influence in either Ballinamere or Durrow thinks that way.
(5) Finally, this line:
Our tiny clubs are doing their best to compete at Senior A in both codes and getting nothing but grief for it.
Park the bit about the adjective for now. What grief are either Ballinamere or Durrow getting for trying to compete at Senior A in both? Anyone can find an odd begrudger or whinger hiding behind a username on social media or even on here, and you'll certainly get an odd stray sitting on a barstool somewhere that thinks he knows it all because he was a handy U-14 before his knee injury 30 years ago, but the only commentary giving out about either club is related to Durrow conceding the walkover, and there's mixed views on that. I haven't read a single word of criticism from anyone about how the clubs compete at the top table, albeit I haven't spent my time looking for "Johnny59274524" talking muck to his 11 followers on twitter. Where have you seen anything in the local media, or from people willing to put their names to what they say?
And when I say I'm not bringing this up to be harsh, I mean it. Spare yourself the victim complex, stop making straw man arguments, and instead of looking at a 50/50 ethos in your parish as some sort of handicap and bemoaning the fact that other clubs don't have the same obligations weighing them down, respect and appreciate that both sports have a strong tradition in your community.
That's a good thing. Instead, look around the place to find the countless examples of clubs that prove that it's perfectly possible to do both, and to be successful in doing so. And I'm not talking about city clubs like Monaleen, Cuala, St. Finbarr's or Na Fianna that are irrelevant to anyone here in Offaly, I'm talking about how Ferbane and Belmont have made it work for both. I'm talking about Slaughtneil, Cratloe, Shelmaliers, Loughmore-Castleiney, and there's plenty more smaller communities too that consistently punch above their weight in at least one code while making a decent fist at the other.