Antrim Hurling

[the colonel]

belfast select...... christ i had a team written out but it was mostly galls men and the herrons and some from St Treseas and one from Sarsfields maybe two from st Pauls, one from st endas, or are they north antrim     aggies have maybe one but i'm losing the will. the DALL hammer them         

let us know what your select was milltown? i wouldn't have a clue about who would play for the divisional teams

[Fairhead]

Very interesting senior draw; i would say Dunloy are quietly satisfied and Loughgiel might be nervous. They have a tough enough route just get to the final and then they can start thinking about 7 in a row  

Fair play to Glenariffe for staying in the senior championship rather than droppping down and now they have a chance of getting to a semi final. This can only bring their players on further.

Seems to be mixed opinion (what else would you expect with Antrim people!!) on the divisional teams. Credit to the county though for coming up with the idea but they have to stick with it for a 3 or a 5 year period and give it a chance. Theres no point in giving up on it after this year if results are poor. Other people have mentioned Cork and Kerry as examples of where it does work but they have been doing it for a lot of years. Two things are definitely needed for it to work:
1. The county board will need to have a bit of vision and organisational skills to sort out a manageable calendar. I wonder will they do the shocking thing and ask for advice from a Cork, Kerry or Limerick board, and
2. All the clubs with players involved will need to buy into it.

I thought there were a few older posters on here who would remember that amalgamtion teams were tried in the 80's (ok not divisional teams but still) to varying degrees of success. I remember Ballycastle beating a city based team who i think were called Sliabh Dubh and then of course we had an amalgamtion team winning the senior championship as well. I think they were called Loughgiel but their star player was from a junior club!!!!  

[NAG]

What way will St Johns measure up this year then, will they make any progress from last year or previous few years?

[slow corner back]

Very interesting senior draw; i would say Dunloy are quietly satisfied and Loughgiel might be nervous. They have a tough enough route just get to the final and then they can start thinking about 7 in a row  

Fair play to Glenariffe for staying in the senior championship rather than droppping down and now they have a chance of getting to a semi final. This can only bring their players on further.

Seems to be mixed opinion (what else would you expect with Antrim people!!) on the divisional teams. Credit to the county though for coming up with the idea but they have to stick with it for a 3 or a 5 year period and give it a chance. Theres no point in giving up on it after this year if results are poor. Other people have mentioned Cork and Kerry as examples of where it does work but they have been doing it for a lot of years. Two things are definitely needed for it to work:
1. The county board will need to have a bit of vision and organisational skills to sort out a manageable calendar. I wonder will they do the shocking thing and ask for advice from a Cork, Kerry or Limerick board, and
2. All the clubs with players involved will need to buy into it.

I thought there were a few older posters on here who would remember that amalgamtion teams were tried in the 80's (ok not divisional teams but still) to varying degrees of success. I remember Ballycastle beating a city based team who i think were called Sliabh Dubh and then of course we had an amalgamtion team winning the senior championship as well. I think they were called Loughgiel but their star player was from a junior club!!!!  

Armoy were involved in a few of those earlier amalgamations which never really worked in the eighties. As for the loughgiel amalgamation winning the county title the ballycastle team of the seventies and eighties had one or two armoy men on it. People in glass houses etc

[maxpower]

Its an interesting draw alright, and if loughgiel are for winning a championship they will have to do it the hard way, probaly having to play St John, Rossa, Cushendall then a final.

Might possibly be the draw they wanted at this stage as there performances against Cushendall in recent finals has been very poor so if they are for winning a final they will prob want to play either Dunloy or one of the expected weaker teams. 

Love knock out championship and although i'll admit at this stage it would still appear to between the big three i think Ballycastle with Neal McAuley flying could make an impact and the Johnnies always have potential to cause an upset, as do Rossa.

Think the co board, or my old club mate Skull deserve a bit of credit for trying something alternate with the divisional teams and whilst i expect a certain degree of apathy in its initial year if one of the divisional teams makes an impact, someone gets recognised by S&W or players feel they benefited from playing at a higher level on a competitive basis then it could take of.

Nothing ventured nothing gained,

[NAG]

Max

Good to see the rivalry isnt dead, you waded straight into loughgiel there opening old wounds!

What is the situation with managers out around the country for the incoming year?

[maxpower]

NAG

don't think the rivalry will ever die ...

far better talking about your opponents ills than your own

[NAG]

Who is taking the reigns this year then Max and what about your neighbours are they coming back with anything this year?

[maxpower]

No men in yet, AGM is this Sunday, heard plenty of rumours but nothing confirmed, too be fair the three men stepping down will be hard to replace and only lost to one Ulster team in two years, just a pity it was loughgiel, and one of the defeats was championship

[theskull1]

Max

Good to see the rivalry isnt dead, you waded straight into loughgiel there opening old wounds!

What is the situation with managers out around the country for the incoming year?

old??
Rubbing salt in the open wound surely. Need the ould niggle to keep it interesting.  . The bodies will still be a threat.

Hey max enough of the old

[milltown row]

belfast select...... christ i had a team written out but it was mostly galls men and the herrons and some from St Treseas and one from Sarsfields maybe two from st Pauls, one from st endas, or are they north antrim     aggies have maybe one but i'm losing the will. the DALL hammer them         

let us know what your select was milltown? i wouldn't have a clue about who would play for the divisional teams

Lamhs,    Brendan Herron, Michael Herron, Conor McConville, Chris Tumelty

McDermott's    Thomas Maguire

Sarsfields,    Kevin Ward, Kevin McKearnan junior

St Endas    Philip Curran

St Galls,    Conor Mc Gourty, Kieran Mc Gourty, Sean Mc Areavey
Johnny Flynn Karl Stewart Ciaran O'Grady Aodhan Gallagher

St Pauls,    Declan Gamble Fintan Gamble Ciaran Killyleagh

St Teresa's,    Philip Maguire, Conor McGoldrick

St Agnes,    Declan McLarnon

I could have put more on from my club, but it's down to the manager and whether the players make themselves available


Have played against all these players and watched so many games over the years and these would make a fair enough team

[Fairhead]

Very interesting senior draw; i would say Dunloy are quietly satisfied and Loughgiel might be nervous. They have a tough enough route just get to the final and then they can start thinking about 7 in a row  

Fair play to Glenariffe for staying in the senior championship rather than droppping down and now they have a chance of getting to a semi final. This can only bring their players on further.

Seems to be mixed opinion (what else would you expect with Antrim people!!) on the divisional teams. Credit to the county though for coming up with the idea but they have to stick with it for a 3 or a 5 year period and give it a chance. Theres no point in giving up on it after this year if results are poor. Other people have mentioned Cork and Kerry as examples of where it does work but they have been doing it for a lot of years. Two things are definitely needed for it to work:
1. The county board will need to have a bit of vision and organisational skills to sort out a manageable calendar. I wonder will they do the shocking thing and ask for advice from a Cork, Kerry or Limerick board, and
2. All the clubs with players involved will need to buy into it.

I thought there were a few older posters on here who would remember that amalgamtion teams were tried in the 80's (ok not divisional teams but still) to varying degrees of success. I remember Ballycastle beating a city based team who i think were called Sliabh Dubh and then of course we had an amalgamtion team winning the senior championship as well. I think they were called Loughgiel but their star player was from a junior club!!!!  

Armoy were involved in a few of those earlier amalgamations which never really worked in the eighties. As for the loughgiel amalgamation winning the county title the ballycastle team of the seventies and eighties had one or two armoy men on it. People in glass houses etc

Ah now scb don't be getting hot under the collar in January over a bit of slagging!!! Just cos your annoyed at drawing the Faughs in the 1st round of the intermediate dont be taking it out on the rest of us.

[saffron sam2]

TWENTY years past his hurling prime, in a bar in Armoy village, Olcan McFetridge declares that life is "wonderful". He beams with good cheer, laughs frequently during conversation, and betrays no discernible trace of bitterness or regret. But he's not the version of 'Cloot' McFetridge we once knew. Back then hurling made his heart race and, now, he finds it hard to detect the faintest pulse.

It is easier to convey McFetridge's indifference to the game he once loved than it is to comprehend it. He grew up in an estate a couple of minutes from the Armoy GAA pitch and immediately yielded to its charms. Armoy was a modest club most at home in the intermediate ranks but through Antrim he made his name. He lived for hurling and this month 20 years ago he became one of four Antrim players nominated for an All-Star -- more than Kilkenny, Cork, Waterford and Clare. Those were the dizzy times in which he prospered, before injury finished him.

Antrim would go on to win one All-Star for the '88 season, awarded to Ciaran Barr, but by the end of the county's unforgettable championship of 1989, McFetridge had done enough to earn his. In the storied slaying of Offaly he was one of their chief assassins. Hurling devoured his spare time. And now, oddly, he feels nothing. Whatever was there is gone. He knows it's strange but that's the way it is.

He is not involved in the club and rarely goes to a local match. In the past he served as chairman, juvenile coach, sat on various committees, and played until his late 30s. Then the fire went away. A few years ago he was asked to manage a county development squad and quit after a few training sessions; he had no feel for it.

"I said 'what am I doing here?' I lost all my motivation basically. I left it all behind. People still want to talk to me about it. Sometimes the TV is on in the bar and a game might come on. Like, the Offaly game came on one night on TnaG and I'd no interest in it. I never mention hurling at all. People are coming in talking hurling, talking hurling all the time. I rarely get involved in a hurling conversation."

He used to work on building sites as a plasterer but more recently he has packed that in because of a bad back and now runs a pub, McClafferty's in his native village among the Glens. On a Wednesday afternoon in January, there are a few regulars huddled around the warm fire. The pace is decidedly pedestrian and he likes it that way. He had it hectic for long enough.

He and his wife Helen had their first child, Erin, when he was 41, four years ago. Last autumn, their second girl, Emer, turned one. "All my time goes into them two wee girls," he says affectionately, "they're very special to me. Maybe if they got interested in camogie I might get the buzz again but I wouldn't force them into anything. Just let them do their own wee thing.

"My wife often said to me to get back involved, but I said there is no point unless you're going into it properly, (otherwise) you are wasting everyone's time. I intend to put a lot of time into the family, because to me, at this stage of my life, it is about family really. 'Cos my sporting time is over."

* * * * *

ONLY a few miles away, in the village of Cloghmills, Niall Patterson is standing behind the counter of the family shop he's been looking after since his father died 17 years ago. His hair is greyer and he has put on more weight but he's still recognisable from the days when he was another of those identifiable characters who helped electrify the hurling world, prompting Nicky English to admit after one league encounter: "Those lads can hurl."

English would prove their nemesis in the '89 All-Ireland final, Antrim's first since 1943, with a record score of 2-12. But the respect they gained during those years was genuine and will stand firm as they grow older and people's memories fade. Patterson was always an improbably large figure, his weight veering around 18 stones during his best years with Antrim. He drops in to see Cloot occasionally when he's on the road. But, like Cloot, he has lost contact with many of the team that Jim Nelson moulded into a winning concern.

This year there's talk of a reunion to mark the 20th anniversary of Antrim hurling's greatest year. Cloot hadn't heard of it but he likes the idea. During conversation with Patterson, his door swings open and, like a grand stage entrance, in steps an ebullient Sambo McNaughton to renew brief acquaintance after several months. His hands are blackened from coal he's picked up in Dunloy.

Sambo has never let go. Like Dominic 'Woody' McKinley, the joint manager of the Antrim senior hurlers, he was unable to break completely free. It had him hooked. A couple of years ago he asked Patterson to come in as county goalkeeping coach but he didn't have the time. He has also, like managers before him, asked Cloot to help out but was told that the heart wasn't in it.

In the personal notes accompanying the Antrim players for the 1989 All-Ireland final, Patterson, now 47, is listed as a musician. He has been playing music since he was 14, guitar and keyboard, and last March he parted ways in a duet that had worked together for 14 years. He was doing too many nights and couldn't sustain it. Now, part of another two-man band called Beezer, he usually plays Saturday nights and has regained his appetite for stage performance.

He had an offer to join one of the country's "biggest showbands" which was a lifetime ambition but it came too late. Like Cloot, he has a young family, three girls all younger than eight, and that is where much of his focus has relocated. In recent years, though, he started to coach goalkeepers at Loughgiel, the club he won an All-Ireland with in 1983.

"I had good reactions, good reflexes," he says, (but) as I got older I got slower and that's why I quit (at 30)." Weight became a problem then? "It was, yeah, a constant fighting battle. The family was all the same. I trained hard, I was fit, even though I was big. Jim (Nelson) would have me doing this and that. The best I got to was 15-16 stone. I started helping out DD Quinn, our goalkeeper in Loughgiel, but I had taken him as far as I could -- the game had progressed so much since I played. I got on the blower and phoned Donal óg Cusack and a few others, picking their brains. They said Donal óg might be distant but he was first class. He gave me a list of what they do and I had to say, 'no, that's plenty'. All the 'keepers were good, Clinton Hennessy as well."

Unlike McFetridge, Patterson retains his love of hurling and has stayed a passionate follower. There was a seven-year hiatus, however, when he stayed away from all games, club and county. Soon after retirement he went to Casement Park with an uncle who was virtually immobile and they were prevented from taking the car into the ground. The official insisted on players and mentors only. Having just retired he felt grievously let down. Then one day on a whim he went up to see Loughgiel play and that ended his exile.

"We had a team going over several years that could have won an All-Ireland; we were capable of it," he recalls, reeling off matches; the 1-24 scored against Cork in the 1986 All-Ireland semi-final; the 1-19 to 2-18 defeat by Kilkenny in the semi-final of 1991; the epic win over Offaly; the scalps they took in the league. "It should have kept going from then. Our biggest problem was (that) we didn't have a Club Tyrone type thing (to raise finance). We need the minors in Leinster as well as the seniors. It's all money."

* * * * *

HAVING been squeezed out by Kilkenny in 1991, with McFetridge injured, Antrim were never the same force again. The next year Down won their first Ulster title since 1941 and while Antrim regained the provincial title in '93, they were crushed by Kilkenny, collapsing in the final quarter. McFetridge made a comeback after injury but wasn't the same player. Doctors had repeatedly told him to retire. "I wasn't a rebel but I wasn't going to be told what to do. To retire at 26, I wasn't going to do that."

He sidestepped surgery for a back injury and instead his career was put on life-support: physio and patchwork improvisation extended his Antrim playing days. He believes that going back in '93 was a mistake. Kilkenny routed them 4-18 to 1-9. The next year Antrim lost 0-11 to 2-23 to Limerick. They were finished.

McFetridge remained wedded to hurling and took the county minors for two years. In 1995, they lost to Kilkenny by five points, a highly respectable showing, with their top scorer Brian McFall going on to feature for the seniors in later years. This was a team that grew up having seen the exploits of men like McFetridge, Patterson, Sambo. But management wasn't an easy ride in Antrim any more than playing.

"That was a struggle the whole way," recalls McFetridge. "You were shifted from pillar to post for training sessions, you didn't know where you were going next, and you were fighting with the county board looking for this and that. I remember one time we were playing in the Leinster league in Belfast, and we couldn't get a cup of tea for the young fellas. And a game in county Down where we paid for their food out of our own pockets -- that's no way to operate.

"I remember one time, too, we got the bus from here, a minibus, to Belfast. The Troubles were going at the time, and we got in the gate at Casement and a couple of boys came to the gates and ordered the bus man to drive the bus out on to the Anderstown Road. And they burned the bus. I remember it well.

"They needed to burn a bus and that was it. There was a lot of trouble going on at that particular time; maybe we were silly going in. We went ahead and trained and had to get a way back. Three or four black taxis picked us up and took us out of there and our driver arranged to have another minibus sent down to collect us."

What did the '89 team leave behind? "Antrim didn't build on it at all. Possibly, if they (county board) had been doing their job properly, money wouldn't have been a problem because for five or six years Antrim were fairly successful. They could have built on it. They could have got more sponsorship.

"I know Sambo and Woody will do everything they can and if they can't make people move, nobody can; if they can't get the county board into their way of thinking, nobody can."

* * * * *

PATTERSON hasn't been to Croke Park since he retired, chiefly because he was busy with the band and the shop. "I'd love to go in and see the museum," he says boyishly. He remembers the crowds that greeted them in all the hurling villages of north Antrim when they had their homecoming after the '89 All-Ireland final. "It hurt us, because we didn't do them justice. But that All-Ireland, it's an experience that will be taken to the grave."

When they got back to Glenavy that September it was a couple of hours past midnight. Cloot got up on the stage and played the accordion. He's asked what he treasures most and it is the "camaraderie" and the respect players had for one another. He is still in contact with Brian Whelahan and in 2000 a group of 22 arrived in Birr for Cloot's stag.

Patterson remembers a game in Loughgiel a while back when a few young lads came into the shop and asked who he would be rooting for. That's how little some youngsters know of the legacy he and his team-mates left behind. It was like they never existed.

McFetridge feels he has emptied all his reserves of energy and interest. A few years ago he was sitting down to watch the hurling final between Cork and Kilkenny when his young daughter came in and asked to be taken to the park for a walk. "The ball was just about to be thrown in and she came in I said 'right, come on.'

"If you went into my house you wouldn't think I played hurling, because you'd see nothing there that resembles hurling. Like, everything I got, strips, tracksuits and what not, I gave that all away. After my last game I swapped jerseys with DJ Carey; some young fella asked me if I could get it. I said I'd try. I gave it to the young lad who wanted it. It was just the way I was."

He played his last club game several years ago. After games he'd need his late mother to tie his boots the next morning, such was the jarring pain and stiffness that would follow. More recently he took part in a charity hurling match. "I told them after that if they came up with any more bright ideas like that, just ask me for a donation (laughs). It was a bad idea."

How about the girls then, will they play? "I don't know. I wouldn't say no, and I will get them a hurling stick. Sometimes there when I go to matches, including juvenile matches, and see the abuse that's hurled in over the wire. Some of the senior matches it's ridiculous the stuff that's shouted in. Like, I'm no prude; I can do bad language myself. But I think some of it is really, really vindictive. It's not even to do with how you're playing, but to do with who you are and who your family are, and your ancestors were. I don't want them involved in that.

"It kind of goes on everywhere, (and) not just Antrim. That would turn me right away. Like, when the oldest girl was eight months, I stopped at Ballycastle to watch a match, we called in as we were passing by, and stood for five minutes and the language was unbelievable, it was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, though she wasn't picking it up, I can't even listen to that. We got back into the car and drove on."

But, in time, his girls will surely bow to curiosity and enquire of the days when all he heard was the warmly voiced appreciation of his people, and the exultant release of their primal scream when they liberated themselves of their chains and announced to the world that they could hurl with the best of them.
Copyright Sunday Independent *

* I don't buy or read that document, butterknife told me about it.

1991 was the one that got away.

[saffron sam2]

I wasn't there. I chose instead to listen on a radio in the home of hurling.

The Trip To Tipp.

Acts like Steve Earl, Nancy Griffith, Transvision Vamp, Tiberious Minnows and The Pogues got priority that weekend instead.

[NAG]

Does anyone else feel a sense of let down at the attitude of the two boys in the article above? I had read it at the time and felt a sense of regret. I am not getting at the two individuals at all but is this part of our problem that this type of character in our county becomes disillusioned with our game so much that they end up walking away from it?