KEANEY: BASQUEL CAN REPEAT STELLAR SEMI DISPLAY
COLM BASQUEL’S performance for Ballyboden St Enda’s in the Leinster club semi-final against Coolderry has claims for being one of the greatest senior hurling Championship debuts of all time. Few players get handed their first start in a provincial series, never mind go and shoot the lights out with 3-3, electrifying the crowd at Parnell Park and showing that he has the hurling potential to go with his status as a Dublin senior footballer. Conal Keaney has an admission to make ahead of Sunday’s final against Ballyhale Shamrocks. ‘I didn’t even know he played hurling to be very honest with you,’ he says of his new team-mate, an overnight sensation. ‘He’s been around a while now this year. He’s been good and he did what he did the last day. I hope he can do something like that at the weekend and keep it going which I’m sure he will. ‘It is impressive — very impressive for one game. I know that’s very harsh maybe to say. He knows he’s good enough. We all know he’s good enough. It’s just a matter of time with the hurl and he’ll certainly be one of the best forwards around.’ Keaney’s own reputation should be bulletproof at this stage. The story of his own dual pedigree is well told. Eleven years after the club’s sole Leinster final defeat to Birr, and 10 since losing to Ballyhale Shamrocks in a semi-final, he’s still raging against the dying of the light. ‘You always have doubts,’ he reveals. ‘Every game you play you’ve doubts. When you get to over 30, if you have a bad game, people think you’re finished. If you’re 22, 23, if you have a bad game, there is always another day. People write you off very quickly.’ A key part of Anthony Daly’s Dublin hurling uprising that sparked a first National League and Leinster title for generations, he has no regrets about parking his senior football career and missing out on the glory years that followed the 2011 breakthrough under Pat Gilroy. ‘No. I don’t regret it. I was going to do it two or three years before it and I hung on and hung on and hung on. I don’t look back and regret that the lads are winning now and picking up five or six or seven All-Irelands. That’s great. That is their time. I had my time. You move on. You just have to keep winning what you can win at the time.’
For a team that is supposedly not the force it once was, Ballyhale Shamrocks put 6-21 on Wexford champions Naomh Eanna in the other semi-final. ‘Well, they’re certainly not the team they were on paper from when we played them 10 years ago, and all the big names they had then. ‘But if you look at their team down the middle, they’d get on any inter-county team. So they’re nearly as strong and they have young lads coming through who are very good. ‘Nobody knows them now but in three or four years, they’ll be household names. So they are very good. Any team that comes out of Kilkenny is very good.’ His old on-field adversary Henry Shefflin now patrols the sideline for Ballyhale, a role that doesn’t surprise Keaney. ‘He was obviously going to go down that road eventually given the character that he is and the hurling history that’s behind him. It’s probably a bit earlier than I would have thought but I’m sure he wants to go back and give something to the club before he goes on after that and proves himself at inter-county level. ‘I’m sure he’s hoping to go a little bit further and cement it and maybe go on and manage the county.’