More than just a team of Champions champions
THEY won the AllIreland in August, but it is in the four months since that Limerick became champions. I am not being pedantic here but one thing that has always nagged at me is how the word ‘champion’ is thrown around.
Win a cup, any kind of cup, and you are conferred with the status of being a champion when in fact all you have done is won a cup.
To become a true champion, you have to be more than just the best at what you do — it has to be accompanied with the honesty and humility that demands you are looked up to for more reasons than just lifting a cup.
Winning and being a champion don’t always go hand in hand, but I truly believed that we are blessed in my county with the team that brought back Liam MacCarthy for the first time in 45 years.
I am not saying that because I am blinded by pride. I am a proud Limerick man, but as I have written on this page on many an occasion, the game comes before the jersey and the people come before the game.
And that is why I, and so many Limerick folk like me, take so much pride in this team.
Last week in our parish we launched the Ballybrown Journal, it’s an annual local publication which has been going for 20 years and the proceeds are used to take those who can’t afford it on trips to Lourdes.
It is the kind of local community event which takes place up and down the country and Cian Lynch was asked along for the launch, but it was not so much how he obliged but how he interacted that impressed.
I am not really a people watcher, but it was hard not to be drawn to him because it was clear he was not there out of a sense of duty, or to bag some brownie points but because he wanted to be there.
That will hardly come as a surprise given his bloodlines — his uncle Ciaran Carey and his mother Valerie always had that way about them.
But it is not just Lynch; it goes for the whole lot of them.
Given the adulation which has been showered upon them over the past few months, you might have expected that young heads might have become infected with the disease of ‘me’ but I have not heard a single anecdote which would suggest that has happened.
That hasn’t happened by accident; it comes down to the leadership shown by John Kiely and the county board.
Anyone who knows my history and has read this column would realise that I would not be a cheerleader for the latter, but credit where it is due.
The culture which demands that success on the field can only be celebrated with debauchery off it is something which has always bothered me in the GAA.
The three-day binge sessions which morph into a week does not damage just those who participate but also the impressionable who observe.
I have no doubt that the Limerick players have enjoyed themselves over the past few months, and will continue to do so when they visit Cancun on a welldeserved team holiday shortly, but the image they have portrayed while in the public eye has been sober and responsible.
The board’s ban on the Cup going into public houses should set the bar for how teams celebrate in the future, and instead the focus has been in taking the Cup into an environment where people do not have to drink from it to get their buzz.
It is still on the school circuit; last week it was taken to the Laurel Hill Convent in Limerick City.
It is fair to say that it is the first time that one of Irish sport’s most iconic trophies passed through the doors of that school, and the memories that creates will provide a high far greater than any concoction that has ever been poured into it has managed in the past.
So it is one thing winning, it is quite another being a champion and hurling could not have asked for better ambassadors in that sense.
Of course, shortly they will be back out there having to prove themselves once more while this time shouldering great expectations.
I can’t tell you if they are going to succeed in making a successful defence — no one can — but I do believe that this is a group that will not just fade away.
I say that for a few reasons. The last few months have shown me they have both discipline and character and those qualities will serve you well on and off the field.
Secondly, I have had my ears reddened for the past few months by punters who keep telling me that they always knew this would be Limerick’s year.
I’d give up my top field to ask what those same people thought of this team when they trailed Galway heavily at half-time in the League during the spring.
That was the game that made them.
I would also love to have heard what those fortune tellers had to say when Clare cleaned Limerick out in Ennis in the final round of the Munster Championship.
I will put my hand up because I believed that was the day a young team hit the wall.
The thing is they didn’t. These kids have resolve to go with their talent and that is another reason why they are worthy champions.
There is one other thing that makes me think they are a little different to a lot of teams that have gone before.
I watched the Fenway Classic last month — it’s hurling but not as we know it — and you might expect the All-Ireland champions to treat it with a large dollop of disinterest.
But even in a competition that will have no bearing on their season, they got stuck into it straight into it.
You see they have pride in themselves.
All the more reason we should have pride in them.