We will always stay Faithful to the cause
Legend Bergin is confident lowly Offaly can rise again
IN A time when there is nothing to do for Offaly hurlers but count, another anniversary flashed past their window during the week.
It marked eight years since they beat Wexford by two points, 2-12 to 1-13, in the Leinster hurling quarter-final on a rainsoaked afternoon in Tullamore.
It was a game so utterly routine that it should be lost to memory and time, but it owes its significance to Offaly’s depressing decline.
It was the last time they beat a recognised tier-one team in the Championship, although given where Wexford were at the time – they had finished second from bottom in the Division 1B of the league – it is stretching the point to call them top tier.
However, history and hurling’s shallow base ensured that Wexford’s status as an established force remained, although how people voted with their pockets said much.
In 2000, when the two teams met in the headline fixture of a Leinster semi-final double-header in Croke Park – Kilkenny toying with Dublin in the curtain-raiser – 50,000 turned up, while 12 years later just 7,000 braved the rain for the same fixture.
Joe Bergin, who brought the curtain down on his 13 years as an Offaly hurler at the start of the year, nailed 1-1 but his only recollection of the day was its absolute greyness.
‘It never stopped raining for the whole match. It was just played in awful conditions.
‘We were well in control after Shane Dooley got a goal in the first half but in the end we just hung on by the skin of our teeth,’ he recalls.
As it transpires, that qualifies as a pretty accurate synopsis, but what they did not know at the time was just how close they were to the cliff edge. Without ever contending, they were still competitive back then – they would lose the Leinster semi-final to a Galway by 14 points, though they still had enough firepower to rack up 3-15 – but gravity’s pull could not be defied. ‘It happened over a few years,’ admits Bergin. ‘I sometimes look back on 2013 as the year when we could have made more progress. ‘We were under Ollie
Baker and Waterford came to Tullamore for a qualifier game and they only beat us by four points.
‘I always felt if we got over that game we might have pushed on a bit further.
‘From 2010 to ’13, we were very close in games where if we had had a bit of luck things might have changed but ultimately that did not happen.’
But the speed and scale of their fall has been unprecedented.
In the space of 12 months, they went from a tier-one to a tierthree team, from senior to effectively a junior inter-county team on the back of last year’s relegation from the McDonagh Cup.
Relegations in back-to-back seasons might be common – and also understandable given the consequences of negative momentum – but hurling’s shallowness tends to mitigate against both extreme surges and slumps.
If Offaly’s relegation from the Leinster championship in 2018 had been anticipated – they lost all four games with a negative scoring differential of 62 points – falling though the second-tier trapdoor had not.
‘It was a surprise to Offaly people but it was as much a surprise to the players. We just didn’t get a bounce of the ball,’ says Bergin, who believes that Offaly ultimately paid the price for sacking Kevin Martin and replacing him with Joachim Kelly mid-championship.
‘We had a decent start against Laois which could have gone one way or the other, and if we had won that game, it would have been very different.
‘We lost momentum and then we lost our manager after the Westmeath game.
‘And when something is upset mid-season, anyone that has experienced that knows it can go one way or the other and the chances of it going the other way, the wrong way, are fairly high.
‘It is hard enough to sustain a level when you have familiarity but when a guy comes in and has totally different ideas, we did not come out the right side of that. It was supposed to help us but ultimately it didn’t.’ And now, with the possibility that there will be no Championship played this year, Offaly could be faced with spending two years in the Christy Ring Cup. ‘It sounds worse than it actually is. If we were two years in it because we failed to get back up the first year that would be damaging. ‘If there is no hurling and you spend two years in it, it is not going to do anyone huge harm,’ insists Bergin. There are those, though, who have used Offaly’s demise as an argument that relegation should not be in play, because it increases the likelihood of those counties who need help instead becoming detached. Bergin does not agree. ‘Just because Offaly won All-Irelands in the nineties and were once a top-level team should not mean that they are exempt from going down and are therefore treated differently and more favourably to a Westmeath or a Carlow who were never at that level. If they are playing the better hurling that is all that should matter.
‘If you look at the English Leagues, they have been based on teams going up and down and you are judged only on your performance.
‘And if you don’t perform, then you just have to accept the consequences.
‘I know hurling has a shallow pool and it is damaging but the simple reality is that if you are good enough to play at the top level, then you play there and if you are not then you don’t,’ says Bergin, who believes that better days lie ahead.
‘We don’t cast our minds back often enough. Offaly might not be where we want to be today but they can be in the future.
‘I am sure Wexford people were despondent eight years ago and last year they were very unlucky not to be in the All-Ireland final and if they had got there, with that kind of momentum behind them, they could have the Liam McCarthy in their cabinet.
‘And that has happened inside eight years so I choose to be optimistic. I think Offaly will come again.’
“In the end we just hung on by the skin of our teeth” “If you don’t perform, you accept the consequences”