BASH BROTHERS
As Wexford captain Matthew O’Hanlon eyes a reunion with old sparring partner Walter Walsh, their relationship has echoes of baseball’s famous duo
‘IT IS DIFFICULT TO HEAR NEGATIVE THINGS ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU’RE THE TEAM CAPTAIN’
ONE of the prizes eyeballing Wexford captain Matthew O’Hanlon today is a victory will lead to a reunion of an old schools double act. There was a time when he was a student in Good Counsel that O’Hanlon was one half of the Bash Brothers. The other? Walter Walsh is sitting pretty, waiting in the semi-final with his Kilkenny team-mates and the chances are if Wexford manage to put down Waterford today, O’Hanlon is heading his way.
The Bash Brothers by the way were an iconic baseball double act – Mike McGwire and Jose Canseco – who played with Oakland in the 1980s/’90s and made their name from swinging hard with the bat while having a trademark joint celebration that would see them bash each other’s forearms to celebrate runs.
It is not known if O’Hanlon and Walsh ever went that far, but one thing is certain when they were students at the New Ross school they were hardly shy of opportunity.
They were team-mates when the hurlers won the Leinster Colleges championship and they were midfield partners on the football team that would reach a Leinster final, while they both rucked for New Ross in rugby and later teamed up again in UCD.
‘I would be very good friends with Wally. He’s from Tullow, I’m from Ramsgrange on the other side of the border but we grew up and played together all the way through.’
That border, though, has meant that the Bash Brothers have experienced diverging fortunes at play as inter-county hurlers. Walsh is 140 minutes away from a fourth All-Ireland medal, O’Hanlon is appearing in just his second quarter-final.
That has more to do with the randomness of their birthplaces than a gauge of their respective talents, and one wonders if O’Hanlon, in fleeting guilty moments, does not take to looking across the border and ponder on what might have been.
‘I suppose you could look on it like that but I’m a proud Wexford man,’ insists O’Hanlon.
That he would have made the cut on the other side is without doubt. What staggers is that he is still only 24, but this is his third season as captain – a measure of his status as a full-back and team leader. He was handed his debut by Colm Bonnar as a teenager in 2011 – the same year he won a Leinster Under 21 medal with the footballers – and he will make his 20th appearance in Thurles today.
He has played every single minute of the previous 19, which pretty neatly sums up the absolute faith invested in him by his manager Liam Dunne. One of these days, though, it would be nice to see that faith validated in something other than game-time.
Reaching next month’s All-Ireland semi-final would represent real progress, the kind they were expected to make when they shook up the hurling world two years ago.
The manner in which they stripped Clare of their All-Ireland crown over two epic games and then went on to defeat Waterford caught the mood of their supporters. But it seemed to be over as quickly as it began.
A brutal trimming from Limerick in the quarter-final and a no-show last summer, O’Hanlon is not sure why they could not build on it, but concedes it may be down to the belief that momentum would take care of itself.
‘It was the first time for a lot of the guys to be involved in big Championship wins and to go twice to extra-time (against Clare) and having the bulk of the GAA community watching your games it was hard to keep things under control.
‘You can’t expect success after one good season you have to put in the work again and we realised that this year. We worked hard and thankfully the performances are paying off because I don’t think we have done ourselves justice over the past 18 months. But we have that experience now moving into this quarterfinal and we can keep our powder dry and just focus on ourselves and Waterford.’
While the semi-final is the target now, he won’t deny that back in May they would have happily settled for making it this far. On a rain-filled evening in Croke Park, they produced a wretched performance when shooting just a dozen points to Dublin’s 2-19 and the hostility that performance attracted demanded serious introspection. In a way, it has benefited them in a manner the festival of support two years ago never did.
‘It is always difficult to be hearing negative stuff about the team, especially when you are the captain and have put so much into it. Our supporters want us so much to succeed and if we are not giving them performances to shout about you can understand their frustrations. But as a group of players we had to remain united after that, knuckle down, train harder and give them something to shout about.
‘I think we have managed to do that in our last two games.’
Their run to the last six this time doesn’t have 2014’s swagger, there have been no epic dethronement of champions, no putting down
of neighbours in a sun-splashed shoot-out like they did against Waterford that summer in Nowlan Park, but it is has revealed substance.
They have been tested mentally. Their goalkeeper Mark Fanning had a perfectly converted penalty puck bizarrely ruled to have come off the upright against Offaly when it had bounced off the back stanchion. They could have allowed that to eat at them when trailing at half-time, but they parked it and went on to win by eight.
Last time out against Cork opponents who they had not bettered for over 60 years, they were not shy of reasons to doubt themselves when, after dominating large swathes of the game and spurning two goal chances, they fell behind in the final quarter to a sucker punch strike.
Again, they showed resolve to keep on keeping on. ‘We’ve had our fair share of moral victories and near misses over the years. When the goal went in it was a case of we’ve done enough to win this game let’s get over the line. We kept our composure and didn’t panic. In the past when the game is in the melting pot, we were likely to retreat but not this time.’
Enough of going backwards, he is in a hurry to go to a new place and renew old acquaintances.