Old hand Brady hasn’t hit the wall yet
THIS was never part of a grand plan for Paul Brady. He didn’t expect to come back and reach another All-Ireland final at the age of 44. It just sort of happened. Ireland’s greatest handballer had gone back on to the court before Christmas, in an effort to shed a few pounds. A friend somehow roped him into playing a doubles competition and between the jigs and the reels, he decided in February to put his name down for the All-Ireland singles championship.
Once in the championship, Brady did what he does best and started winning. And so next Saturday at the National Handball Centre in Croke Park, the Cavan man will look to claim his 11th All-Ireland, a full 11 years after winning his record 10th title. Adding a bit of spice is that standing in his way is Robbie McCarthy, the talented Westmeath native who took up the sport’s mantle after Brady.
‘This showdown should be a final for the ages,’ is Paul Fitzpatrick’s estimation, the sports journalist who doubles up as PRO for handball in Ireland.
‘This wasn’t planned or expected, it wasn’t part of the agenda,’ Brady insisted on Wednesday afternoon. ‘I just had a bit of weight on and went back to the game to get fit. One thing just led to another.’
Brady won’t be the only one with a chance to burnish their legendary status at Croke Park. Catriona Casey, widely regarded as the greatest female player, is looking to regain the All-Ireland title she last won in 2022 against Fiona Tully, the former Roscommon footballer.
Casey was on her way to Mexico on Wednesday, where she is playing a WPH (the pro handball tour) event in Juarez. All going well, she will be playing in the final this afternoon and flying home tomorrow to start preparing for next weekend.
‘It’s Dublin to Dallas and then fly to El Paso. And it’s the same back. It is a lot of travelling, but I am used to flying over and back to the States by this stage,’ Casey said from Dublin Airport on Wednesday morning.
She’s not kidding. There have been 30 events since the WPH started holding women’s tournaments in 2013 and the Cork woman has competed in 29, winning 27 of them. Like Brady, she is a master of her craft and early in her dominant career, she was even entered into a men’s event in Arizona.
‘That was interesting alright, I played the women’s event the same weekend so it was difficult to do both but it was good to do. Maybe it is something I will try again before I retire,’ she says with a chuckle.
The Ballydesmond native is a primary school teacher, like Brady. And she is excited by the opportunity to showcase the sport in the National Handball Centre next week in the first singles finals to be staged there (the All-Ireland doubles finals have been played there previously).
The state-of-the-art centre behind the Cusack Stand has been
beset by numerous problems over the past 15 years, as well as the pandemic also stalling the grand opening, but it now stands as the gleaming home for the sport, promising a bright future.
Handball went through a difficult time during Covid-19. As an indoor – and minority – sport, it saw playing numbers nose-dive, and some clubs fell by the wayside. ‘We probably lost half a generation of juvenile players because of the pandemic,’ Brady surmises. But in the past couple of years, the sport has turned a corner. Opening the new centre has been key. The sport has somewhere to call home – and it just happens to be at Croker.
‘For years, colleagues and friends would ask where I was playing at the weekend and if I told them, they’d just nod. But when you say Croke Park, everyone sits up and take notice. It is something special,’ says Carey.
Since 2022, handball has also come under the GAA’s coaching and development department after years of operating more as an independent state within Gaelic Games. Waterford native David Britton, who had previously worked with the Irish Athletic Boxing Association, was made chief executive of handball in 2022 and over the past 18 months, has helped clean up the governance issues which held the sport back.
Before Britton’s arrival, the governance had been so poor that the Department of Sport had written to the GAA president outlining their concerns about handball while Sport Ireland had frozen funding in 2022 over noncompliance.
Since coming in, Britton has worked very closely with Sport Ireland to iron out these issues. ‘They have been very good in assisting us and providing us with experts in this field. The GAA have also assisted us to become compliant and because of that, Sport Ireland have released the funding they were withholding. That was a big step forward for the organisation, good governance is non-negotiable, it is a requirement for all sports,’ Britton said.
Britton has also worked hard to ensure that handball reaches the 40% gender quota on the board required by the Department of Sport. And over the past year, handball is evidence that when things are done properly at the top, it flows down through the sport.
There has been a surge in participation numbers, with many more primary schools taking up the game. As Brady, also a primary school teacher, points out, the game is so accessible for kids because all that is needed is a ball and a wall. It is particularly accessible for the new Irish, as shown in a recent RTÉ news feature on two Afghan-born brothers playing handball in St Felim’s National School in Cavan town, where Brady plays.
‘Any school I have worked in, I’ve coached kids. Handball is an easy one, especially one-wall, because all you need is a wall and ball. And it especially works for kids who have only recently arrived in Ireland. There are 28 different nationalities in our school, and kids who haven’t grown up immersed in GAA or soccer, might be more inclined to try handball,’ Brady says.
If numbers declined immediately after Covid, there was surge last year. ‘This year, there was a 35% increase in entries in the junior nationals, which is a huge jump,’ Britton says. ‘Anecdotally on the ground, we are hearing good things from our members, that they are being inundated with enquiries from people who want to take up the game or get back into the sport.’ Wallball, which uses one wall, is going through a surge of popularity across the world and this August, Ireland will host the World Wallball Championships at UL followed by the World 4-Wall Championships in Kilkenny, Carlow, Laois and Dublin in October.
They will mark the centenary year of the handball organisation. TG4 will broadcast both championships while next week’s All-Ireland finals will be shown live on TG4’s YouTube channel – the Irish broadcaster is also developing a documentary about the sport.
And to top it all, the game’s most legendary figure has made it back to the most eagerlyanticipated All-Ireland final in some time.
But just as Paul Brady insists that it wasn’t part of the plan, he also quietly points out that he never actually left. ‘I never officially retired, I just sort of quietly wandered off into the sunset,’ he says. The game pulled him back in. And next Saturday in Croker, Brady will be centrestage, hoping to be king of the court one last time.
I never officially retired, I just sort of quietly wandered off