Hurlers keep on showing their value
WHAT is the difference between O’Neill’s Healy Park, Omagh, and Portlaoise’s MW Hire O’Moore Park? This is not a trick question. Aside from the usual – pitch dimensions, crowd capacity, location – it depends on who is playing at each venue and for what reason. Sligo hurlers were in Omagh last Saturday. Just 24 hours later the county’s Gaelic footballers were in Portlaoise.
The hurlers had something to play for – promotion – and, not only that, there was the competition’s round five to offer salvation, however unlikely, if things ran aground against Tyrone. In contrast, the footballers had the Division 4 Shield to joust Wexford for. In a previous life the Division 4 Shield was the much-maligned Tommy Murphy Cup.
These Sligo teams have big championship games coming up against teams they are going to struggle with – the hurlers play Offaly in the Christy Ring Cup and the footballers take on Mayo in the Connacht Senior Football Championship.
The difference here is that the hurlers, who now are Allianz Hurling League Division 3A champions, are looking forward to this glamour tie.
You get the sense that the footballers have already consigned the Mayo assignment to the trash folder and it is case of getting it over with, without losing by too much.
The fact is that Sligo’s hurlers have won a major title for the fourth year in succession and Sligo’s footballers are struggling to achieve back-to-back wins, no matter who is in charge. This sums up the contrasting stages of development that each squad are at.
Sligo hurling boss Padraig Mannion is continuing the good work put in by his predecessor, Daithí Hand, and Mannion is fortunate that the exit of one talisman, Keith Raymond, has seen the rise of another, Gerard O’Kelly-Lynch.
The likes of Kevin Banks and Rory McHugh are inspirational players in their own right. Fortunately for Sligo, all three have been in flying form in recent weeks.
Mannion probably knows at this stage what his best XV is; here are several good alternatives in the panel and his wishlist for who he’d like to have had in an extended matchday squad for last Saturday would probably feature the names of Conor Griffin, Kevin Gilmartin, Mikey Gordon and Niall Murphy (yes, this guy would make a first-rate hurler at inter-county level).
His panel is familiar with winning trophies, be that at the Connacht GAA Centre of Excellence at Bekan or Croke Park.
For sure, it hasn’t always been rosy in Sligo’s hurling garden. Like all amateur sports, hurling at local level has an amazing capacity to eat itself. We’ve had DRA rulings, county players having to go the ends of the earth to get permits to play club hurling.
Back in the 1990s I remember a National Hurling League game where Sligo were short on numbers and Mick Burke had to tog out and stand in one of the corner-forward positions (not a bad move, given Mick’s hurling pedigree, but he had long since retired at this stage). Sligo’s present hurling upsurge won’t last forever. The team will find its ceiling in the Allianz Hurling League for several reasons and maybe just one – Sligo haven’t got a second Rory McHugh and there’s only one Kevin Banks.
Perhaps Allianz Hurling League’s Division 2B will be the campaign of reckoning but Sligo have got there and so can only be judged after a season at the higher level.
Sligo, though, continues to be primarily a football county and, that being the case, it is a county in the doldrums.
Tony McEntee, the Sligo Senior football team manager, needs a rub of the green, injuries to clear up, options to become available, an array of players (with potential) to deliver and a full season with which to implement his ideas. Even then there are no guarantees.
Back to the original question of what is the difference between Omagh’s Healy Park and