It doesn’t get much further off GAA Broadway than finishing bottom of Division 4 and being statistically ranked the worst team in the country, but Curry relishes the challenge of it all.
“I suppose personally you want to go out every day and put yourself up against the best, test yourself. You could be lazy and just keep tipping away at the club where you’re playing the same lads week-in, week-out,” Curry said.
“But when you play inter-county, you’re playing against some of the best players around. I know it’s Division 4 but some of those players would walk on to most teams in the country. Personally, it’s just going up and testing yourself against them. You’re saying, ‘Jeez, I can compete here, against anyone’.”
Curry is a dying breed at county level as he works as a dairy farmer along with his older brother Michael, who makes his 100th competitive appearance for Waterford this weekend.
That would be an easy ‘out’ if he wanted to find one but the 28-year-old is only looking for reasons to keep his shoulder firmly to the Waterford wheel, not the opposite.
“I would have the easiest excuse and people would say, ‘Yeah, sure you’re too busy with farming’. Sure no one else is at it, everyone else is using that excuse that they’re too busy farming,” he said.
“It would be the easy way out but I’m only going to play inter-county for another couple of years or whatever. That’ll be it. You’ll have long enough playing with your club but you only get maybe 10 or 12 years playing inter-county football. We might as well make the most of it.”
A career highlight has already been achieved by Paul Shankey’s side this year with a Munster SFC victory against Tipperary, which Curry duly celebrated by immediately returning home to complete milking duties.
Such days must be savoured in a county where hurling is king and many of the best footballers in the county are off limits, although Dessie Hutchinson started his county career with the big ball in 2019 before switching codes.
“There are well good footballers in Waterford, it’s just getting them to commit is the biggest problem. When Dessie came back the first year from soccer, he came in with us and he was a class footballer,” the Rathgormack clubman said.
“A lot of them there, Conor Prunty, Jamie Barron, Conor Gleeson, if you had them all playing, it would be a different story. They’re probably some of the best club footballers in the county.
“There’s probably lads on the bench with the hurlers that could easily come in and play football as well. It is tough but hurling is number one in Waterford and it will probably always be that way until results start turning.”
The Tailteann Cup at least offers some hope for those far off football’s top table, especially compared to many summers under the old system, where the luck of the draw could see them pitted against some big hitters and out of the equation after just two games.
“It was hard to put a bit of effort in for it. That year we got Wexford in the qualifiers [they beat their south-east neighbours in 2018], we were thinking ‘we actually have a chance here,’” he said.
“Whereas other years you’d get a bad draw and it was nearly not worth your while going training. That’s probably the good thing about the Tailteann. At least you know you can go out and have a good lash off these teams.”
Kildare, who make their way to Fraher Field this afternoon, are probably the exception to that rule but Curry will be up for the challenge as they bid to bounce back from an opening-round loss to Leitrim. Reeling in a big fish like that would make his efforts all the sweeter.
