The usual scene. Players from the six participants bedecked in their club colours, posing awkwardly for photographs, speaking guardedly with attendant media.
One of them, wearing a Kilmacud Crokes tracksuit, looked so young we thought maybe the club had misinterpreted the brief and sent someone from the Féile team over.
Or maybe they’d finally lost the run of themselves and invoked old Maori custom of using the youngest member of the tribe as an emissary.
Turns out it was Brendan Kenny, the man who gave such a dynamic interpretation of the sweeper position for the Dublin U-20s earlier this year. His father is from Roscommon, his mother from Singapore. Neither a hurling, etc.
Only his second year a Crokes senior and already a load-bearing element of a vibrant team. One with all the ballistic energies you’d associate with extreme youth.
This is a very Kilmacud Crokes thing. Pulling fellas out of their stacked underage ranks, dropping them straight into the choppy waters of championship hurling, trusting their buoyancy. Not so much in the doing it, as in the being able to do it.
A couple of years ago, Brian Hayes – Ronan’s younger brother – was plucked from the club’s B team (itself, a fairly highly-performing unit) due to his roadrunner speed and demonstrable personal ambition.
Nobody knew exactly what to expect. Within 18 months, he was the ‘find’ of the short-lived Micheál Donoghue reign with Dublin.
Match reports of their blitzkrieg semi-final over a confident Lucan Sarsfields team two weeks back show a ‘D Purcell’ scoring 0-4. Nope, it wasn’t Dara Purcell, the 2021 Dublin U-20, whose sparkling attacking talents two years ago marked him in fluorescent colours as very much one for the future, for club and county.
It was David Purcell – no relation. The 2024 Dublin U-20 who was eligible for the Crokes minors this year.
Of all the immensely promising ‘D Purcells’ in Kilmacud’s attacking ranks, all we can say for certain is that he was the most recent.
Theirs isn’t so much an underage system as a talent industrial complex. Regeneration is automatic.
Quickly, with tidal regularity, all that promise laps up on the shores of the seniors. Hence a team that barely looked like needing a shave between them only two years ago when they lost a Leinster final to Ballyhale Shamrocks has now been reinvigorated.
Davy Crowe of Kilmacud Crokes in action against Dónal Ryan and Peter Feeney of Na Fianna during the 2022 Dublin SHC final. Photo: Sportsfile
“I was jealous a couple of years ago looking at those two finals we won, just wishing I was down on the pitch,” explains Kenny. “Obviously I was delighted but I was wishing I was involved myself too. It’s a huge opportunity now for the club again and obviously for myself I just really want to grasp it.”
Time was, the big Southside clubs like Kilmacud, Ballyboden and Cuala would venture across the city to play the Northside strongholds of Craobh Chiaráin, O’Toole’s and St Vincent’s for games of note and come home with nothing more useful than a beating and some splinters.
Then they just took over. Between 2007 and 2022, only Crokes, ’Boden and Cuala won senior titles. Most years, they faced one of the others in the final. Craobh and O’Toole’s have fallen away. Vincent’s have been competitive of late but haven’t been in a county final since 2010.
For all its deep spread, hurling in Dublin badly need a Northside accent. A new one. Roaring into this breach came Na Fianna.
The Mobhi Road club won a three-in-a-row of U-21 hurling championship titles in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and four minor championships between 2014 and 2017.
They are the counterpoint to the argument that Crokes could, were they to fully harness all that talent, reduce the competition to their own personal fiefdom. Tomorrow will be the third time the clubs meet in a senior county final in four years. The fourth major meeting in as many championships.
All the KPIs – form, age profile, depth, etc – point to the two being magnetically compelled to one another at Dublin’s summit between now and the end of the decade.
Na Fianna boss Niall Ó Ceallacháin will take over as the new Dublin hurling manager. Photo: Sportsfile
Adding intrigue to the pot, the two competing managers will soon be close collaborators. Presumably, Niall Ó Ceallacháin and Donal McGovern are already working together in their new brief with the Dublin senior hurlers.
It was an interesting appointment. Giving them the job went against the grain of opinion that the expertise require to thrive at inter-county level was still very much an import commodity.
“I think we have plenty in the county to do it,” says Kevin Burke, a pillar of the Na Fianna defence. “It definitely adds something a bit different and a bit special to be involved with.”
“You can see it with the club championship. I think it’s one of the hardest championships in the country to win. We found that out in the last few years.”
