EVERY season brings another first for East Belfast GAC. Whatever is thrown by the bigots who want the club to fail only serves to make it stronger and on Friday, Down’s youngest club will make its debut in a men’s championship final when their hurlers take on Kilclief in the junior decider (Pairc Esler, Newry, 7.30pm)
A dedicated group of players from eight counties including several have-a-go hurling rookies have bonded under the East Belfast banner and flourished with player/management trio Turlough Hendry, Conor McCurdy (Ballycastle) and Portaferry native Owen Taggart.
Many of the players who will line out against Kilclief have hung in there since the club first fielded a team 2020. Back then scores came occasionally but hammerings were regular.
“There were some tough times for the club when we started,” says Dungiven native Hendry.
“We had some very heavy defeats. I remember our first-ever victory – we beat Bredagh and everybody went out for the night to celebrate! It was a big thing for the club and then we won our next game against Portaferry.”
But win, lose or draw there is an energy and a unity of purpose about ‘East’ that goes way beyond what the scoreboard says at the final whistle.
“It’s a very infectious club,” says Hendry.
“We have a great bunch of lads and they all have the same mindset - they don’t live close enough to play at home so they had given up the game and wanted to re-find hurling again and some of the other boys wanted to try it for the first time.
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“We all socialise together. All my friends at home I made through football and hurling and I now have that same sort of atmosphere in Belfast as well. We’ve really pushed that social aspect this year because we wanted people to feel like that because it affects you on the pitch as well.
“The more you bond the lads, the more they get on, the more they’re going to help each other out when it comes to a tackle, or tracking back, or pushing things on and that has an effect on people’s willingness to train two or three times a week and put the hard work in.”
Hendry’s path to the club began with his native Kevin Lynch’s and he played for Derry and then Louth before he was enticed to join East Belfast back in it’s formative days three years’ ago.
“Football was my first sport,” he explains.
“I come from a football family in Dungiven and football was bred into us. I didn’t start playing hurling until I was about 14 at St Pat’s, Maghera and then I was very lucky to be part of very successful underage teams with Dungiven and Kevin Lynch’s.”
Hendry followed the likes of Paddy Kelly and Niall Ferris into the Oak Leaf senior hurling team but a succession of knee injuries meant his career with his native county didn’t last as long as he’d have hoped.
However, that wasn’t the end of his county career...
“I was working for Stat Sports in Newry and there were guys from Wexford and Kilkenny and a couple of them played for Louth. I was asked if I wanted to play too and I did. I was living in Newcastle and it’s fair jaunt from there to Dungiven so I ended up playing in Louth but, again, I had reoccurring knee injuries and they put me out of that as well.”
Again he wasn’t finished. Brian McGuigan, a friend from Dungiven, and Andrew Breslin got involved with East Belfast and he went along to watch them play Warrenpoint in the Betsy Gray Cup.
After McGuigan told him: ‘You’re coming to join us’.
Hendry explains: “I said: ‘I’ll see what happens’. It was during Covid and there was a shortened season and then I thought: ‘Well, I’m living up here, I’ll give it a go’ and that’s what got me into the fold.”
And from those early days hurling has grown and grown in the club. This year, for the first time, East Belfast fielded a reserve team in the South Antrim League and several players who started in the reserves have now stepped up into the 30-strong senior squad.
This season the seniors played Down league games on Mondays and there were South Antrim League games every second Thursday.
“We have a couple of Fermanagh hurlers in the panel and they’ve been saying they’ve played more hurling for us in the last couple of years than they had in their whole career,” Hendry explained.
“Across Ulster there is a lot of work going into developing hurling which is brilliant to see. We’re trying to develop the game in East Belfast but in Belfast as a whole hurling is obviously a very popular sport. It was great that we were able to go into the South Antrim league and be competitive in it.”
The games come thick and fast and the fact that there is a narrow-minded sectarian minority seeking to drive the club out of the locality has no impact on the East Belfast players.
“That isn’t a factor in anything, it doesn’t even get talked about,” says Hendry.
“We’re here to play hurling or football and that’s all it is. None of us get involved in that, we’ve no interest in that, it’s just: When’s training? When’s the next match? That’s it, that’s the way we go about it.”
LOOKING on from afar, you’d expect that East Belfast will be up against it in the final. Their opponents Kilclief were Division Two champions and clear winners when the teams met in their championship opener. However, East bounced back to beat Castlewellan (their first-ever win in a championship match) and a hard-fought draw with Ballyvarley sent them into this final.
Preparation for the decider has been complicated. East Belfast live a nomadic, itinerant existence and they’ve trained on six different pitches in the last couple of weeks – the Henry Jones playing fields, the Lamh Dhearg GAC grounds, Cherryvale, Woodlands, Mallusk and St Malachy’s College.
The team’s WhatsApp group needs constant monitoring as venues and times for training change but the players focus on turning up and working hard.
“I don’t know if I’d say we’re confident of winning, but I’d say we’re confident of what we can do,” Hendry explained.
“We’ve got lads who have played county level and at the same time we’ve got lads who had never played before until they got involved with the club.
“We played Kilclief in the first round of the championship and we didn’t really give a good account of ourselves. We were well down going in at half-time and we brought it back from a heavy defeat to about eight points in the end.
“We bucked ourselves up after that and we beat a very good Castlewellan team and we have squeezed our way through into the final.”
MAYBE some of the players don’t know it, but some of the coaching and man-management techniques they are being exposed to have been taken from the play-book of current Portugal soccer manager Roberto Martinez.
Hendry was part of the Spaniard’s backroom team for two years during his time as Belgium manager.
A graduate of Loughborough University, Hendry worked as a sports scientist at Stat Sports and, after experience with Ireland’s International Rules team in 2015 and the Republic of Ireland U17s he was sent to Belgium to explain the rudiments of the GPS system.
Initially he was booked for a week but that trial period led to a stint of almost two years with Les Diables Rouges who went on an extraordinary run of 46 wins in 49 games under Martinez and became the world’s number one-ranked international side.
“It was a fantastic experience to work with them,” says Hendry.
“Growing up in a small village like Dungiven, I never thought I’d ever work with elite players of any stature to be honest. So it was unbelievable to see athletes and how they operated at that level – it gives you a lot of insight into the professional game and how they go about it and how you can take that and transition it into your own career and your own management or coaching.
“You’re able to take little snippets from them and apply it at your own level. A myth that was busted for me coming from a GAA background was the whole: ‘Lets get tore into them!’ shouting match - all that stuff. I couldn’t believe it in the Belgium dressingroom, everybody was so calm, these big leaders that I’d watched on TV like Jan Vertonghen and Toby Alderweireld, beasts of men, just sitting in the changingroom quiet.
“Roberto told them exactly what they needed to do and that was what was in their head when they when onto the pitch – what their job was, what their role was.
“Any shouting that was done was kept to half-time and it would have been reactive to a poor performance. Before a game everyone was calm, Roberto used to say: ‘There’s no point in me giving them instructions and then shouting the house down because that, the bollocking they got, is all that they remember when they go out on the field’.
“I saw a lot of man-management in it too because some people are confident in their ability, some are the polar-opposite, some need motivation, some need calming down… You take wee things from that and I learned a lot from the coaches about warm-up routines and how to build a session from warming-up and stretching. Everything has to be short and sharp – we’ve only been able to get pitches for an hour and that suits us.
“All three of us take the coaching. I do my bit and Owen and Conor are brilliant with the lads, so it’s a mix of all three of us taking different parts.
“I’m not saying we’re going to do ‘X, Y or Z’ in the final, but every man has been running through brick walls in training to try and get their jersey on the day. They’ll represent the club and themselves as best they can.”
