Sport

Ulster club hurling series the GAA's hidden gem

Cahair O'Kane

Cahair O'Kane

Cahair is a sports reporter and columnist with the Irish News specialising in Gaelic Games.

Slaughtneil leave the field after beating Dunloy during the Ulster Club Senior Hurling Championship semi-final at Owenbeg on Sunday. Picture by Margaret McLaughlin.
Slaughtneil leave the field after beating Dunloy during the Ulster Club Senior Hurling Championship semi-final at Owenbeg on Sunday. Picture by Margaret McLaughlin. Slaughtneil leave the field after beating Dunloy during the Ulster Club Senior Hurling Championship semi-final at Owenbeg on Sunday. Picture by Margaret McLaughlin.

AT the tail end of the 1970s, O’Loughlin’s house at the top of Dungiven was vested so that work could begin on a new bypass road around the bottleneck town.

That we’re almost 40 years on and there hasn’t been a spade turned on it is a never-ending bone of contention in the town, but that’s for another day.

Any number of things could cause a head-wrecking traffic jam in the town. A lorry needing to shed its load at one of the shops on Main Street. Someone pushing the button on the lights to cross the road. A car trying to get out at Millar’s corner. And on the odd occasion people take the fancy, match traffic bound for Celtic Park.

In recent years, Owenbeg has caused the most severe build-up at weekends. When Derry played their first qualifier there against Sligo in 2013, there were cars parked along the road at O’Kane’s filling station (or Duffy’s, as it’s still known locally) 90 minutes before throw-in.

It has regularly attracted crowds of between 4,000 and 5,000 for club championship games over the last five years. Getting in and out of the place can be a pain, if no worse than any of the other major venues around Ulster.

One thing that wouldn’t previously have caused much congestion was hurling.

But on Sunday, Dungiven saw chaos like it had never seen before. The travel time from Maghera, 12 miles away, was close on an hour. It was clear when people were streaming into their seats an hour before the game, with no curtain-raiser on, that Slaughtneil and Dunloy were going to attract a big crowd.

Supporters were abandoning their cars at Dungiven chapel and running the rest of the way. Late in the first half, people could be seen dumping their cars on the Feeny Road and coming across the fields behind the terrace.

Some didn’t make it until the start of the second half, by which stage they were no longer being charged in.

At the start of the second half, there were still people coming in late. In the end, 6,142 souls were accounted for.

It is the biggest crowd the venue has ever seen. Bigger than All-Ireland football qualifiers, bigger than club championship semi-finals between heavy-hitters in a football-mad county.

Ulster Council, often maligned, deserve praise for forcing a coin-toss for ‘home’ advantage upon Slaughtneil and Dunloy. That contributed in no small way to the record crowd.

But what it’s really about is people catching on that the Ulster club hurling series being a hidden gem.

Slaughtneil’s emergence has made it so. A Derry team had never before beaten an Antrim side in championship hurling prior to last year’s provincial final win over Loughgiel, but the Oak Leaf county has had strong representations in the past.

Lavey and Dunloy fought out a series of gripping battles in the mid-90s. Kevin Lynch’s had Cushendall on the rack more than once during the 2000s, but neither could quite get over the line.

When those games were on, supporters flocked. They knew that the Downeys and McGurks and Collins’s would give the Antrim champions their fill, or that Geoffrey McGonigle was worth the admission fee on his own.

As one former Lavey player who won pretty much everything there was to win said last year: “My only regret was that we didn’t beat those b******s from Dunloy.”

Loughgiel won three straight titles between 2010 and 2012 by an average margin of just under 20 points, and we wondered if the provincial series was headed for an even more obscure wilderness than the one in which it has sadly existed for too long.

It is to the great shame of many that such has been the case because without exaggeration or fear of contradiction, some of the best spectacles in recent years have been in the Ulster club hurling championship.

Slaughtneil’s blistering start against Loughgiel in 2013 created an unexpectedly interesting game for 50 minutes. Their draw with Cushendall the following year was a remarkable game. When they met again 12 months later they arguably surpassed it, prised apart by a single point after extra-time in an engrossing tussle.

Last year’s historic final up in Armagh created a new dynamic on the whole thing and no doubt a lot of the intrigue around Sunday’s game was based on seeing whether Slaughtneil were a one-trick pony, or if they could back up their success.

The first half atmosphere crackled so that it perforated the soundproof glass of the press box. The ovation both teams got going down the tunnel at half-time was spine-tingling material.

And yet how much will the rest of the country ever know about what we have up here. TG4 and Eir Sport are still unlikely to ever plump for showing a game live, which is a real pity.

BBC NI were represented at the game and you’d wonder are the circumstances not so unique that the GAA shouldn’t consider giving them the rights to screen these games live without looking for the payment that would usually be associated.

That might do short-term damage in terms of harming the attendance, but perhaps there is long-term good to gain from displaying the fact that the small ball code is very much alive up here.