A lifelong love of Clare and Cratloe hurling

A couple of pivotal factors combined to allow Frank O’Brien maintain his interest in Clare and Cratloe hurling while he lived and worked in Birmingham for 33 years.
Now 84 and living in Tulla with his sister May, Frank feels that not drinking or marrying was a big help in his regular visits home, when Clare were playing league or championship hurling.
“No, I never married,” Frank confirmed to The Clare Champion. “That was a big help. Needless to tell you, I won’t call it a handicap but I suppose if I was married, I wouldn’t have been as free. That’d be a terrible anchor altogether.  The fact that I wasn’t drinking in England was a big help as well. They drank differently in England than they did in Ireland,” he notes.
Frank was never gone for more than a month. Aside from the hurling, he also visited his elderly parents.
Before he emigrated in the late 1950s, Frank had served as Cratloe GAA club secretary and county board delegate.
Although he doesn’t remember Clare losing the 1932 All-Ireland final to Kilkenny, when he was seven, Frank recalls Cratloe’s 1935 junior championship victory.
“I was taken there by my father. They played Mountshannon. There was a great hurler playing for Mountshannon the same day called Packie Lyons. He was centre-back when they won a county league in 1945 and they won the national league in ’46,” Frank remembers.
Beaten by Bodyke, after a replay, in the 1936 intermediate championship, Cratloe won it a year later, played senior in 1938 and reached the semi-final a year later. An internal dispute helped to derail Cratloe however.
“Feakle were on a run, they were going for three in a row. We had two county men that time, two Quaine brothers. They were on the sideline though. There was a little bit of a dispute. T’was a simple thing over the captaincy of the team. The local schoolmaster was the secretary of the club. Of course, at that time, there was no manager or no selectors. The secretary, in effect, picked the team. And he picked a young, local schoolteacher as captain of the team,” Frank recounts.
“And of course, the fog rose. The brother PJ was the county man but there was no problem with him. He’d play but he’d play if the brother (Mick) would play. And the brother wouldn’t play. They were leading by two points at a minute to go. The full-back came out and didn’t the ball hit his boot and go into the corner of the net. Feakle won it by a point and they won it again the year after. The Cratloe team broke up again after that. Feakle won three in a row,” he adds.
Last year brought unprecedented glory to the club when they won their first senior hurling title. Frank feels that Fiach O’Loughlin’s training influence was central to Cratloe’s epic foray.
“I was at the match in the park the day they played Broadford in the quarter-final and I was utterly, utterly disgusted the way they played and the laxity they were moving around with. They were terribly lucky to get a draw. Shortly after that he (Fiach O’Loughlin) joined them and he turned them around the same as you’d turn a penny over. Whatever gift he has, I don’t know, but he absolutely infused something into them that they didn’t have. And  it wasn’t murderous training at all. They’re hurling as hard at the 60th minute as they’re in the first minute. And that’s how they won the championship. I was crying like a child. I couldn’t believe it,” Frank reflects.
During his time in England he never attended a match at Villa Park in Birmingham, although Frank, who worked as a groundwork sub-contractor, often laid concrete in and around the stadium. Heading home for the hurling was always on his mind.
“We had a great run and they won two leagues in the ’70s. They were very close to the real thing but a little bit short at the same time. They were great hurlers and they were great characters as well. There was something about Tulla, they used never get beaten there,” he says.
Frank remembers a particularly good hour of hurling from Jackie O’Gorman against Kilkenny in Tulla. 
“They were playing on the Sunday and on the Saturday, Jackie Gorman was going to a wedding in Wicklow. His wife’s sister was getting married. He came down on the Sunday and he played a stormer. After having a few little nips. I remember Brendan Vaughan, God be good to him, he was on the hill behind my back. ‘Frank,’ he said ‘we’ll have to have more dinner dances and weddings. If we had we’d win the All-Ireland the way those fellas are playing today’. He was referring to Jackie of course, and Noel Casey. They were great days,” Frank laughs.
Working and living away seemed to strengthen, not loosen, his ties with home and hurling.
“Nothing would push the GAA out of my head. No matter how bad Cratloe were, no matter how bad Clare would be. When the new season would start, there’d be a bit of hope there all the time,” he concludes.