Éire Óg out to cement their football legacy

FOOTBALL teams from the county town have been here before — tasked with the challenge and opportunity of putting county titles back-to-back, and while many good sides have attempted the feat, few have succeeded.

Indeed, you have to go back nearly 75 years to when that elusive double was achieved and when a town football team could say that theirs wasn’t a fleeting brush with success, but a sustained thing.

It’s so far back that it wasn’t even the storied Jack Daly that was up for grabs — instead, it was the Exiles Cup that was the biggest prize in Clare football from the early 1930s through to the early 1960s.

The great Faughs team of the 1940s was the last Ennis side to double up — with Tony Strand from Steele’s Terrace as captain they put titles back-to-back in 1947 and ’48, with victories over Clohanes and O’Curry’s respectively.

Since then many Faughs and Éire Óg teams have been to the last dance with only 60 minutes separating them from cementing their legacy with a two-in-a-row, but each and every time they’ve had to give second best in that dance-off.

When bidding to back up the ’52 final win over Kilrush, the Faughs fell to Miltown in ’53, while two years later were foiled once more, this time by Doonbeg — a feat also endured 40 years later by the reincarnated Faughs that fell again to Doonbeg, while Éire Óg have suffered a similar final misery when searching for that elusive two-in-a-row, going down to Doonbeg in 2001 and Lissycasey in 2007.

Until Sunday comes, when opportunity knocks once more.

That Éire Óg teams can get themselves into this position is traced back to an underage system that was first established 50 years ago when the club embraced football for the first time since a team under the Éire Óg banner brought county minor titles to the town in the 1930s.

The star of those minor teams that won back-to-back titles in 1933 and ’34 was Sean Guinane, who was a great dual star for Ennis Dals hurlers and Faughs footballers in the 1940s and then helped get football going in Éire Óg in the early 1970s along with the likes of Pat Brennan, Michael Howard, Denis Horgan, Bob Lyne and more.

It was the start from which everything flowed, even if in the early 1980s there were many wondering whether the game had a future in the club. “Has football a place in Éire Óg?,” the Éire Óg Bulletin asked.

“What, you might well ask does one mean by asking such a question as this? After all, haven’t we got a football club in Éire Óg. Sure we have, but it is in name only. Do we really have enough interest in the game of football to take it seriously? The answer to that is very simple. We don’t. We must decide sooner or later if we want football played.”

It had a place, with a county final appearance in 1986 hinting at a latent talent, but it wasn’t until the revolution year for Clare football that everything really changed.

Clare won the Munster SFC in 1992, while the same year Éire Óg embarked on a three-in-a-row of minor championships, while the now celebrated coach Donie Buckley threw in his lot with an Under 21 team.

Within two years 12 Éire Óg players joined with St Joseph’s under the Faughs banner to win a first senior title in 40 years — a victory that in its own way mirrored the rise of the club’s hurlers in 1980 when they teamed up with the Banner as Ennis Dalcassians to win a first senior title in 14 years.

“Football had really announced itself in the club in those years after 1992,” remarked club stalwart, Tony Honan. The real proof of same came in 1997 when six Éire Óg men played on the Clare team that beat Cork in the Munster SFC for the first time since 1941, while the conveyor belt of talent finally came through in the red and white in 2000 when the club finally made the big breakthrough by beating Doonbeg in the county senior final.

“The talent was there for a number of years and we got a great response from them that year,” said Dave Loughman, who was the team coach under manager John Hickey, who had also been the manager in 1992 when the minors made their breakthrough.

In the 22 years since then, Éire Óg have always had the ability to contend, with successive senior teams being sustained by a steady stream of talent from successful minor and under 21 teams.

“It’s about bringing them through and holding onto as many of them as you can,” said Dónal Ó hAiniféin, who along with Maurice Walsh brought an overdue minor title to the club in 2012 and then a three-in-a-row of under 21s from 2013, before a younger generation under the watch of Shane Flanagan and Conor Healy harvested minor and 21 titles in 2016 and ’18 respectively.

Meanwhile, the thread linking all the building blocks and foundations that have been laid over many football generations is brought forward to the present senior set-up and provided by manager Paul Madden and selector Peter Cosgrove.

They were vital cogs in the minor winning team of ’92, while another member of the backroom team, Tom Russell, was on the club’s first-ever minor winning team in 1979 and played in the senior decider in ’86.

Russell went on to win Monaghan and Ulster medals with Castleblayney Faughs and then bookended a great career back in Clare by being a corner-stone of the Faughs’ 1994 senior title win and keeping his sleeves rolled up for Éire Óg since then.

Winning back-to-back senior titles is the only bookending that matters now.