Inner belief inspires Tooreen to title number five

It’s not today or yesterday that a man from Tooreen insisted to this newspaper that if the money Mayo GAA has pumped into football in its pursuit of the Sam Maguire Cup since 1951 had been invested into hurling instead, that the county would long since have won the Liam McCarthy Cup. Given the individual achievements of Tooreen Hurling Club, off such meagre resources, it’s becoming more and more difficult to argue against him.

If anyone thought Tooreen’s zenith was becoming the first club outside of Galway to represent Connacht in the All-Ireland intermediate final, like as happened last January, they may wish to reevaluate, for the Blue Devils have all the look of a side intent on breaking yet more new ground. They stand one win from returning to Croke Park, having now won five of the last six Connacht intermediate hurling championships.

Some labelled last Sunday’s as a three-in-a-row, after wins against Killimor (2022) and Moycullen (2021) and the fact that Tooreen actually lost the 2020 Mayo senior hurling final to arch-rivals Ballyhaunis. But with no provincial championship played that year on account of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Tooreen winners of Connacht in 2019 as well, when beating Kinvara, the record books will forever show that for four Connacht hurling championships running, only one name was etched onto the trophy: Tooreen.

It's a success that hasn’t happened by accident. The club is as exemplary off the pitch as it is on it, evidence being the superb facilities they developed from scratch a decade or so ago. When Brian Cody visited to perform the official opening, he said that what Adrian Freeman Memorial Park had to offer would be the envy of many a Kilkenny club, so it came as no surprise that the Mayo senior football team would later see fit to use the pitch on occasion during the tenure of former manager James Horan. There’s even a picture somewhere of club members handpicking the stones from that which they would eventually turn into a surface to rival anything in the province.

That knowledge, that there are no spoils without toils, is something that has been embraced by the Tooreen players as well.

“We’re not the biggest team, it’s not a case that we can just lump the ball in and hope for the best, and we found coming up to this standard that we had to play the ball around and we’ve worked a lot on that these last few years,” explained Michael Morley after Sunday’s 0-21 to 0-19 victory over Ballinderreen of Galway.

The Tooreen full-back, one of eight players who also started the 2017 Connacht title win (the club’s first), which too was against Ballinderreen, is part of a defence that has conceded one measly goal in the last three Connacht finals combined.

“We’ve been on a journey and some of the hurling we’re playing now compared to six years ago… we had a puck around yesterday, pinging balls thirteen yards, and it was David Kenny who said that six years ago probably only two lads on the team would have been able to make those passes whereas here we were, the whole team, working that drill.

“We just believe in ourselves and we know what we’re capable of. When we play to our best we can go all the way, so I’m just glad we put it in [today],” added Morley.

Aside from Tooreen’s defensive stubbornness, a remarkable consistency has developed in attack also. To have won four Connacht finals in succession when hitting the net only once, highlights some exceptionally strong displays of point taking. Indeed it’s quite the coincidence that three of Tooreen’s five Connacht final wins – last Sunday’s included – have been achieved by scoring 0-21 exactly, and the other two by scoring 1-15 both times.

“When you’re scoring 21 or 22 points in Connacht finals, it’s massive,” admitted a delighted Tooreen boss Ray Larkin. “We’ve done a good few goal-scoring drills but they didn’t work out today, but I suppose when we had the chances to take a point we took them.

“In tight games like that, there’s nothing as bad as to take a shot and miss it, or for the goalie to save it, when you could have popped the ball over the bar. We’ll keep popping points over as long as we can get them,” smiled Larkin, who agreed that the nature of Sunday’s match – how his players had handled trailing and then managed the game from the front – made this one of Tooreen’s best wins yet.

“For the hurling neutral it was a really good game,” he offered.

“Four points down inside seven or eight minutes, credit to our lads they didn’t panic. And even when they were coming back at us in the second-half and brought it back to two, we got some vital scores.

“All credit to Ballinderreen, they had a good bit of work done on us. They were direct and were trying to create the overloads on left and right with long puck outs, but we were trying to counteract that by going short, working it into space and getting the ball into Shane (Boland) and Eoin (Delaney) and bypassing the whole overload they had in the backs.

“When we opened them up, we were awesome,” beamed Larkin, acknowledging however the need between now and an All-Ireland semi-final against the yet-to-be-decided Munster champions, to address Tooreen’s sluggish start that saw them fail to score until the thirteenth minute.

“I think it was of our own making, a few sloppy balls given away more than anything, we gave them some soft scores,” reasoned Michael Morley, who said the victory was a just reward for some “serious challenge games” in the lead-up, together with “lots of tactical work”.

“We always knew within ourselves what we could do but it was just about getting settled into the game, no soft goals.

“It came down to the last puck, there was nothing in it at all. This time of year, it’s not pretty hurling but you have to put in the work. We’re just happy to get over the line.”