For Portarlington, Clough-Ballacolla and The Harps, last weekend brought the best of times.
After a year-and-a-half of our lives being turned upside down due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the delayed 2020 county finals gave those clubs a reason to celebrate.
And in each case it was a significant success.
Not since the heyday of the likes of Hughie Emerson, David Sweeney, Adrian Phelan, John Bolton and Brendan McCann had Portarlington even been in a county senior football final.
Twenty years is a long time to wait for a club as traditional and proud as Port. But they won last Sunday’s decider against Graiguecullen in some style and with a degree of comfort. Only three times in the past 70 years has a county final been decided by a greater margin than the 11 points they had to spare.
The challenge now for Portarlington is to retain a title, something the club have failed to do on their last four attempts.
Not since they won both the 1954 and 1955 championships within the space of six months in 1955, have Port successfully defended the title. In 2002 they were beaten by St Joseph’s in the semi-final, in 1996 by St Joseph’s in the final, in 1989 by Portlaoise in a bruising first round and in 1960 by O’Dempsey’s.
It was a pity there was no Leinster club championship for this group. While a Ballymun Kickhams team including Dean Rock, James McCarthy, Philly McMahon, the Small brothers and Evan Comerford would no doubt have been hot favourites, it would have been great to see Port get a shot at them – or the likes of Athy, Rhode or Eire Og – quite possibly even in their home ground in McCann Park.
There will be a Leinster championship this year, if Port can get that far. And as it stands they are, by some distance, the best team in the county.
That’s not to say they’ll win it again. If they’re not as sharp and focused as they were or if they encounter bad luck (already it looks like they’ll be without the influential Jason Moore who is set to go overseas with the Irish Army again), they could be caught.
There’s a target now on their back and it will be a serious scalp if someone beats them. Good and all as Port are that’s an entirely new position to be in for this group of players.
Portlaoise look to be the most likely contenders and it would be fascinating to see the two do battle in a straight knockout game. Right now, however, there is a considerable gap that has to be closed somehow.
This success for Portarlington has been building for the last couple of years and their age profile, depth and the absence of an outstanding field of challengers means they should really win a handful of championships over the next five or six years. Indeed if they don’t it’ll be deemed a disappointment and an underachievement.
For the Clough-Ballacolla hurlers, who got their hands on the O’Keeffe Cup again last Saturday, it represents the latest chapter in their incredible recent history.
When they won the 2009 final it was the parish’s first success in a century and their first final in almost 40 years. Now they have four wins in 12 seasons and have been in six finals in that time.
For a number of players it was their fourth county final success. But crucially they had a handful winning their first.
At the start of the season they were the fourth favourites and deemed an ageing team. But they’ve regenerated their starting team and their dominance on Saturday would suggest they’ll be strong contenders for the next couple of years again.
It was far from a famine since their last triumph in 2015 but the intervening years have been disappointing and they’ll have felt they’ve had nothing but bad luck with injuries and sickness at the wrong times in recent years, robbing them of the chance to win another championship.
They too now find themselves looking to defend their title for the first time, something only Camross have managed to do since the breakup of the great Castletown side that dominated from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s.
They’ll have had less than two weeks from their county final win to the first round of this year’s championship though there is probably a cushion in that three teams will get out of the group and the accepted big hitters of Rathdowney-Errill, Borris-Kilcotton and Camross are all on the other side of the draw.
For The Harps, who play Ballacolla in the first round, they too have very little time to come down from the high of winning the Premier Intermediate hurling title and the joy of a breakthrough success for the club.
They’re a club with a senior attitude and structures but will the short turnaround be too much? Or will the new-found buzz and confidence that goes with a county final success drive them on.
With Rosenallis and Castletown in their group they will back themselves to make the knockout stages.
But the alternative is stark: a relegation final against the bottom team in the other group. That’s certainly not where they want to be.
They all have achieved what they wanted so far in 2021.
And the time to build on that success is upon them already.
SEE ALSO – Check out more Breaking Ball columns from Steven Miller here
