ONCE, THERE WAS a time when the Leinster Club Intermediate Hurling Championship may as well have been handed out on county final day at Nowlan Park.

Before Covid, Kilkenny champions advanced to provincial honours in 10 out of 11 years. In 2012, the trophy escaped three miles over the border to Mount Leinster Rangers. Kilkenny clubs responded by putting the trophy on lockdown, winning the next eight editions in a row.

This Saturday, hurling teams from Meath and Wicklow will meet to decide who succeeds a Kildare club as Leinster intermediate hurling champions.

Both have defied the odds. Trim beat a Danesfort side rated 1/20 favourites and equipped with four-time All-Stars Richie Hogan and Paul Murphy at Nowlan Park.

Bray Emmets have defied even greater odds: overcoming the general indifference of the town to grow a greenfield hurling tradition in GAA badlands.

‘A failing club’

The latter story doesn’t start with the visit of Mick O’Dwyer to the seaside town but the shallow soil from which GAA grassroots have sprouted is best encapsulated by his visit.

The greatest Gaelic football manager of all time was building the buzz around Wicklow football about 15 years ago and it was decided to bring a training session to Bray’s newly developed Old Conna grounds.

Typical Micko, he was the first to arrive in Bray for the session. He parked up and asked people in the main street that Sunday, ‘Where is Bray Emmets’ pitch?’ All he got in return were impassive shrugs or well-intentioned bad guesses. He asked 10 people before he found someone who could tell him the way.

Go back a decade earlier and the club’s own history describes itself as a “failing club”. Leaving aside the sparse football representation, the club had no camogie and only one hurling team across adult and juvenile levels. They subsisted long-forgotten in the Wicklow Junior B Championship. Even more damning, there was no under-10s coaching undertaken in any code.

“It was very much a Gaelic wasteland,” says author, journalist, and Bray Emmets PRO PJ Cunningham. “They used to say anyone in Bray was either playing for Greystones Rugby Club or Dún Laoghaire Celtic or Bray Wanderers. All the good young players ended up not playing Gaelic.”

The Wicklow County Board may not be the greatest hurling evangelists of all time but even they had a meeting 20 years ago giving out that Bray wasn’t doing anything for the sport.

The decision that started a sea change had already been made 20 years previously and 150 kilometres down the road, even if it didn’t take full effect for a few decades.

All-Star Kilkenny hurler John Henderson had married a Bray woman, taken a Dublin job, and moved to the Wicklow town. When he retired from black-and-amber duty, he hurled for Wicklow and would’ve hurled for Bray too if only they had a senior hurling team. Instead, he lined out half an hour down the road with Glenealy.

When his sons got to the age when camáns are measured and helmets fitted, he got involved with the juvenile club, teaching the kids how to hurl. “It was a labour of love for him,” says Cunningham, “because he was doing what every Kilkenny man loves doing.”

There have been other “pied pipers” in Gordon Loughnane and his successor Willie Braine as games development administrators who have put in the work at underage level. The club is open and inclusive for all, with their Bray Emmets All Stars initiative catering for children with additional needs.

“In the last 15 years, there’s been a transformational change in Bray. Bray was a garrison town in terms of the rugby and the soccer and it’s lovely to see it now with the green, white, and blue flags out everywhere,” says Cunningham, who moved east from Offaly nearly 40 years ago.

“You know what we have down the country? A village unites. I used to say Bray was the biggest village because there was only eight or nine families when I got here that were what you’d call proper GAA families. We won Féile in football in my time and people didn’t even know what Féile was when we won it.

“That’s all part of taking the big steps from being a GAA desert into something that’s a really vibrant part of the community now.”

Diehard hurling territory

Trim may not sound like a hurling stronghold but as their captain James Toher has said before, “parts of Meath are diehard hurling”. The town lies at the centre of a seam of south Meath hurling heartlands, between Kilmessan, Kiltale, and Kildalkey, three clubs that focus exclusively on the small-ball game.

Trim is dual territory although of its 29 Meath senior titles, 28 have come in hurling. They have spent the last century tying and trading places at the top of the Meath roll of honour with Kilmessan.

There are families represented by three or four generations of Trim hurlers populating those roll of honour teams. James Murray is a free-scoring free-taker whose father, grandfather, and uncles all played in the red and white. Midfielder David Murtagh is the grandson of Ted, who sponsors the Meath Hurling Championship, and son of CJ, who is heavily involved in coaching with the club. James Andrews is the son of Meath hurling legend John.

Trim went 20 years without a Meath title until winning the delayed 2020 final in an extra-time thriller. They have enjoyed two in three seasons now, along with a run to last February’s All-Ireland Intermediate Football final. That two-decade drought has been set aside thanks, in part, to a decade of work put in by their juvenile coaching and development committee (JCDC).

From six years up, kids are grounded in the basics of hurling. They are given a tennis racket and bean bag to develop coordination and balance. By eight, that turns into a hurling skill they’ve been developing for two years without even realising it.

Last week, Trim’s U21 hurlers won the county title even without Murray, rested for the Leinster final, to complete a remarkable clean sweep of hurling titles at every grade from U13 up to senior. They had an U12 hurling team with no competition to target so they entered them into Division 4 at U13. They won that too.

Many of those players who have come through in the JCDC era are now playing senior hurling in what is, by and large, a young team. Multi-talented too. Nine of those who have featured in the Leinster campaign also played in that All-Ireland football final at Croke Park last spring. They have carried that belief into their extended hurling season.

“From the outside, it might have looked like we were going towards football. The truth is in the background all the underage teams were just winning left, right, and centre with hurling. No one could stop them,” says PRO Niall Flynn.

“Some of the players are diehard hurling and some of them are diehard football. It’s literally a 50-50 split down the middle with the players. For some of the players, that’s it, hurling is all they can see. They’re fantastic footballers, these guys, but they just want to hurl.”

For all their potential, they couldn’t find a manager to take over this team at the start of the year. “We struggled to find anyone to even talk to us,” says Flynn. “We had three or four guys interviewed and for whatever reason, it wasn’t a good fit from our side or their side.”

Jimmy Canty took charge on an interim basis alongside fellow Trim men David McGuinness and Ciarán Joyce. He insisted he hadn’t the time. Aside from work and life responsibilities, no trivial matters, he was taking underage teams and on the committee. The championship started and still, no manager was found. Now, into December, Canty must be the longest-serving interim manager in hurling.

“It might be official now,” laughs Flynn. “He’s not interim anymore. He’s bringing us to Leinster, we’ll have to call him the manager!

“The guys are quite happy now because they’ve had a fantastic run but it’s a big commitment for them. They do seven days a week up there; two, three hours between everything they do.”

Two towns

They meet in Aughrim on Saturday at 1pm. Neither will feel any limit to their ambitions given Naas’s journey since winning this title last year. All-Ireland intermediate champions and now Leinster senior semi-finalists, a winning run stopped only belatedly by the might of Ballyhale Shamrocks.

Two-time All-Ireland champions Cuala train on Bray Emmets’ pitch too. No shortage of role models to emulate in their neighbours across the county bounds.

Bray have gone from one county title (won in 1952) to annexing seven of the last nine, with Henderson leading them to their breakthrough 2014, 2015, and 2016 successes. When Wicklow won their first-ever All-Ireland U21B title in 2015, half the team was from Bray. The current crop has taken it to another level; their replay victory over Glenealy making it four in a row in October.

They are led by the like of Henderson’s son, John junior, veteran sharp-shooter Christy Moorehouse, and captain Marc Lennon, with Wexford man Paul Carley providing the sideline nous.

Moorehouse’s free sent them to a one-point victory over Laois champions Abbeyleix St Lazerian’s and they put double scores on Dublin winners Naomh Barróg, who failed to register from play in the final 59 minutes of the hour.

Trim are similarly tough to crack defensively. Their size and physicality, led by centre-back Toher, allied with Murray’s accuracy were credited with upsetting Danesfort by a point. Tullamore fell by 12, all their scores coming from Shane Dooley; all his scores coming from placed balls.

Bray Emmets and Trim have plenty more in common. Between them, they have senior football famines lasting a combined 147 years. Ending those are high on both priority lists.

Both will hope these runs provide some inspiration to counties that managed just one league win and none in championship all year; Meath relegated from the Joe McDonagh Cup, Wicklow relegated from Christy Ring.

Both clubs have benefitted from expanding populations. Bray have grown from six teams to 47 in recent decades; from one pitch to four; from a turnover of £8,000 to somewhere approaching €500,000. Trim now have 1,300 members; close to 600 of them are younger than 10. The senior teams of 2030 and 2040 look set to be well-stocked.

Internal migration patterns have placed passionate GAA families on their doorsteps. As well as the Henderson lineage, Bray wing-back Cian Lohan is a grandson of Galway footballing great Mattie McDonagh.

Trim will have Wexford-native Mark Molloy, no.30 on the programme against Danesfort, in their thoughts on Saturday. The man who has made such an impact with his adopted club and earned his Meath debut in 2020 is suffering with leukaemia.

“He’s made it to a few of the finals and he was there on the sideline,” says Flynn. “The boys always give him a shout-out or have a quick chat with him before they go out on the field. He was a huge addition and a lovely fella.

“He’s having a tough time at the moment but he’s always in everyone’s thoughts.”

This Saturday, come what may, two towns unite.