*Joe & Mark Rafferty.
WITHIN THE Rafferty household they have a county final involvement on the double.
The Clare Echo’s online coverage of the Clare SFC is with thanks to The Shannon Springs Hotel.
Joe has been one of the leading forwards in the St Joseph’s Doora/Barefield attack as they contest a first senior decider since 2012 while his father Mark is coach of the Corofin intermediates looking to bounce back to the senior ranks at the first attempt.
The Clare Echo caught up with Mark and Joe ahead of a busy week where they both vie for county honours. “Everything in our house is football,” Joe admitted.
There tends to be a Rafferty link with Doora/Barefield’s Clare SFC final appearances. Mark was midfield when they lost the 2011 decider to Kilmurry Ibrickane and was manager a year later when they lost to the same West Clare opposition.
Those campaigns are among the early football memories for twenty two year old Joe. “I remember 2010, they played a relegation dogfight against Ballyvaughan up in Ennistymon and they hung on by the skin of their teeth, then all of a sudden the next year they just kept winning and winning, they played Doonbeg both years dogged games, I remember the crowd being nearly in on the field, it wasn’t high scoring and it wasn’t pretty football, Doonbeg were the county champions and I remember the county finals they weren’t the best days but I remember beating Wolfe Tones in the 2011 semi-final and Doonbeg in the 2012 semi-final, it all meshed into the one but if I ever think back to watching Doora/Barefield play it is back to that, it was nicer to have him playing because the year after he was manager. There was good times and then you think of Kilmurry Ibrickane and it wasn’t as good”.
Midfield one year to manager the next wasn’t a difficult transition, Mark recalled. “I suppose one just sort of rolled into the other. I was also lucky enough I had Kieran Kelleher was along with me, and Declan O’Keefe, and Eugene Moynihan. I think Kieran had been part of the selection committee the year before. Declan was was still the goalkeeper, and Eugene was always on the sideline anyway, Eugene just had a good eye for stuff and a good head on him as well and Declan could see games from his point of view so it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t mind it at all. I know I played along with a lot of those players but still, you know, you had hard choices to make, that’s just the way it was”.
Thirteen years have elapsed since they contested back to back finals. “Finals don’t come around easy. A lot of bigger clubs would have had a conveyor belt of talent coming through and you could see that here, go to the big towns and big clubs in Dublin, Limerick, Galway and Cork it is the same thing, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get that kind of final, at the end of the day, a good minor team coming along, good under-21 team coming along, you know you don’t necessarily have to win those competitions but you might have someone to get two or three players out of each of those teams every time, and then those two or three players either stay free of injury. You can nurse them along till they’re 22 or 23 to make them really good club players and then maybe one of those guys will make a county squad so it’s about trying to get those two or three players all the time, big numbers at underage doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting to finals. I was saying to James last week you need to enjoy the couple of weeks building into this because you might not see it again,” Mark said.
Delving back into the memories, Joe is asked whether his father was a better manager or footballer. “I suppose when he was a player, I still feel like he would’ve stood out, Maybe it was the grey hair. Maybe the legs were a bit gone, so he was probably 42 or 43 for them games. I would remember him more for playing junior football a couple of years after because I was a bit older and I probably knew a bit more as well. From what I’ve seen of him as a manager, he is a pretty good manager as well. I wouldn’t be able to compare to his playing days when he was younger but he was a bit tougher, he was always fit and a good fielder”. Mark interjected, “just the best guy on the pitch”.
According to Mark he could see Joe’s ability from an early age. “From when he was very young, he was always out in the garden with a ball, he was easily in the top two or three players at his age in the county at the time, he was really talented when he was eight and ten, he probably struggled a bit from when he was fourteen to eighteen, I was a bit like that myself but he kept at it. He’s able to kick with both feet and that’s just hard work, you have to go out and work, practice. With Michael Neylon and the Clare U20s they had a really good run for a couple of years, they were very unlucky not to beat Kerry that time, they took them to extra time so that was really good building blocks that he had with Clare. It’s just hard work since then on, he’s been in with the Clare squad last year so he’s started to blossom there”.
Struggles for Joe during his teenage years were due to a drop in work ethic and mentality, he believed. “I knew how good I was I probably just stopped working hard. Football has been everything for me since I can remember and then when I started to struggle it was really hard for me, up till I was maybe twelve or thirteen I was probably playing four or five years above my age and would have been miles ahead of everybody my age and then you start to slow down a small bit and lads started to grow bigger than me, get quicker than me and suddenly I wasn’t the best player anymore. Maybe I thought I was better than I was or maybe I knew how good I was and stopped putting in the hard yards for a couple of years. I turned a corner there recently but it did take a while because even when I was struggling I still thought I was better than this guy or that guy even though lads had gone light years ahead of me, it was tough”.
For him the moment of realisation that he needed to pull up his socks arrived when he was dropped off the Clare minor panel by then manager Dermot Coughlan. “Definitely getting dropped from the Clare minors in my first year by Dermot Coughlan and he was well within his right to. I hadn’t done enough work, I wasn’t good enough, there was lads better than me that I thought I was better than which made it worse, that year was a tough one, it was probably the first time I’d ever not made a squad or even started for a team, I was sixteen or seventeen then in 2018”.
Derry native Mark won a championship with Glenullin in 1985 before emigrating to Australia. He then moved to the native county of his wife Deirdre (nee Healy) when they returned from Australia in 1998. He has played a big part in developing gaelic football within The Parish. “I think Doora/Barefield have probably undersold themselves a bit, when I came here I think we were playing Division 3, my first game was against Cooraclare’s second team on a wet Sunday afternoon in Cooraclare. Most of the Executive hadn’t an intertest in football and that’s probably still maybe the way, it was only really when people like myself and other people from football counties coming in that started to drive that on, that is where it all stemmed from. At the same time, there was good players there but the structures and the drive just wasn’t there for that. With the Celtic Tiger coming at that time, there were different people who’d moved in to around the club and there were loads of houses being built there and that, and you’re sort of starting to see the fruits of that there”
A building contractor, Mark said football can be a constant in his head. “There’s times when it is in your head all of the time and then just other times when you’re just busy with work and it goes away from you. There’s always a text coming in from Peadar or someone in the management. That is my main concentration, when you’re at home sitting around the dinner table, it’s a different story and you’re sort of hearing titbits of what Joseph’s talking about at training or whatever or you’re asking how training’s going or whatever but my focus is to get Corofin over the line on Sunday, make sure training is right and that everyone is set up”.
Now in his second season with Corofin, he is hopeful they will overcome Cooraclare for a second time this year. “We were senior last year and I managed to bring them to intermediate, so now I’m trying to get them back up to, to senior again. That’s sort of where the goal is, we have done a lot of work in this last two years, so it’s trying to get bad habits out of them and just to play better, get fitter and bring the whole package. We’re still a long way from where I’d like it to be but we’re going in the right direction”.
Winning the U21A championship last year instilled a sense of belief for Doora/Barefield while overcoming Kilmurry Ibrickane in the quarter-finals ignited their run to the final. “The 21s probably you could say was for my group, we had won everything and that was the one thing we didn’t have, so for a lot of us it was kind of to cap off with the underage group but it also showed we can win tight games, that was a dogged game against Lissycasey. You could call the Kilmurry Ibrickane game a coming of age one, it was like we knew ourselves that there was a performance in us. We showed patches like the first twenty minutes, we ripped through them and then we just completely stopped playing. We know how good we can be, even still we didn’t play excellent against Kilmurry but the amount of games we’ve had over the years where the games were there and the fat is in the fire and we haven’t got over the line, I think getting the win was huge for us,” Joe said.
How Doora/Barefield have dug deep in their last two outings has impressed Mark, a former county minor selector. “The one thing maybe going against them is their strength in depth, Fionn was injured the last day, hopefully he’ll be back for the final. We’re missing Tom and Jack Hannan, Kieran Thynne from last year, that is one thing that could go against them but on the other side as Joseph said it was good to get over the line against Kilmurry and take another step beating Cratloe. It’s one thing to go out and beat one big team but to go beat another big team then you’ve really backed it up. There was a lot against them in the second half against Cratloe, they were four points up and Cratloe were coming back but they stuck it out and there is a lot of positives for the boys because they can now eek out wins and that is what championship football is all about”.
Overcoming Kilmurry Ibickane and Cratloe, champions as recently as 2020 and 2023 respectively has Doora/Barefield heading into the final versus Éire Óg with less fear. “It has definitely given us a lot of confidence but look we’re still playing Éire Óg, they are red hot favourites and deservedly so, they’ve countless Clare players but for us as a group we know that we can win championship games. We hadn’t won a knockout championship game since 2012 but it has given us a lot of confidence but we know the team we’re playing is seriously good”.
Corofin are red hot favourites when it comes to the intermediate, Mark acknowledged. “I heard people say after the semi-final ‘oh that was the county final’ but we’re not looking at it like that. I know we beat Cooraclare well in the group stage but we both came out of the group, we got late goals that day to put a real gloss on the scoreline and Cooraclare got a black card halfway through that game so we notched on about five or six points at that stage, Pearse (Lillis) had only a few games played at that stage, he has another three or four under his belt, Brian (McNamara) was in the States at the time so they are a different animal now. We’re in the final and you just don’t know what is going to happen in a final”.
There are further parallels with Doora/Barefield losing to Éire Óg in the second round of the SFC. “The past few games we’ve had have given us a lot of confidence and probably showed everyone in the county things that we already knew about ourselves but we still needed to show ourselves as well that we were able to do it. Everyone will tip them, I don’t think anyone fancies us which we’re okay with, we know what we’re capable of and we’re more confident,” Joe outlined.
Reaching county finals can be rare but there are two to prepare for in the one household. Mark is of the view that both Corofin and Doora/Barefield must seize the opportunity in front of them. “I go back to Kilmurry Ibrickane and gut wrenching is the word for it, a senior final is not a nice place when you lose well the same for any final. I just find that on the day of finals, it never seems to go the way you think it’s going to go, the plans you make, you do this and that but suddenly the days seem to fly and it is nearly over before you realise so you have to try and make the most of it. What I’d be saying is we have an opportunity here, you’ve to try and take it because you never know when you will get another chance, I won a championship when I was eighteen and I never saw another one till I was 42, that’s a fair chunk of life”.
Their run to the final was more expected than Doora/Barefield’s. “If you look at the way Kilrush were playing at the start of the year they were really red hot favourites, we were down the pecking order but it didn’t bother us at all. The lads have really put their heads down this year, they were disappointed getting relegated to Kilmihil who were the better team on the day so you just take it on the chin and go again. We’re in the final and we have to go and try finish the job, I’m sure Cooraclare will be looking to do the same thing”.
Working with Zurich Insurance, Joe spends a chunk of his working week in Dublin which offers some separation from the hype in Clare. “If I’m talking about it in work people would be looking at me as if I have ten heads. Football will always be there no matter if it is a county final or relegation final but it is nice to still be playing at this time of year. It is nice to have the separation in Dublin but it is still in the back of my mind no matter I’m doing”.
With a chance to win two trophies on the line, the Rafferty home in Knockanean would like to be visited by Jack Daly or the Talty Stores Cup, both would be their preference. “Hopefully the Jack Daly, I don’t really care about the Talty Stores Cup! Obviously I’d love to see Corofin win I know what he’s put into them and I even talk to some players that they do really seem to enjoy him as a coach. I would love to see them win but my main focus is the Jack Daly, I’d love to see it in Doora/Barefield but it would be nice to have both,” said Joe.
Father and son possess a similar outlook on football and Joe who was part of the Clare senior panel this season wouldn’t be against Mark getting involved with the Doora/Barefield seniors at some point in his playing career. “I wouldn’t mind it. Like I know the way he wants to play the game and wants to kick the ball and wants to play attacking football, um, which isn’t very common in Clare, I don’t think it would be too bad, we might clash heads a few times but I do think it would be enjoyable”.
