*Colm Cleary. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill.
HAVING SPENT the first eight months of the year working in The World Trade Center in Amsterdam, Colm Cleary has regained his place on the O’Callaghans Mills team but it is much stronger than the side he left behind.
As he commenced his Erasmus in Rotterdam last September, the Mills were battling relegation, defeats in the play-offs to Clooney/Quin and then Corofin consigned them to intermediate for 2025. They are now bidding to return to the Clare SHC at the first attempt.
Colm returned in August and could notice a vast difference in the fitness and strength of the Mills side. |I’ve been away all year really, I was in Amsterdam for eight months on my work placement, I was coming over and back as much as I could, it was great because every time I came back there seemed to be a good buzz in the group which was different to the last couple of years, people seemed to be enjoying themselves an awful lot more, it was nice to come back to the atmosphere and it took me a while to get my place back in the team because the training they had done was absolutely savage, I’m glad to be back among the top fifteen or seventeen hurlers on the team. I was away for a lot of the year but the lads put in an awful lot of work, I came back at the end of August and have been trying hard to get back into the team since”.
Appearances from the bench against Killanena, Tubber and Tulla were made by Colm who has regained his spot in their top six forwards. “I was coming on towards the end of games but my fitness wasn’t 100 percent right so I picked up a bit of an injury and I was trying to get right. I worked with Seán Doyle for years and years so we know what to expect out of each other, hopefully all goes well on Sunday”.
There was certain elements such as the lack of hills in the Netherlands which precluded Colm from doing the same training as his teammates. “I kept in good shape but the lads had just got in better shape to what I was in. They had done some really dogged stuff, Seán Doyle was ringing and texting me to do hill runs, it is fairly well known that the Netherlands is a notoriously flat country, you could travel for miles, miles and miles and there would be no hills, everything is all straight, flat and he couldn’t grasp the fact that I could not find a hill. I used to go to the Park and do my runs there which had to suffice for there being no hills while all the boys were getting dogged up and down the hill in Kilkishen. I kept fit but when I came back the lads were in great shape and the buzz was way better than the last couple of years, the last few years was a slog and lads weren’t enjoying their hurling as much as they should have been, this year it seems to be all going well, it is nice when you are winning matches too”.
As an intern in the World Trade Center, Colm worked in financial reporting and accounting. “It was a very good experience, I was working in The World Trade Centre in Amsterdam with a big firm which was nice, a very professional set-up, 9-6 Monday to Friday, it was my first time working in an office, I always worked on the roofs so it was a big change and it took me an awful long time to get used to it but the eight months flew by, it feels like a blip in time now looking back, it is great to be back and hurling with the lads”.
Amsterdam has a strong GAA community, he noted. “I was playing hurling and football, they have a very good team there, they are the best out of all the European teams, Luxemburg, Stockholm plus some other big cities in the Netherlands would be big into their GAA, we were one of the strongest and had a great Irish community, I trained with the footballers and the hurlers about three times a week”.
He has returned to his final year of studies for international business at the University of Limerick along with assisting his father Robbie on some roofing jobs.
Bodyke native Doyle has brought certainty and stability to the team line-up, Colm believed. “I think the Mills as a club is in great shape, it is in the best shape it’s been in for a good few years with the overall morale of the group, the fitness levels, lads enjoying themselves and clicking, working together and having a very solid team this year where every day you go out you know where everyone is going to be playing, the last couple of years there was chopping and changing with lads so you didn’t know if lads would be wing forward or wing back, full forward or centre forward whereas this year has been fairly consistent, there has been a couple of changes throughout the year but lads have stayed centre forward or centre back, people nailed down their positions early on and we’ve went from there, everyone is very fit and we’re well able to hurl so it has been good so far this year”.
In 2020, O’Callaghans Mills contested the Clare SHC final, joining the panel a year later Colm was hopeful of experiencing the big days on a frequent basis. “I came on the panel in 2021, it wasn’t such a good year, I was like some bad hoax, I was only seventeen and I started against Clonlara in the Park, we were up six points at half time, I was thinking this is bloody great, hurling with the Mills seniors and we’re up six against a great Clonlara team, we ended up losing the match by four, we lost to Inagh/Kilnamona then and lost to Kilmaley, it went a bit pair shaped then for my first year senior and I had been looking forward to being on this team that reached the county final but we ended up in relegation which was a shock to the system. We were knocking around relegation for a few years then and in the Clare Cup, we didn’t see the heights of 2020 which is a disappointment but that is the way things work out and that is hurling, we had lads gone, they are coming back now so if we could build on this and try beat Clarecastle we could focus on trying to do better in senior next year if we were there”.
Losing players “didn’t make it any easier” when trying to keep their senior players, the twenty one year old said. “I was fourth choice freetaker with the Mills, Jacob Loughnane, Colin Crehan and Garry Cooney were all ahead of me but then within a year I was the first-choice, it was a big switch up, we had a lot of lads gone and they were huge marquee forwards so we didn’t have the firepower up front and the backs were under a lot of pressure, we had to work really hard in every match so we weren’t the same team, we had to make a dogfight out of every game because we didn’t have the firepower and the scoring going forward, that has got better and last year wasn’t the same. This year we have Jacob and Gary back in the forwards which is a huge boost, for their physicality, presence and putting scores on the board, this year we haven’t been struggling with the scoreboard all year so hopefully that continues”.
Cleary continued, “There is nobody carrying anyone which is good. We don’t have any Clare senior player at the moment like some teams in intermediate do so they have a lot of expectation and pressure on them every time they play, we have gelled well as a team, we get a great spread of scorers every day we go out, we get scores from midfield, as much as possible from the inside line and the half forward line is always great to pick up scores, some of the half backs even chip in with scores, there is no demanding pressure on one person so if that one person doesn’t play well it is very hard for the other players to pick up the pieces after them, it is an evenly spread them and we haven’t found it hard yet to get scores”.
Corner forward of the St Joseph’s Tulla side that won the Dr Harty Cup in 2022, he said Sunday’s final against Clarecastle “is the biggest game since then”.
Returning to senior at the first attempt is the primary focus for the Mills. “That was the objective at the start of the year but that is the objective of every team that comes down, they always say they want to bounce back straight away but a lot of the time it doesn’t work out like that, they say if you don’t get up in the first year you could be there for a couple of years which is fuel for the fire, you don’t want to be facing into an entire routine of trying to win the intermediate because it is a tricky place, there’s teams coming down, it is tough, if you get caught there for too long you can get sucked down and dragged down to another level of hurling that you get used to the intermediate pace, whereas if you get back up to senior as quickly as you can and get used to the bigger physicality, skill and pace of the game the better, you don’t want to be caught in intermediate too long”.
