*John Russell. Photograph: Ruth Griffin
WITHIN THE Éire Óg dressing room, only John Russell has been acquainted with the Canon Hamilton, by Sunday evening he hopes to be sitting amongst a new batch of Clare SHC winners from the town.
The Clare Echo’s online coverage of the Clare SHC is with thanks to The Temple Gate Hotel.
A broken jaw and a hand injury restricted John’s involvement in 1990 to that of a substitute coming off the bench as Éire Óg defeated O’Callaghans Mills 1-5 1-3 to be crowed county champions. He was back among the starting team that November when they lost the Munster club final to Patrickswell 0-8 0-6 in Cusack Park.
Among his most youthful teammates in 1990 was wing back Tommy Corbett who captained St Flannan’s College to Croke Cup success a year later and is a selector in Brian Lohan’s Clare management, his son Matthew is part of the Clooney/Quin panel. At midfield on the team was Gerry Cahill and his son Oran will be midfield for Éire Óg on Sunday.
That Éire Óg would be waiting thirty five years to lift the Canon Hamilton is something John would never have envisaged in 1990. “We were in county finals and semi-finals regularly then, I played in five finals, I won two and lost three, I remember playing in the 1985 final and we lost to Kilmaley, that was forty years ago, I said to the lads that our team was good enough and we’d win it next year, I was lucky to get back again in 1990 and then again in 1992 I was captain”.
He continued, “When you’re playing you think they will come easy but they don’t come around too often, you have to take your chance when it comes. Thirty five years is a long time, there’s young lads growing up in the town of Ennis that have never seen Éire Óg win a senior championship, I saw Éire Óg win when I was fourteen years of age, I remember playing outside with my neighbours the Barrys, Petie and Joe, it made all the difference to me. Thirty five years for us in the town is a long time but it’s the same for Clooney/Quin and they are thinking the same thing”.
Uniqueness as the only Clare SHC winner in the dressing room is something he is well tired of. “It’s not a record I am proud of and it is not one I want to hold onto, I’d like it to finish and be over now because it is too long. We have a good academy here. I’ve seen the impact of the footballers winning the championships, we’ve young lads here and they know if you play senior football for Éire Óg there is a good chance that you will be on a winning team, we need those young lads in the academy to see us get over the line and then maybe an explosion of hurling could happen, it would be fabulous for the town. There’s proud Éire Óg people that have been waiting thirty five years to see a championship come back here, it might not happen this year but it is close and this team has a few older lads who won’t be around for forever, we need to strike while the iron is hot and we have a big challenge ahead of us”.
Russell returned to the senior management when Gerry O’Connor became manager last season. Prior to this, he had been involved with the club’s intermediate camogie side and junior hurlers. This is certainly not his first rodeo at senior level, “I’ve been manager four times since I finished hurling myself, I was a player manager in 1995, I’ve had three unsuccessful attempts as manager since,” he recalled. He has also coached Kilmaley’s senior hurlers when the late Eugene McMahon and John Carmody were in charge.
Management and players produce a “very professional effort” in their approach. “This is a serious group. The management group is very good, you’ve serious coaches and a serious manager. Liam Cronin, Ronan Keane, Owen Tarrant and Gerry are super people to work with”.
John’s role as coach and selector sees him primarily work with the backs and oversee touch drills while Ronan is tasked with “the tactical stuff, all the tactics came in when I finished, I wouldn’t be great on that but whatever is needed”.
How tactics have led to an evolution in hurling has left John fascinated at training sessions. “Having played corner back for Clare if the goalkeeper hit me out the ball I’d hit it straight back to him, I wouldn’t be thanking him. The modern game is very tactical, it is completely different to what I played, you just hit the ball and got rid of it because you had to get rid of it, there was no taking on your man, no breaking the tackle or creating overlaps, you just got the ball and let it go, it was the age-old story of letting the ball do the work, if you held onto it someone was going to crease you, it is a completely different game. Liam Cronin, Ronan Keane and Gerry are all very astute with what is happening and how teams set up, every day is a learning day, that is a fact, I go training and I learn every day off the boys, it is enjoyable at this stage of my life and to be with a group of players like what we have is fantastic. I’ve managed Éire Óg teams that have ended up in relegation situations but we were lucky enough to come out of it, sometimes you didn’t but to be involved with a group that is good enough to get you to a county final and have a chance of winning it is fantastic”.
Having lined out for Clare’s senior hurlers when there was no back door, he made ten championship appearances, the last of which was the 1993 Munster final defeat to Tipperary. He is unsure on how he would fare in the modern game. “The one thing I would say in the modern game, we were defenders and our job was to stop our man, I remember the late Jackie O’Gorman said to me after I marked Kevin Hennessy in the National League, I was only eighteen or nineteen, I didn’t hit too many balls and I was disappointed enough but Jackie said to me ‘your man didn’t a hit a ball and that is all you have to worry about making sure your man doesn’t score’. The modern goalkeeper is the most important person on the field, in our time he was a shot-stopper and just pucked out the ball, now he has to be clever, he has to be clued in and has to know the nuances, tactics and everything. Would I like to be in the modern game? I suppose if I was brought up in the game I would yes but sometimes I’d be watching saying that is not good when I see a corner back taking on his man or when we got turned over for the goal in the semi-final, you’d be saying ‘Jesus Christ, what are we doing’, it wouldn’t happen in our time because the ball would be hit as far from goal as possible, if I was fourteen or fifteen and I trained that way I’d love to be playing, it is a different game, I don’t know how good I’d be at it, they say the best hurlers are in the future or that’s what Christy Ring used to say”.
That future for Éire Óg looks much brighter, given how seamlessly their younger cohort have adapted to the senior ranks. Russell has taken on a role in mentoring them, “I suppose I have but that is for them to say, I enjoy working with them, as a fella that played in the backs myself to a fairly decent level I would be trying to pass on whatever bit of knowledge like ‘don’t let a fella catch a ball off you’ and ‘stay goal side’, the basics, sometimes these young lads come and they are so interested in playing hurling that they forget there is a job to do and that is to stop your man, I’d try to bring it down to the basics because we all know they can hurl, whether they can defend is a different thing, I try to bring it back to we’ll defend first and play hurling second”.
There are parallels with Sunday’s opponents Clooney/Quin, he believed. “They are the very same as ourselves. We are both coming from similar situations and backgrounds, haven’t won it a long time, the build-up of pressure will be in both camps because it’s a county final, somebody is going to win it, I hope it is us, if I was down there I’d be thinking the same way. If it was Ballyea, you’d be talking about their experience and the amount of times they have won it, we’re two novices going into it with a lot of young lads, we both have to take our final chance”.
Leaders in the dressing room have ensured it is a player-driven set up, the Element Six employee of the past forty years noted. “The dual players have won three football championships which is huge, we have Shane O’Donnell and David Reidy who are All-Ireland winners and that is huge experience, you can see that in the dressing room, Danny Russell is there who might not have the same amount of medals as the boys but his experience and Liam Corry’s is savage, we have a lot of leaders in the dressing room and it is about leaders. Gerry said it in earlier in the year, this is a player driven set-up, we’re only there to facilitate it, I hope it shows in the way they play, they take control and get us over the line”.
Last year’s quarter-final loss to Inagh/Kilnamona gave him the belief that this Éire Óg were capable of reaching the 2025 final. “We put the worst twenty minutes of hurling together in the opening twenty minutes, we were ten points down at half time and we went eleven down straight after half time, we came back and got into a situation where we won the game but we left it after us. I felt we only hurled for thirty minutes that day and we could have won a county quarter-final, we beat Inagh/Kilnamona this year and mentally I felt that was something we had to get over, when I saw the draw I didn’t want it to be a repeat of last year, I knew if we could get over that game that it would do a lot for us mentally, that mental toughness showed in the semi-final”.
Forming part of that toughness is the pain of their 2022 final defeat to Ballyea. “We were three points up with four minutes to go but we managed to lose the game, if it was against anybody else we might have won but Ballyea were only coming good so there is a lot of pain there for Danny Russell, David Reidy, Shane O’Donnell, Ciaran Russell, Aaron Fitzgerald, they have been in the situation and know what it is to lose one, they say you have to lose one before you can win one, I’m hoping”.
