Birr’s display against champions a big step forward despite defeat
By Kevin Egan
Throughout my twenties, a time when Birr won nine out of the ten Offaly SHC titles on offer and picked up plenty of Leinster and national silverware along with it, it was hard to imagine that there would ever come a time when losing a senior semi-final in any fashion would be seen as a big step forward for that famous club.
Yet that was the landscape when the final whistle sounded last Saturday in Tullamore, Charlie Mitchell’s winning point for Kilcormac-Killoughey having confirmed a 17th successive season without getting their hands on the cup that bears the name of their former club chairman, Seán Robbins.
Birr had been incredibly competitive in a game of real quality, forcing the county champions to go deep into the well to pick up a win, and it could be argued that even in defeat, it was as good a showing as Birr have produced in a knockout game for quite some time.
After that decade of dominance around the turn of the millennium, what followed was an equally long time when the club gradually lost ground against their rivals in the county, and whether it was correlation or coincidence, at the same time a lot of energy was expended on off-field matters, including some quite acrimonious battles.
Most would say it wasn’t entirely coincidental that as Birr slipped back as a hurling power, so too did Offaly.
The neutrality required of any columnist compels me to say that the important thing is that standards are high across the board, that intercounty teams are successful, and that the next generation is inspired to pick up hurls and footballs, and well-supported once they do. It shouldn’t matter which clubs are the most successful at doing so, as long as the overall tide is rising.
Yet there’s also a pragmatic aspect that says that it’s wonderful to see small clubs get their day in the sun - watching Lusmagh celebrate their fully-deserved Senior B title win certainly falls into that category – but it’s the simple truth that in a small county, the handful of bigger clubs need to be in rude health for Offaly to prosper.
Nobody wants Kilcormac-Killoughey to get weaker, but they need robust domestic competition. It helps no-one if K-K dominate the landscape at all grades, and it was notable that in recent years, the few clubs that were competitive with K-K at adult level weren’t the same very few clubs that came anywhere close to matching them at underage.
Birr still have a long way still to travel but they look closer than they’ve been for some time, while they have another massive fixture in St. Brendan’s Park in the minor final against Kilcormac-Killoughey tomorrow (Saturday) and a chance to pass another big milestone on the road back to where they want to go.