Baltinglass captain Jason Kennedy
By John Harrington
The Leinster Senior Football Club Championship will welcome back a long-lost prodigal son on Sunday when Wicklow champions Baltinglass make their first appearance in the competition for 22 years.
The Wicklow side were once one of the most familiar faces of the provincial club campaign in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, a period that saw them win 15 county titles in 24 years.
That glorious era for Baltinglass GAA club was gilded with gold when they won the ’89 Leinster title and went on to win the All-Ireland too, the only Wicklow club ever to do so.
In more recent years though, those past decades of high-achievement seemed to weigh heavily as Baltinglass went into decline and were replaced by Rathnew as the Kings of Wicklow club football.
They’re back now though thanks to a County Final win over St. Patrick’s, and team-captain Jason Kennedy admits it’s hugely satisfying that the current generation have added their own chapter to the club’s illustrious history.
“I suppose people probably dwelled on the club’s past,” he admits. “Baltinglass has a very decorated history, obviously, winning the Club All-Ireland in 1990.
“For a town that's relatively small, it was a fantastic achievement. But the reality is, we won a few championships after and then kind of finished in '94 and didn't win another one until 2007.
“We've been beaten in three County Finals in the interim before we got over the line this year. So it was a long time. A lot of heartache and hard-luck stories and moral victories in between. Fantastic to get over the line and get Baltinglass back to where we think they should be.
“I was too young to remember Baltinglass being successful. I always remember going to matches and seeing Baltinglass losing, or whatever.
“It has a great history but, you know, it's just that, history. It's good to have a bit of success now in the present day.
“An amount of championship titles were won in the eighties and nineties and maybe it cast a bit of a shadow over ourselves. We had to write our own history. Now we've won the Championship and nobody can take that away from us.
“It's on to the Leinster club now, and in 2007 Baltinglass didn't get to play in it due to a fixtures backlog in the county championship, or whatever. It'll be a great day on Sunday getting to represent Wicklow and we're really looking forward to it.”
Jason Kennedy
Now that they’re finally back where they once felt they naturally belonged, Baltinglass are determined to make the most of the opportunity.
Winning a first county title in nine years meant a lot to everyone in a town now festooned with green and white banners, but their tradition demands that they now have a good cut off the Leinster Championship which starts with a clash against Louth Champions, Sean O’Mahony’s, on Sunday.
“We celebrated (the county title) for a couple of days which we were more than entitled to,” says Kennedy. “We won on a Sunday and were back training on the Wednesday night.
“We actually had to play our last League game the Sunday after that so we were back into it. In Wicklow we would have had quarter-final, semi-final, and final, with two weeks in between them all. So our approach has been the very same before this game as it was for those matches.
“We have our routine and we're sticking to that. Look, no-one expected us to win the county championship, we were completely written off. We were knocked out in the quarter-final last year and people were saying we were finished.
“We've proven them wrong and we'll be going into the game on Sunday looking to do ourselves justice. If that's enough to get us into the quarter-final, then well and good. We'll be taking this game very seriously. It's not like we have the championship in the bag and we're just going into this to see how we go. We'll be hoping to definitely be competitive.
“It is a bit of a journey into the unknown, but it's one that we're very excited about.”
