Hutchinson happy to have proven himself all over again

By John Harrington

Dessie Hutchinson’s consistent excellence for Ballygunner in recent years has been remarkable.

Since 2018 he’s been selected in the AIB Club Hurling Team of the Year four times and at last Friday’s awards ceremony he was awarded the Hurler of the Year award for the second time.

But despite all he had achieved at club level before this year’s All-Ireland success, the Waterford star was fuelled by a desire to prove he is still a hurler of the very highest calibre.

“In fairness to the Ballygunner management, they put massive confidence in me and my role this year,” says Hutchinson.

“I suppose I came off the back of a tough enough season with Waterford as well, and I probably wanted to prove a point to myself and maybe to other people that I'm still a good hurler and all that.

"Knuckling down...people outside of Ballygunner would have thought that we underachieved a little bit and I suppose certain players took that upon themselves to say, look, if we're going to go down, we need to show our best selves and maybe in previous years we didn't do that.

“So it was all about us standing up and having no regrets this year and thankfully we've done that and it brought us back to Croke Park and produced a good performance here in the All-Ireland Final that got us over the line.

“Maybe the outside noise was that for as good of a team we was, we should have more All-Irelands, we should have more Munster Championships, and maybe that got under our skin a little bit but we knew we were a good team and we knew that the reason we lost games was our own doing.

“Now, in fairness to Sarsfields in the Munster Final last year, they were the better team and we underperformed but even if we did perform, they were very good that day and that's what we're kind of getting at, that we didn't want to leave ourselves down in any moment this year and I don't think we did that.

“Even though at times we didn't hurl for 60 minutes full, we showed it in very good patches at times but we knew then coming into an All-Ireland Final, if we could put a full 60-minute performance together, that it would get us over the line.”

It’s a testament to just how good Ballygunner were throughout their All-Ireland winning campaign that Hutchinson was one of three players from the Waterford club to be nominated for the Hurler of the Year awards along with goalkeeper Stephen O’Keeffe and midfielder Paddy Leavey.

Forwards like Hutchinson tend to make the headlines for their scoring exploits, but he knows that O’Keeffe and Leavey were just as central to Ballygunner’s success.

“Start with SOK, you can't say enough good words about him for what he does with us and we're so, so lucky to have him in Ballygunner,” said Hutchinson.

“For me he's still the best goalkeeper in the country and we're blessed to have him and every year we have him we're saying how lucky we are to have him.

“Look he's influential to everything we do in Ballygunner and when we do lose him, hopefully it won't be anytime soon, but when we do it's going to be a massive boot to fill when he does go.

“Paddy, he's our wall in midfield, he does some of the work that nobody sees. Like, when you think about individual awards and stuff you think about people scoring or making saves, Paddy's a break-up player, he's gets it and moves it to other people.

"Every team needs a Paddy Leavy. People underestimate him at times but for us he's a special, special lad, a special player and again so grateful to have him on our team.

“If you went into one of our meetings the week before the All-Ireland Final we would have talked about turnovers, we would have talked about puck outs and all those little things, those KPIs that you go after in a game that ultimately if you're on top of them you win a game.

“Paddy is definitely one of the ones that you look at the tackle sheet every week, he's probably the top tackler and, again, as I said, he probably doesn't get enough recognition for what he does within our team.

“Yes, every team has a different type of midfielder but for us he's brilliant and, look, SOK, talk about puck out retention and stuff, you're not going to get much better than him."

In the last 12 years Ballygunner have won 12 Waterford championships, five Munster championships, and two All-Irelands.

Hutchinson believes the secret to their success is that they do the simple things well.

“Look, we're a really united bunch I suppose but we focus on real basic things and we don't go over the top on everything that you imagine a team is thinking about in today's game.

“I suppose whether it's S&C or whether it's stats or whether it's coaching, we just focus on the basics and it brings us really far but obviously we've a really good team, we're really skilful players and that helps too.

“As long as we can keep producing that it's please God it'll work in our favour. We've a lot of young lads coming in again this year that are going to add freshness to it and like I said at the start of the year to the lads like there's certain people in the dressing room they've never won a county medal and let's go and win them one and then it goes from there.”