Sean Brennan loving Cuala's return to the big show

By John Harrington

The big time came knocking very early in Sean Brennan’s club hurling career.

When Cuala goalkeeper Fintan O’Brien rolled his ankle in training the Thursday before the 2012 county quarter-final against Craobh Chiaráin, the senior team management phoned Brennan.

He was only 17 years old and never played senior club hurling before, but they’d seen enough of him in the minor grade to know he was made of the right stuff.

Brennan went from there to play Cuala in that year’s county final defeat to Kilmacud Crokes, but not before he also played for the club’s minor footballers earlier that morning in a county semi-final against Naomh Mearnóg.

He won his first Dublin senior championship three years later at the age of 20, and by the age of 23 had won three Dublin senior titles, two Leinster senior titles, and two All-Ireland titles.

Two more Dublin titles followed in 2019 and 2020 to make it a total of five in just six years, but then Cuala’s era of dominance came to a sudden end.

They’re back in a county final again this Sunday for the first time in six years, and Brennan has a new appreciation for something that was almost an annual event in the first half of his senior club career.

“Yeah, it's great, I’m absolutely buzzing to be honest,” he says. “It's been six years now since we've been in one. So, this will be my seventh final.

“Maybe we took it for granted a small bit. When I was younger, I suppose I was lucky enough. My dad was on that '88 football championship winning Cuala team. He was 18 at that time and he never made it back to a final.

“In fairness, he said to me, 'Don't get too used to this'. We went on an incredible run at the time. But, yeah, look, as I said, we haven't competed for the last couple of years really.

“Group stages, quarter-final stages, haven't been able to break into a semi-final, final. So, just to get back here, it's so exciting. I personally just cannot wait for it.

“You want these big days, you want a packed out Parnell Park here under lights on a Saturday night. Just the buzz around that, it's just incredible. So, I just can't wait for the whistle to blow and the rest to look after itself.”

The lean years that Cuala have endured in recent times have made Brennan realise all the more just how special an achievement it was to win back to back All-Ireland club titles in 2017 and 2018.

He and many of his team-mates were very young men at the time, and those couple of years went by in a happy blur.

“I suppose an adventure is a good way to describe it,” he says. “We just had an unbelievable group of players. We had a brilliant management team with Mattie (Kenny) and Greg (Kennedy). I think just the profile of players that were there at the time was a really good blend.

“Obviously, then you had the likes of the Schuttes, the Treacys, Darragh O'Connell, Oisín Gough…there was a lot of inter-county experience there as well. And then maybe the younger crew, Jake Malone, Sean Tracy and myself or whatever.

“Then there was Colm Sheanon and Cian Waldron…they're nearly unsung heroes because they did a lot of the dirty grunt work that no one gets any credit for. But you put a ball down on either of those two lads, it's not coming out or it's waiting 10-15 seconds before it comes out and just gives the whole group a chance to reset or whatever.

“We just had a really, really good group there, a really good understanding of each other. Tactically and all, we were very well set up at the time.

“Look, it was just an incredible time. It's probably something you're not fully going to appreciate until you've probably retired I'd say, or you're probably 50 looking back at it all. At that time we were so successful, maybe you take it for granted a small bit, or you just kind of get used to it or something like that.

“The years just kept rolling into one and we just kind of stayed going as far as we could. It was 2021 then, we lost the semi-final to Crokes, wasn't it? And that was the end of the journey then.”

The decline of the team was pretty swift from there with Cuala needing to beat St. Jude’s in a 2023 relegation play-off to preserve their Senior 1 status.

Since then they’ve built themselves back up with a new generation of players coming through to complement experienced heads like Brennan, Sean Moran, and Cian O’Callaghan.

“It's probably a natural evolution of every team, I suppose,” says Brennan. “Obviously, a few of the older guard kind of retire and stuff like that and you're bringing through the young lads. It's always a bit of a transition to get the young lads up to speed or whatever.

“And you're trying to find the balance of, I suppose, age and youth and experience and everything like that and kind of gelling it all together. But I think we've found a nice balance of it now and we've a good mix on the panel at the moment.”

Cuala’s young guns like Liam Murphy and Conall O’Toole really came of age in the county semi-final victory over reigning champions Na Fianna to set up a final joust with Kilmacud Crokes on Saturday evening.

The intense rivalry between the two neighbouring southside clubs will ensure Parnell Park will be packed to the rafters.

“I think it adds a little bit of spiciness to it to be honest, having the ‘noisy neighbours’ there,” says Brennan.

“There's a huge Colaiste Eoin contingent on both teams so a good overlap of lads going to school together.

“I heard the ‘clash of the cash’ being mentioned again. I think that was a 2016 line from when we last played one another in the final, so you get all those little things popping up.

“It's kind of funny to be fair, it doesn't bother us anyway, it is a good little punchline for outside clubs or whatever.

“Cuala want to beat Crokes, Crokes want to beat Cuala. It's always been the way growing up, it always has been at underage and stuff so it does add a little bit of edge to it, makes it a little bit more of an incentive to make sure you get the bragging rights I suppose come Monday.”

Having already won the Dublin senior football championship, Cuala have a glorious opportunity to become just the fourth club to do the double and follow in the footsteps of St. Vincent’s, Ballyboden St. Enda’s, and Kilmacud Crokes.

Does that prospect put additional pressure on the Cuala players going into the game?

“I wouldn't say pressure, it's actually making you want to do it a bit more,” says Brennan.

“Watching the footballers win the All-Ireland two years ago, I was going ‘Ah f**k, imagine we got another chance to do that’. I was jealous watching them to be honest.

“So it's not a feeling of pressure, it's actually a bit of I want to replicate that feeling. We'd love to be able to do it, irrespective of what the footballers have done.

“Obviously it's phenomenal they've done it, but we have to mind our own patch here as well. We want to get over the line, there’s no point living off the back of their success if we can't do it ourselves so there's a huge incentive for us to do it also.”