Na Fianna won three-in-a-row Dublin U-21 'A' Hurling Championships from 2016 to 2018.
By John Harrington
At the turn of the millennium, hurling in the Na Fianna GAA club in Drumcondra, Dublin looked like it was on its knees.
The club hadn’t fielded a minor team since 1985, and the senior team was still counting heavily on the graduates of their 1981 county minor winning team.
The Na Fianna senior footballers had won three-in-a-row county senior titles from 1999 to 2001, and hurling was very much shivering in the shade they cast.
The darkest hour is just before dawn though, and behind the scenes the foundations were being put in place for a brighter future.
“We started a nursery about 20 years ago from scratch,” says Na Fianna’s Adult Games Manager, Tom Ryan, who has played a key role in the rejuvenation of hurling in the club.
“There was a situation where we had no underage hurler in the club at all.
“We gradually introduced the concept of all the players in the nursery playing both hurling and football so they'd all come through as dual players.
“A lot of the credit would go to the mentors who brought those kids up through the age-grades. They were good people and good man-managers and developed a really good group of players who just happened to come together as a group.”
Na Fianna were able to field a minor hurling team again in 2000 when the first crop of young hurlers from the nursery were harvested, and from those first green shoots they’ve grown and grown.
They reached County Minor ‘A’ Finals in 2006 and 2007 where they were well beaten by Ballyboden St. Enda’s and Kilmacud Crokes, but that still counted as huge progress for a club that hadn’t really been mapped in the grade for over 20 years.
The big breakthrough came in 2012 when a team Ryan helped mentor won the Dublin Minor Championship, and since then they’ve been the dominant force in the age grade winning another four titles in a row from 2014 to 2017.
Na Fianna celebrate after winning the 2017 Dublin Minor 'A' Final, their fourth in a row in the grade.
Success in the U-21 grade has swiftly followed, with county ‘A’ titles won back to back in 2016 and 2017.
The challenge now is to mould this generation of talented young hurlers into a successful senior team, which is where Declan Feeney comes in.
He’s coached or managed them to success through all the underage grades and now hopes to do the same at senior level, though he’s realistic enough to know that will be easier said than done.
Underage success is no guarantee of the same in the dog eat dog senior grade, and the team that Na Fianna will field in Friday evening’s Dublin SHC Quarter-Final against St. Vincent’s is callow in the extreme.
Their two most experienced players, former Dublin hurlers Tomás Brady and Joey Boland, are not available this year - Brady has moved abroad and Boland is injury – so the team is almost exclusively staffed by players still in or just out of the underage ranks.
“I anticipate the team that will play St. Vincent's will have an average age of 21,” said Feeney. “Out of a senior panel of 30, only four of them are over 22.
“The problem is that there's huge expectation on the current senior squad. But, to be fair to them, they're still effectively an U-21 team. And no U-21 team has ever won a senior championship.
“That's the only fear I'd have for them, that bigger fellas are going to push them around the place. We're just physically not strong enough yet.
“Ballyboden won five minors in a row and it took them five years to win a county senior title.
“Young fellas, it generally takes them a couple of years to get used to playing adult hurling. But, obviously, you go into the game on Friday full of expectation.”
The 2018 Na Fianna Senior Hurling team.
The St. Vincent’s team that stand in their way are a formidable obstacle.
They gave eventual All-Ireland Champions Cuala plenty of problems in last year’s Dublin SHC semi-final and will be fired up to defeat their neighbours from the other end of Griffith Avenue.
“They're a good team, they have some fabulous hurlers,” said Feeney.
“They're very fast up front. They've two huge men in John Hetherton and Keith Connolly and the rest (of the forwards) are built for speed.
“Their backs are much older than our forwards, they're all 27, 28, the perfect age.
“Cuala made their mark when they had a lot of 26, 27-year-olds. Vincent’s have to see themselves as winning a championship this year.
“Whereas we're hoping to get to a semi-final so we can say we've made progress. After them being in a semi-final last year, they've got to be looking to make a semi-final this year.
“They have the tools to do it, absolutely. They've enough experienced inter-county hurlers blended in with some very talented young fellas.
“I feel they're in a very strong position.”
Feeney has worked at the coal-face of Dublin hurling for a long time now.
He was a mentor with the Dublin Colleges team that won the 2006 Croke Cup which was one of the first signs that hurling in the capital county was moving in the right direction.
In the years that have followed Dublin hurling teams have won one Leinster Senior Championship, one National Hurling League, four Leinster U-21 hurling championships, five Leinster minor hurling championships, and two All-Ireland Club Hurling Championships.
The Dublin club hurling championship is now one of the most competitive in the whole country. Cuala have won the last two All-Irelands in a row, but in that time many of their toughest games have been played in their own club championship.
Rising Dublin star, Donal Burke, is a key man for the Na Fianna hurlers.
Na Fianna are the latest club to rise up and potentially challenge them this year and in the years to come. As far as Feeney is concerned, club hurling has never been healthier in the capital.
“All of the Dublin club teams go to the country to play challenge matches and they all go down expecting to win them,” he said.
“Once upon a time you went down hoping not to be beaten by 10 points. But now teams go down to the country expecting to win.
“A lot of the young hurlers coming through in the county now have had a lot of success at underage inter-county level and even in DCU over the last two years.
“Those teams have been populated with Dublin lads. They're after winning two Freshers All-Irelands with a litter of Dublin fellas on both teams.
“So they're all getting huge experience and huge exposure. There's no reason to fear any of the teams in the country.”
Fearlessness is an obvious trait this young Na Fianna team possesses to complement their obvious quality.
They’ve already reached the final of the of the Dublin Senior Hurling League for the first time in their history this year, and if they could defeat St. Vincent’s on Friday they’d qualify for just their fourth ever Dublin SHC semi-final.
Some are even dreaming of a first ever County Final appearance in the not too distant future, but Feeney is keeping his two feet firmly planted on the ground.
“There's a great buzz, but there's huge expectation, and I'd imagine everyone in the club is dreaming of winning something at senior.
“But this is still a very young team, so let’s give them some time.”
