This article is from page 103 of the 2008-10-28 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 103 JPG
CLARECASTLE is famous for it’s sluice gates, but it’s the ones up in the great beyond and not down on the River Fergus that attracted most at- tention on Saturday afternoon. They just wouldn’t shut and were intent of spoiling the showpiece occasion of intermediate hurling year.
But even the rains failed to spoil the Broadford party that started up around the midfield area of Clare- castle’s second field just after Spm on Saturday. It was there that the play- ers gathered in one big scrum to cel- ebrate joining the elite of Clare hurl- ing for the first time in 14 years.
That’s a long time, before Ger Loughnane’s hurling revolution swept the county to Munsters, All- Irelands and high kingship of the game. Maybe that’s why the scrum was so big and why the rains failed to put a damper on a huge day for Broadford hurling.
In time the scrum became one big rolling maul to the sanctuary of a fence on the sideline from where county board treasurer Bernard Keane addressed the crowd from on high and presented the intermediate cup to Padraig Hickey.
A winning captain, Hickey was al- ways going to get to lift the cup, but if ever a man deserved the honour it was the stylish corner-forward. He led by example, scoring four brilliant points from play over the hour in a man-of-the-match display.
“Give me the ball and I’ll score, that’s my motto anyway, but it’s the men that give me the ball, it’s the men that put super ball my way,’ he said after his winning speech and when the scrum had finally left for the dressing room and the bars of Broadford.
“We knew we were going to be there or thereabouts this year. At the start of the year we lost a couple of games and we knew afterwards that we just
had to get things right. Parteen beat us twice this year. Fair play to them, but it was a kick up the backside for us. Once we knew we had a lot of work to do we really got down to it, especially over the last two months. We put the foot to the floor and drove on. The rewards are here by winning the championship.
“It’s a massive step up for Broad- ford hurling. We haven’t played sen- ior championship since 1994. We went up Senior “B’ in ’97 and again in 2003, but playing Senior ‘A’ now is going to be a massive step up again. We’re going to have to put our foot to the floor again to even stay in the gerade, but we’re not going to worry about it tonight.”