Keady and Middletown will meet in the Armagh SHC Final this Sunday.
By John Harrington
It’s a good week for Keady Lámh Dhearg hurling club in Armagh.
This evening their U-14 and U-18 hurlers contest county finals in the BOX-IT Athletic Grounds. On Sunday, it’s the turn of the senior team as they bit to prevent Middletown from winning a sixth Armagh championship in a row.
Had Keady not beaten Middletown in the 2018 county final then the reigning champions would be gunning for a 10th title in a row, but that’s little comfort to anyone associated with Lámh Dhearg.
A club with great tradition, throughout their history they’ve been more used to sitting on the throne rather than being a pretender to it.
They top the Armagh SHC roll of honour with 25 championships, and you can arguably add another six more to that total as the town alson won county titles as Éire Óg Keady and Keady Michael Dwyers before Lámh Dhearg came into being in 1949 and promptly won their first the same year.
You can usually boil the story of successful hurling clubs in counties where it’s a minority sport down to a few fanatical families, and Lámh Dhearg are no different.
Were you go to scan championship winning teams throughout the decades then you’d find surnames like McCormack, Breen, Kinsella, and King popping up consistently.
If you want to get a sense of the history of hurling in Keady, no better first port of call than club legend Jim McCormack.
He won nine Armagh championships in his own playing days with Keady, managed the club to many more, was a driving force behind the underage structures that are still producing bountiful crops, and has served in a variety of committee roles including club chairperson.
His passion for hurling was inherited from his father Paddy, another club legend who, like Jim himself, represented his county as well as club with distinction.
“My father was a Cork-man,” says McCormack. “He was born in Cloyne and went to school with Christy Ring. He was only a young boy when him and his sister came up to Keady. You're going back to the early 1930s.
“The De La Salle brothers were in town here and they were the ones that really pushed hurling in those early years. There was a Brother Matthias involved as far as I know who pushed it.
“So, when my father came up as a young Cork lad he started playing hurling. The family has been steeped in it ever since.”
The Keady U-18 hurlers that will contest the County Final.
That’s putting it mildly. Jim’s son’s Paul and Barry both won multiple county championships with Keady themselves and were leading lights for many years with Armagh too.
Barry manages the U-14 team that plays in this evening’s county final and is the club's Vice-Chairperson. While Paul, who won a Celtic Cross with the Armagh footballers in 2002, now manages the Slaughtneil hurlers.
The McCormack family ethos of giving back to the game is one that permeates the whole club, which is why Keady has produced championship winning teams in every decade since the 1920s.
The conveyor belt of talent has always kept moving even if it has been more productive at some times than others.
The current senior team is a young one that should improve in the coming years, and it looks like there’s another talented generation coming along quickly behind them.
“We're doing a lot of work at underage,” says McCormack. “The U-14 squad is very good and we have a fair minor squad too. We're hoping that we can get these boys through.
“We're doing a lot of work with the younger ones too, the U-8s, U-9s, and U-10s. Francis Fullerton has been a big influence, he played with me back in the day and is our underage coaching officer and he does great work.”
The future might look bright but, Keady being Keady, they’re ambitious about the present too.
The Keady U-14 hurlers that will contest the county final.
They’ve yet to win a senior championship this decade and it’s an itch they badly want to scratch.
All the more so because Sunday’s opponents, Middletown, have beaten them in the last three finals in a row.
There’s a sense that Keady are getting closer to them, but McCormack knows knocking the reigning champions from their perch will be no easy thing.
“They've won five in a row and they're going for six,” he says. “We stopped them in 2018, that was the last championship we won, but they've been dominant since and they're a very good team, there's no doubt about it.
“They worked hard at their underage and brought through a lot of young lads together and have been dominant in Armagh ever since. It's hard to break them down, but we're hoping it can be a close game on Sunday.
“Players like the Gaffneys, the Currys, and Cathal Carville are all very, very strong and Middletown have been dominating the Armagh county team for a number of years which Keady did prior to that.
“We'd be hopeful we're getting closer to them. We're pushing them rightly for around 50 minutes but then in the last 10 minutes they always seem to be able to turn the screw on us.
“We have a good young team so you never know. It might take us another year or two yet but we're not far away.”
