By John Harrington

Kilmacud Crokes football team captain, Shane Cunningham, is very aware his club are different than most.

They don’t quite fit the romantic ideal many seem to have of a GAA club being the beating heart of a small, usually rural community, where everyone knows everyone else.

Instead, Crokes have been tagged as a ‘super-club’, and those that use that term tend not to mean it as a compliment.

Rather it’s a commentary on the sheer size of Kilmacud Crokes who have around 5,000 members from Stillorgan and its surrounds and field approximately 130 teams.

But Cunningham’s view is that just because they’re a big club in a sprawling urban area, doesn’t mean they they’re a vibrant community hub just like any other GAA club.

“It does get dismissed as a super-club and that undermines some of the hard work that's being done from the coaches, and the volunteers to people right through-out,” he says.

“It's more than just a GAA club, there's other clubs within the club that make it a community hub so I don't think people really understand the Crokes community spirit until they're involved in it themselves.

“It is different to your small rural club in that, seeing as there's so many members, you're not going to know everyone. But, for example, within the club there's a cycling club there that my dad is involved in along with about 200 others, and they all know each other really, really well.

“There's the cafe on a Friday morning, everyone there knows each other really well. There's a tennis club where everyone knows each other really well, so there's so many clubs in the club, and they'd be best friends.

“That builds that community spirit and feeds into that overall community spirit of the club. So it's different than the rural club, where there's so much family connections - there still is in our club but it's probably a different community spirit.”

Those that use the moniker ‘super-club’ to describe Kilmacud Crokes often use it as a means of undermining their achievements. The inference being that the reason they’re successful is mainly down to weight of numbers.

The truth is that running club as big as Kilmacud is a huge logistical undertaking that requires a massive effort from hundreds of committed volunteers.

“You have your standard mums and dads who do the coaching, but aside from that there's football committees, hurling and camogie committees, people who look after the pitches, the wider club, there's so much going on to keep things ticking over that people don't really appreciate,” says Cunningham.

“They don't get enough credit for facilitating that amount of numbers. If it was a case that we couldn't facilitate all these numbers, and we were letting kids leave the club to play other sports, then we'd be getting criticised as well, so I think credit must go to the lads in the club who organise everything and facilitate all that.”

Whatever about Kilmacud Crokes being a ‘super-club’, their footballers are certainly a super team.

It takes something special to reach a second All-Ireland Final in a row, particularly as the nature of their defeat to Kilcoo in last year’s decider was so heart-breaking.

“I wouldn't describe us as a special bunch,” say Cunningham. “For us, the characters in the team are probably the main thing.

“As in you can have as much talent as you want but if you don't have the character to put in the hard training and the determination to overcome disappointments like we did last February, you wouldn't really get anywhere. That's probably come from Robbie (Brennan) and the coaches.

“They give us belief to get back to these games and to achieve things like this. So, yeah, between a great management team and the character in the team, I think it feeds into that.”

This group of Kilmacud Crokes players is a self-policing one. They hold one another to high standards and aren’t shy about calling it out if someone falls short of them.

That sort of honesty in a group is a defining characteristic of all successful teams, but it doesn’t happen overnight.

“No, it doesn't,” says Cunningham. “Robbie has been with us five years, since 2018. That stuff that I talked about, the player-led stuff, it probably wasn't there as much in 2018 when Robbie came in at the start. We probably relied on Robbie a bit too much.

“With experience and over time with lads getting older and creating a culture, I think that's where it comes from. It's definitely not been a thing that has just suddenly happened because we've been successful. It's literally been a five-year training thing.

“Now there's a big emphasis on players picking things out. Stuff they can do well and stuff they can improve on. Tactics of other teams as well. Players are given the responsibility to do a lot of that stuff themselves, and then they bring it back to the management to see if it matches up.

“Then we come together as a whole to fine-tune things. But, yeah, definitely, the players have a big role in pushing standards and analysing things themselves.”

Regardless of what happens in Sunday’s All-Ireland Final against Derry and Ulster champions Glen, Cunnigham admits that last year’s defeat to Kilcoo will always leave a scar.

They led by seven points at one stage in the second-half and then looked to have the whip hand again in extra-time when they led by two points with a minute to play.

But they were left devastated when Jerome Johnston’s late goal sealed a victory for Kilcoo that looked unlikely for most of the contest.

As a team, how did they manage to process that defeat and come back with their appetite’s renewed to the extent they did?

“We had a meeting in the two or three weeks afterwards and it was discussed and the heartache of it was discussed and how we were going to bounce back was discussed,” says Cunningham.

“It's easy to talk about these things but we went back training then and had a few League games. We had a League game two weeks after the All-Ireland Final which wasn't easy to play but some of us did. It's fine talking about it, but then actually putting it into practice was probably a bit more difficult.

“It didn't come straight away. It's not as if we were back for the first league game and rearing to go. It was a case that it took some lads a bit longer to get up to speed again.

“We went away on a team holiday and after that we drew a line in the sand and it was, look, if you're feeling sorry for yourself all well and good, but this isn't the place where you want to be if you're feeling sorry for yourself.

“There was a couple of months where it was really, really hard training and I think that gave the belief back to lads that we can push on again.

“The lads really trained hard and with that the results in the League improved and we got ourselves into the summer and we started fine-tuning things again. And then we got into the championship and have been on a roll since then.”

Based on what we’ve seen from both teams on the way to Sunday’s Final, there’s every chance this match will be ferociously contested and decided in the end by a very fine margin.

If that does transpire and the game is in the melting pot with five minutes to go, how do the Kilmacud Crokes players prevent the ghosts of last year’s Final haunting them and have the self-belief to fearlessly strike for home?

“We just have to trust ourselves and what we've worked on over the year, what we've spoken about over the last two weeks in terms of the game-plan,” says Cunningham.

“Just trust in Robbie and the management team and what we've spoken about ourselves. Just execute what we've spoken about and trust that if we do execute it we'll come out on top.”