AT A club like Ballela you start early and keep going ‘til the tank is empty.
Then you go into goals…
Unless you’re Johnny McCusker that is. Twenty-four years since he made his senior debut for the Down hurling club, McCusker is still going strong.
This season he captained Ballela to the junior championship title, his seventh.
“I’ve been around,” says the 39-year-old – who’s got glue holding together a gash in his head – with a cheerful grin.
A hardcore hurler, he played the whole way up through underage with Down and made his senior debut for the Ardsmen at 17. He continued until he was 25 and then spent a couple of years abroad working for Eagle Overseas.
When he returned to these shores he resumed is county career but for the last eight years he has been concentrating solely on Ballela.
“I love playing hurling and I have all my life,” he says.
“From I was able to walk I think I had a stick in my hand.
“In Ballela we’re all hurling but we’re a very, very small club. I would say we’re one of the smallest clubs in Ireland.”
There can’t be many smaller and at the start of this year there was a real concern that they wouldn’t be able to field a team. Luckily Annaclone, the neighbouring Gaelic Football club, got involved and several of their players came on board and kept Ballela’s lights on.
“It’s a good success story to have won the championship when you look back at where we were at the start of the year,” says McCusker.
“Joe Cosgrave (the manager) got us gathered up. We started with 23 names on the teamsheet but there were games when we would have had 12 or 13 players and we were thinking: ‘Are we gonna have a team here?’
“But as the year went on, Joe started gathering the boys up and he brought in Andy McGivern and Domhnall Nugent (former Antrim player) and the boys all started to buy into it.
“When anybody sees a bit of success starting to happen, they start tagging along.
“Domhnall took the training and it has been very good. I’ve been through some hard training sessions over the years but I don’t think I’ve been through anything like what Domhnall put us through. All the county teams and whatever I’ve played for over the years… I don’t think I was ever put through sessions like this year. That stood to us because usually fitness would be Ballela’s issue.
“Hurling is a very social thing in Ballela but over the last couple of months it progressed onto something more serious.
“I have played senior hurling for the club now for 24 years and we never emptied the bag of jerseys before. There was always a few jerseys never used but this year we’ve had to give them all out. We emptied the bag and I never thought that would happen.
“It’s class having a big squad and it means we can nearly have an in-house match between ourselves. We’ve never had that before.”
The county final against Castlewellan was a high-scoring affair which Ballela - who also include former Down dual star Malachy Magee - won 3-18 to 1-20 at Pairc Esler to progress on to the Ulster junior series.
“It was a good, hard game,” says McCusker.
“There wasn’t much in it and we got a goal near the end to win by four points. We were maybe a wee bit more hungry for it but they said a few things – not very nice things – along the sideline over the two games (the finalists also that maybe gee-d us on a bit too.”
The scathing comments – which surely don’t reflect the vast majority at the Castlewellan club – included cruel jibes like “you’re a dying club” and “you’ll not be here in 10 years”. They put fire in Ballela’s bellies.
“I don’t think I was ever as up for a game in my whole entire career,” says McCusker.
“There’s no call for anybody to say stuff like that, especially when we’re such a wee club and we struggle most years to keep it going. It wasn’t nice to hear that and I did make a point about it in my speech after the final.”
Who could blame him?
He’ll hope it’s not the last acceptance speech he has to make this year. On Saturday Ballela make the long hike to Letterkenny to take on Donegal champions Buncrana in the Ulster junior championship quarter-final.
“It would be unreal to win Ulster,” he says.
“We got to the final in 2015 (Coleraine beat them in that decider) and it was a point here and a point there in every game. We could go far and we know it’ll be tit-for-tat but we’ve got a good squad there and hopefully we’ll go ok – you have to be positive.
“The years are catching up with me and there mightn’t be too many more, so it’ll be all hands to the pump.”
