{"id":252118,"date":"2026-01-19T04:58:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T04:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/252118\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T04:58:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T04:58:13","slug":"ballygunners-golden-crop-raise-the-bar-to-answer-all-ireland-question-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/252118\/","title":{"rendered":"Ballygunner\u2019s golden crop raise the bar to answer All-Ireland question \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Ballygunner<\/a> there is an echo of Rory McIlroy<\/a>\u2019s opening line from his victory press conference at the Masters: what are we going to talk about next year? For the last four years, the question that hounded Ballygunner was if they were going to win a second All-Ireland<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The longer it went on the less likely it seemed. After they lost the Munster final to Sarsfields 14 months ago Ballygunner\u2019s management team stepped down and people wondered if we might have seen the last of this group as All-Ireland contenders. Instead, they kicked on again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never heard them mention trying to be a great team or being seen as a great team,\u201d said Ballygunner manager Jason Ryan. \u201cBut they want to be the best that they can be. And to be the best that you can be, you need to keep winning games whether it\u2019s in Waterford or Munster or in the All-Ireland.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor sure they\u2019ve been hurt in losing games, and when we do talk about games that they\u2019ve lost, they\u2019re able to pinpoint different incidents or different times or different things that they did or didn\u2019t do that they want to chase after.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Darragh O\u2019Sullivan stood down, Ryan stepped up. He was living just five minutes from the Ballygunner grounds, his kids were playing in the club, he was available and interested and energised by the offer. But the dimensions of the challenge were not lost on him: he was taking over a team that had won everything and the only measure of success for them was to do it all over again. Winning in Croke Park in January was the bottom line that all of them were governed by.<\/p>\n

\"Ballygunner'sBallygunner’s Peter Hogan and Michael Mahony lift the Tommy Moore Cup. Photograph: Dan Clohessy\/Inpho <\/p>\n

\u201cThe previous management teams did really superb work,\u201d said Ryan, \u201cso a lot of the foundations were there. Our job was just to tweak things a little bit or, you know, continue this a little bit and whatnot. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut the players are an incredibly driven, hungry group of players and they take an awful lot of decisions upon themselves. We would encourage them to be making decisions on the field to deal with different things that are thrown at them. And the further you go on in competitions, like the bigger the crowd there today, I don\u2019t know if they heard any instructions from the sideline, so having players with the ability to make those decisions is invaluable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loughrea had no excuses. They played really well in the second quarter and made a bright start to the second half but they led for less than a minute and in the end they ran out of gas. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe came up here with full intentions to win the All Ireland, but we just hit a brick wall, really,\u201d said Loughrea manager Tommy Kelly. \u201cThey\u2019re a fantastic club, Ballygunner, I couldn\u2019t speak any more highly of them. We done our matchups as good as we could, we worked really hard in training and I thought we were in a really, really good place. But the bar is a lot higher than where we are at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the bottom line. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Ballygunner there is an echo of Rory McIlroy\u2019s opening line from his victory press conference at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30883,7026,49722,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-252118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-galway-gaa","tag-waterford-gaa","tag-gaa-club-hurling-championship","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}