{"id":253471,"date":"2026-01-20T01:54:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T01:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/253471\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T01:54:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T01:54:07","slug":"ballygunner-thriving-on-something-special","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/253471\/","title":{"rendered":"Ballygunner thriving on something special"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another All-Ireland club title for Ballygunner, and Dessie Hutchinson marvels at what he sees as a special club, where winning another senior crown is “infectious”.<\/p>\n

The Waterford city outfit were too good for Loughrea in Sunday’s decider <\/a>at Croke Park, a success that yielded a second All-Ireland crown to follow on from the dramatic nature of their maiden win against Ballyhale Shamrocks in 2022.<\/p>\n

For Hutchinson, who in a previous career tried his luck at a different code when lining out for Brighton and subsequently Waterford FC, adding another All-Ireland medal to his CV heightens even more the gratitude he feels towards Ballygunner.<\/p>\n

“It is a really special club,” he told Inside Sport on RT\u00c9 Radio 1.<\/p>\n

“I don’t think people see the insights that we do in the club. I would love someone to come in and watch us on a monthly basis and look at what we do within our squad.<\/p>\n

“They will then start to understand why we are so successful.<\/p>\n

“There is a really good structure within the club and so much credit has to go the volunteers and the coaches of the underage teams who get involved at such an early age.<\/p>\n

“All these young teams are getting to witness us winning county championships and Munster clubs and some have seen us win an All-Ireland in ’22.<\/p>\n

\"From
\nFrom left – Peter Hogan, Pauric Mahony and Hutchinson after their Croke Park triumph<\/p>\n

“That is infectious for any club to watch their senior team win big trophies. Eventually then young lads will want to step in to those big boots.”<\/p>\n

Those with a passing knowledge of the club hurling scene may be surprised that Ballygunner have just the two All-Irelands to their name.<\/p>\n

Dominance in the De\u00edse championship and to some degree in Munster an indicator that the Tommy Moore Cup should have enjoyed greater residence by the banks of the Suir.<\/p>\n

For Hutchinson, such a view ignores the fact that the championship is quite a competitive beast.<\/p>\n

“I don’t think the media have given the teams that beat us enough credit in recent years,” he remarked.<\/p>\n

“You had Sarsfields last year winning the Munster club, before that we lost to Thomas’s and Ballyhale.<\/p>\n

We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences<\/a><\/p>\n

“We’ve lost some big games and it’s the hurt of losing those big games that keeps driving us to go on and to get to where we were yesterday.<\/p>\n

“People have said we haven’t got enough out of what the team can be but you have to give credit to those teams.<\/p>\n

“We were hurting so much after last year’s Munster Championship because we felt we were in a good place. We didn’t perform.<\/p>\n

“We needed to come back and right the wrongs. New management came in and gave us new energy and they have been fantastic.<\/p>\n

Jason Ryan is the new man at the helm.<\/p>\n

The former Wexford and Kildare football manager’s arrival was not seen as the spark to light a new flame amongst some in the county, with the 29-year-old forward saying: “When Jason came into us and a lot of people said: ‘happy days, we’re going to catch Ballygunner now. We used that as well.<\/p>\n

“I’m so happy for him, for all the work he has put in, it’s fantastic.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another All-Ireland club title for Ballygunner, and Dessie Hutchinson marvels at what he sees as a special club,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-253471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253471","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=253471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}