In another excerpt from the forthcoming biography of the sporting and normal life of Ned Power, former pupil Tallow hurler and teacher himself Billy Sheehan talks about the effect my father’s arrival had on the fortunes of Tallow GAA.

“It (the Avonmore League) was the seed for Tallow of what came on afterwards,” says Billy Sheehan.  Billy’s family is steeped in Tallow GAA tradition and he is a former pupil of my father’s, as well as having taught in Naomh Mhuire himself, where he became principal and played for Tallow at senior level.  “At the time in Tallow, there was no permanent hurling field there.  As a child, we used to go out to Curley’s Field for training – that’s where all those schools league matches were played.  The Avonmore League was also important because you had adult teams and minor teams but you didn’t have anything below that until those leagues started in the early 1960’s.”

In the mid-1960’s, the under-16 competitions came into being and the official GAA under-14 competitions started at the end of the decade.

“The 1960’s and 1970’s were like a rollercoaster ride,” continues Billy, before clarifying that “although there were some disappointments, it was generally a case of the grass growing up and up.  From a GAA point of view, what was a big thing was buying a field.  They bought the field in 1963 and then they had a permanent home.  As far as I know, although the deal was done then, it wasn’t paid off until the mid-1970’s.  I remember Ned being in great form one day at school and saying that ‘we finally paid off the field’.

“You had other people involved (in Tallow GAA), but Ned was coming from the school, so all the lads who had trained and played with them had come through the school with him.  And, once they started up these Avonmore Leagues and they continued year after year, he was in charge of those teams – 3^rd class, 4^th class, training them three times a week.  Even when he’d be in school and he’d be looking out the window having a cup of tea, he’d run out and tell a fella that he was holding the hurley the wrong way and get him to change his grip.”

It must also be noted that the footballing origins of Tallow GAA were confined to folklore at this point and the club didn’t even have an actual football when they were playing their first games in the Avonmore Leagues.  So, although a hurling man first and foremost, my father played a major part in reviving Tallow’s lost footballing tradition too.

Tallow’s next important landmark was again in football, when the under-16 team beat Mount Sion to win a county title in 1966, of which Billy was the captain:  “The unusual thing about that match is that it was played in Carrick-on-Suir.  So you had a Waterford county final played in County Tipperary, which is most unusual.  But the reason was that Ned was playing in goals for Waterford and they were playing Tipperary in a league match.  Seamus Power was also playing with the Waterford hurling team and he was involved in the Mount Sion U-16’s, so to accommodate the two of them, the County Final was played in another county… That was a massive win.  After that, county finals started coming.”

“My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary, the life and times of Ned Power” is out on paperback at the end of November 2009.  Click here for further information, pre-order and excerpt.

Waterford hurling coach Ned Power – who was on the last Waterford team that won an All-Ireland 50 years ago, was always a believer in creating a system of coaching, rather than getting in a short-term solution.

The latter is the favoured course of action of most counties these days.  It’s also the more expensive option and it will be interesting to see how that situation may or may not change during these relatively straightened times.

On the plus side, bringing in outside expertise brings a fresh approach, a purer meritocracy reigning in the camp, additional confidence in the form of a winner and expert telling the lesser team that they are as good as any he’s played with, etc.

On the negative side, however, while the outsider brings with him enough to make a real difference in the performance of the team (and I’m talking specifically here about GAA county teams), it’s actually rare enough that this results in the coveted All-Ireland crown.  Count the All-Ireland winners over the last few years in both codes and you’ll see that, for the Mick O’Dwyers and the Justin McCarthy’s (who, incidentally, did do a fantastic job with Waterford while he was there), it’s mostly home-grown coaches who produce champion teams.

Waterford, facing familiar foes next Sunday, will be odds-on to buck that trend if they can get past Kilkenny.  The great thing about sport is that you just never know what will happen.  Who knows… maybe we’ll see a rash of All-Ireland victories over the next few years at the hands of teams with “foreign” coaches.

Here’s my dad in action again – this time making a match-winning save against Cork in the Munster semi-final, 1959

“My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary, the life and times of Ned Power” is out on paperback at the end of November 2009.  Click here for further information, pre-order and excerpt.

Excerpt from “My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary”

From the word go, he started to instil a love of hurling into the hearts and minds of the youth of Tallow.  It was hurling country anyway, so he was certainly not preaching a new religion to people in West Waterford.  The generation that he was dealing with, however, had known only failure to the be the lot of the Tallow GAA in terms of performance on the field – a generation believing that they were inferior to other clubs in the county.

Tallow GAA did not have any field of their own at that time.  Moreover, there was no money around for many children to be able to afford the basics of a hurley and a ball.

“Your father used to train in Aquin Murphy’s field,” Eddie Cunningham told me.  There was also a field known as Curley’s Field, but which was used on and off by the local club as disputes erupted and became resolved and then erupted again.  “When you think of it now… We used two coats for the goals.  Your father would go in goals and I’d be taking shots at him.  We practised up there; we practised in Keefe’s field behind the graveyard of the Church – he was allowed in there; Mort Kelleher allowed him into the Bride Valley Field alongside the graveyard; we hurled in the big Barracks field.  Just the two of us – I was only a youngfella at the time – and there was nowhere else to train.”

Facilities did not, of course, include such luxuries as a changing room.  It was a case of togging off by the ditch at the side of the field.  With Curley’s field, there were stables and if the horse wasn’t there, then you could tog off in the relative comfort of the stable.

“I always said he (Ned) was a man before his time where coaching was concerned,” says Eddie Cunningham.

“There’s no doubt about that,” says Johnny Curley.  He was born around the time that my father first came to Tallow and was one of the first generation to grow up under the direct influence of my father as a teacher and a hurling coach – two roles that blended seamlessly into one in reality.  “The schools thing was something that came across big time, because he was always ball-and-hurley.  Ground hurling was his first love; catching the hurley the right way.  In fact, some fella could be very good and still catching the hurley the wrong way, but your father would be there saying: ‘You can’t hurl like that, you’re catching the hurley the wrong way!’”

By the early 1960’s, my dad was firmly established as a Tallow player and a star of one of the best inter-county senior hurling teams in the country.  Moreover, as a teacher and a member of the GAA club, his presence was beginning to be felt in the beginnings of what was to become a series of skilful Tallow hurling sides.

In this piece of video footage from the early 1990’s, former All-Ireland Waterford goalkeeper (yes, there is such a thing) speaks about the kind of things he’s got up over the course of his hurling career.

With typical self-effacement, he plays down the importance of his own “highlights” or his own role in the extraordinary resurgence of the Tallow club or of all the clubs he worked with around the country.

Well, well.  Just when you think that they have the skill trained or drained out of them (I’m not sure which it is), just when you think that they have come up against a better team again, Waterford hurlers pull a victory out of the bag.

They’re now in the semi-final of the All-Ireland again.  Since Davey Fitzgerald, the former goalkeeper extraordinaire, has taken over the reins at Waterford, their displays have been dogged, though never beautiful.  We long to see them play beautifully again – the way that they had learned how to play under the great skills coach Justin McCarthy.  They can’t have forgotten how to play like that, can they?  In the last two games, we saw some evidence that that they hadn’t forgotten and that allows some glimmer of hope going into the semi-final against Kilkenny.  That, and the fact that you feel that they won’t give up this season no matter what is thrown at them, and it’s a fair enough analysis of last years final to say that they stopped trying, stopped concentrating on simply being first to the ball and competing.

Also, you just never know what can happen in a game.  50 years ago, Waterford were up against the “Kilkenny” of that  era – namely the unbeatable Tipperary with their Hell’s Kitchen backline that was nigh on impenetrable.  But they met them in the Cork Gaelic Grounds in July 1959.  By half time, Waterford had not only held the champions scoreless, but they had managed to score 8 goals and 3 points against them.  They rolled on that year to beat a team called Kilkenny in the final…

In this clip (if you run it on a little), you can see their next match, and effictively their All-Ireland semi-final, which they won with Ned Power in goals for Waterford and the very legendary Christy Ring in attack for the Rebels.