Learned all about Hurley/Hurling today
Today I went with my friends Stu & Marty (Flatmate) to the All Ireland Hurley Junior Final which our other friend Ollie Duffin was playing in. He was playing for a team called Creggan against a team called Beart.
Hurley is a game played with 15 players on each side and the object of the game is to use your sticks (which look like double sided hockey sticks with a much larger end) to whack the ball either through a set of rugby posts, or into the back of a football net (net is made from the crossbar and the sides of the rugby posts.
We arrived slightly late so missed the first 5 minutes. My first reaction was this is the fastest game I have ever seen - the speed at which the ball gets from end to end is phenomenal. Marty was fairly clued up on the rules and explained that if it went through the posts it was 1 “point|, but if it went into the net then it was 1 goal which equals 3 “points”.
That was all well and good, but it took me 10 minutes to get my head round how the score is displayed in a Hurling match. It is shown as the number of goals, then the number of points. E.G Team A = 108 (1 goal and 8 points = 11 points total) Team B = 011 (11 points) In this example the scores are tied. WHY DON’T THEY BOTH JUST SAY 11 POINTS EACH???? I didn’t get a proper answer to this question.
The game went on and Ollie’s team were down by 2 at the halftime whistle. Going into the match as favourites the general feeling was that they would pull back and win the game. Beart continued the second half as they had in the first and were holding onto their lead, but Creggan looked the better team.
Nearing the end Creggan took a 1 point lead, and it looked as though they would nail another couple and close out the game. With 2 minutes to go, Beart equalled the scored from a 25m point, and then with 1 minute to go the old “Don’t piss around in front of your own net” that you get told as school kids reared its head as the Creggan goalkeeper made a horrendous mistake and tried to clear in front of his own net. A Beart attacker managed to get his stick in front of the ball and it rebounded back into the Creggan net, and the Creggan players all fell to their knees as they knew that was the end of the match.
It’s a ridiculously rough sport, with more than one player taking a full blooded swing to the knuckles and I’m pretty sure at one point a player had his kneecap shattered. As part of the Kiwi in Ireland video blog series we took some footage there of the match and even managed to get an interview with a long serving supporter of the Creggan side. This footage will be released in a Kiwi in Ireland special: Sport in Ireland. It’s a few months out though as we would like to get a wide variety of sports.
