Nobody was talking about winning just for pride

LAST summer Jason Forde and Jake Morris felt 'ashamed' to walk down the streets of their home town.

- BY GARRY DOYLE

Yesterday they walked up the Hogan Stand as All-Ireland champions.

If anything sums up sport's peaks and valleys, it’s this, how a team who couldn't buy a win in 2024 learned how to defy the odds time after time in 2025.

And yet their celebrations come with an asterisk, a reminder that the starting point last summer was bitter.

"We obviously live in such a mad hurling county and a lot of us are living close to the big towns," says Forde.

"So, when you're going out and about, you're meeting people. Like, I remember meeting Jack Morris a couple of weeks after our season ended last summer and he was like, “you're nearly ashamed going around to show your face” because of the manner in which we went out."

Morris and Forde were not the only ones who felt that way. For Michael Breen, the hardship preceded the glory, as he recalls: “Twelve months ago, we were walking down the street and kind of ducking and diving from people because you don't want to have conversations.

“And all it took for us to recover from that was an acceptance that we needed to get back into the trenches.

“We had to get the work done. Like we knew where we were last year, put it that way.”

Where they were was in a bad place; so they spent the winter honing their fitness and then the spring picking up results.