Cork GAA Jersey Wars: Carbery Rangers v Carrigaline

WE want to know what your favourite GAA geansaí is.

From here until the end of August, your votes will decide the best design in our Cork GAA Jersey Wars competition.

Our resident jersey expert Denis Hurley compiled a list of 32 clubs, based on those involved in the senior tiers and a selection of wild cards. We put them in alphabetical order and paired them up and we're now down to the last eight. 

Full details of the competition are here.

Voting will run from 8am each day for 24 hours on the link below:

CARBERY RANGERS

A house on the site now occupied by the Celtic Ross Hotel hosted the first meeting of Carbery Rangers in November 1887.

According to the club’s website, “some of the earliest match reports give the name Carbery Rangers or in some cases Rosscarbery Rangers. This title was changed briefly in 1890 to the name Michael Dwyer in response to a request that all clubs should adopt patriotic names. As to why the name Carbery Rangers was chosen in the beginning we just don't know, but it can be assumed that it had connotations of athletic ability, durability, and fearlessness in the Rangers part of the title and the Carbery part obviously came from the title of the local barony.”

A report on a monster meeting held in Ross early in 1888 referred to members of the newly formed club being dressed in their “orange and green uniforms”. By the time the club was reorganised in 1900, green, white and gold/yellow hoops was the design chosen and it is one that has lasted to the present day.

First winning the Carbery junior football championship, the club were triumphant in the division on eight more occasions without claiming county glory, but in 2003 they went all the way and that was the key to unlocking a huge amount of potential.

Reaching the intermediate final in their first year, they lost to Nemo Rangers but, because the Munster club championships were not open to clubs’ second teams, Ross represented Cork and claimed the All-Ireland title. Buoyed by that success, they went a step further in the intermediate in 2005 and soon set about establishing themselves as a force at senior level.

Regular semi-final appearances led to an appearance in the final in 2014 and, while they lost to Ballincollig, they were back two years later as the roles were reversed, Ross lifting the Andy Scannell Cup.

In both of those games, Ballincollig opted to wear a change strip but Carbery Rangers have rarely if ever had to change – even games against Valley Rovers (green/white hoops) have seen both sides in traditional tops.

Like a growing number of sides in Cork, Ross are now clad in McKeever kit and they benefit from the fact that goalkeeper Ronan Milner is the area sales executive for the Armagh firm. For 2020, he designed a new jersey, with the full logo of sponsors the Celtic Ross featuring for the first time.

‘I got two jerseys done up and sent them on to the chairman, Johnny Murphy,” he said, “and suggested that we go with something like that going forward and thankfully the Celtic Ross thought it was a brilliant idea.”

CARRIGALINE

BLUE and gold are the Carrigaline colours, the jersey in the Tipperary style of blue with a gold hoop, though the blue shorts help to give the overall kit a unique look.

While the colours have been the same since the various townlands clubs in the parish amalgamated, the current layout of the jersey is a fairly recent development, however — introduced in the late 1970s or so.

Courtesy of John Dineen and Thomas Maye, we are informed that one one of the most notable hurling clubs in the area was Kilmoney, who played in black and white jerseys, while Hilltown were known as ‘the Baa-Baas’ but, while you might assume they also had those colours like Barbarian RFC, their choice was blue and yellow. Kilnagleary was another club, though their colours are not recorded.

When everything came under the Carrigaline banner, blue and gold were chosen, but four-inch hoops, and this remained the look for much of the mid-20th century. In the 1970s, games against Carrigtwohill resulted in colour-clashes and so a back-up set in the Clare design — gold with a blue hoop — was procured, before landing on the opposite to that as the first-choice strip.

It was in the blue with gold hoop that Carrigaline made the push from being a dual junior club in the early 1990s to where they are now. 

After opting to re-grade from junior to intermediate football at the end of 1992, they made a quick impact, reaching the final in 1996 and doing so again in 2003 and 2007 before finally pushing through to premier intermediate in 2009.

While there was a brief flirtation with relegation, 2015 brought victory in the second tier and a place in senior football, where they still reside. On the hurling front, it was also a case of going close at intermediate before scaling the heights, losing the 2006 final and then winning in 2008.

In the mid-2010s, the wheel came full circle in a colour sense as a change jersey was developed for senior football matches against St Finbarr’s. With the Barrs having gold as their second jersey, the Carrigaline players were canvassed as to what they would like to wear as an alternative and the consensus was for a black jersey — trimmed in blue and gold — which recalled the colours of Kilmoney from all those years ago.

The current Carrigaline jersey is a clean and classy O’Neills offering, featuring a gold crew neck, CUFFS and three stripes along the shoulders, with the gold hoop housing the logo of main sponsor, Barry Collins’ SuperValu.