Munster Junior B endeavours show promise for St Oliver Plunkett's 

THE Junior B Munster Hurling and Football Championships may not have ended the way St Oliver Plunkett’s would have initially wanted, but what the club have achieved across the last year has been incredible.

Their hurling manager, Barry O’Driscoll believes that the progress made over the last season will certainly benefit his team as they return to the Junior A grade of the West Cork Championship.

“It's great for lads now that we’re going back up to Junior A again. We only went down for the one year but winning the county final last year really brought on lots of hurling to some of the younger lads. We were able to put them into some of the central positions.

“All the lads in central lines were all 25 and under, so it gave them great exposure to some good level games this year,” Barry says. “It gives them a bit of belief and a good bit of hurling going back up to Junior A that we should be in a better position heading into the West Cork Championship.

“There's a young guy Fionn Murphy, he’d be the only fella this particular year coming through the underage, we didn’t have the numbers in that age group so we’ve only one coming through, but we have a couple of injured guys who will be back then as well.

“We should have a good level of hurling after having played Munster Junior B, and hopefully the lads will have gotten from 2023 will stand to them.” 

It’s certainly been a long season for the club – given that it only concluded last weekend with their defeat in the Junior B Munster Football Championship final. Still, despite the defeats, it was a year where they achieved the goal they set out for at the beginning of the season.

“We had a WhatsApp group with the players and the managers for football and hurling, and at the start of the year, we named it ‘2x County Champions’.

Like any other team, that was the aim, but to win it, it was massive.

“The way it happened, we started back in January with training, we had the leagues, and it was week in week out all the way through to the championships.

“There were knockouts and round robins, and for two months there it was just every Sunday, every weekend. There was just game, after game, after game.

“You’d have to recover from one and get fellas back right for training on the Tuesday or Thursday, so it was a short turn around,” he explains. “It’s tough to manage the two, it was the same bunch of players essentially.” 

This season will no doubt be more challenging for the club after securing promotion, but another year of development for a club with a youthful core will only be of benefit.

“We had a player meeting at the start of the year,” Barry begins. “And one thing we were looking at was we wanted to get the younger lads in the club into more central positions on the teams, and we told them that and said we just need the attendance at training all the time, and we wanted to put them to the forefront of the team.

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“We have fellas from 18 all the way through to my own brother Edward who’s 41, and when they started the fitness training in January, we had 23 or 24 every night, right the way through to our league.

“Mark Prendergast, who was involved with Inniscarra last year, had done the fitness with the lads at the start of the year, and he took on the hurling coaching role then after the first round of the hurling.

He really upped the intensity of the training; he brought a higher level of speed.

“Mark Prendergast is staying with us again for 2024, so there’ll be the continuity of the whole thing, and I suppose for this year, it will be to try and get back into the Junior A league and championship and to just carry through the momentum.

“We have a couple of strong teams in the Junior A here, Clonakilty are always there or thereabouts in it, Dohenys are one of the strongest teams in it, but we’ll be hoping to go as far as we can this year.

“In the end then, it’s to push on as hard as we can for 2025. The last year when we played Junior A, we just didn’t have the numbers and I suppose our belief was hit back a little bit.”