Hurling owes a debt to Leo McGough, record-keeper of repute

Christy Ring played 65 senior hurling championship games for Cork.

It was a record until 2011, when Brendan Cummins surpassed him, though until shortly before that, there was a general belief that Ring had topped out on 64.

Hurling statistician Leo McGough was not responsible for the mistake – a misinterpretation of his work was. In the early 2000s, the Carlow native was asked by the Sunday Tribune to compile the figures for hurling’s best marksmen – in championship games against the ‘top nine’ counties.

Ring’s tally of 32-208 was listed as coming from 64 outings, but there was also a game in his sole game against Kerry in 1943. However, the figures in the list were misreported elsewhere as being his totals; as those who battle against disinformation know, it’s difficult to get toothpaste back into the tube.

Thankfully, McGough was able to correct the record before Cummins moved to the top of the list and his assiduous recording of games, lineups and scorers continues, a valuable resource for all of us lucky enough to report on the sport.

For Leo, the love of hurling was nurtured in his parents’ native Clare.

“I’m 66 now, so I’m officially retired,” he says, “but I was a freelance journalist, so I was always kind of retired!

“My parents moved to Carlow from Clare, so we used to spend our summers back in Clare in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“An older cousin used to bring me to matches and that’s where it all started – then, when I was going to the local CBS here, they were pushing hurling, so I've been a fanatic since then.”

As with most hobbies that become passions, Leo’s immersion into data collection was something that happened gradually.

“I started getting the Gaelic Sport magazine when I was around ten,” he says, “aand a man called Owen McCann used to have a monthly piece on scoring statistics and that helped to grow that interest.

“At the time, you heard of these things far more in soccer or rugby – if Mike Gibson was getting his 50th cap for Ireland or someone was scoring to 100 goals, you were aware of it, but there was very little for hurling and football.

“I started keeping records here in Carlow, hurling and football, and we had the ‘100 Club’, where players would be honoured if they reached that many games for the county.

“Then I got involved with the Clare supporters’ club – not a fundraising vehicle but just a group of fans that used to arrange buses to matches and also produced a magazine – and I started to do the Clare statistics, too.”

The big event of 2026 in hurling was TJ Reid definitively overtaking Patrick Horgan as the top scorer in championship history; the knowledge of which was  diffused in large part thanks to Leo's research. Naturally, building up reams of facts and figures takes time, though it is made easier by the ease of access that the online Irish News Archive allows.

“Sometimes, there might be discrepancies,” Leo says, “but you check different reports. By and large, the local paper would be more likely to have it right!

“And of course, you have to make judgements. In the 1960s the Oireachtas hurling matches had 20,000 people at them whereas in the 1990s, they had 150 attending. It’s the same competition, but can you say that it was competitive in one period and not in another?”

All the while, is working on a project he has christened ‘Flagship Hurlers’ – flagship in the sense of a county’s first team, whether that was senior, intermediate, junior or the various cups below the Liam MacCarthy level now.

It’s likely to be a website – a book carrying such info might need to be split into more than a few volumes.