AUSTIN Twomey lined out with one of Sullane FC’s first underage teams in the early 1990s. A bus journey back from Crossbarry sticks in his mind. The final score is a bit fuzzy – Sullane lost 10-0, he thinks, to Knockavilla – but the trip home stayed with him.
‘All we cared about was that we nearly scored that day – but we didn’t,’ Austin says. The Ballyvourney man has always loved soccer. It was fun when he played with his friends for Sullane and it’s still fun now in his current role as the club’s secretary and underage coach.
These are good times for the club, with its adult men’s team winning a West Cork League Championship league and cup double, and promotion to the Premier Division for next season, while its U12 girls’ team hit the headlines when they powered all the way to the last eight of the National Cup earlier this year.
‘The club has momentum. Winning breeds success,’ notes Johnathan Mullane, manager of Sullane’s double-winning men’s team, but this isn’t an overnight success story.
There has always been soccer in the locality, Austin notes, as the club caters for players from many parishes, including Ballyvourney, Coolea, Renaniree, Cill na Martra and Clondrohid. The interest was there, but the club needed a structure – and after the Covid pandemic, Sullane hit the reset button and put a plan in place.
‘Everything stopped during the pandemic, there was nothing going on – there was no junior team and underage teams had stopped,’ Austin explains.
‘In 2022, Martin Twomey, Tim Riordan, Neilie O’Brien, myself and a few more of the guys just sat down and said the whole club needs to be looked at. Where are we going forward? What are our goals? When you start writing down all your different problems, you can start to find solutions.’
It was even deciding on the club’s colours. Austin, who returned to help out with Sullane just before the pandemic, had lived in Dublin and remembers looking on Facebook and seeing Sullane had various different colour jerseys. Red jerseys. Black jerseys. Yellow. Black and green.
‘I said to myself: who are we as an entity?,’ he explains.
‘One of the first things I said is that we need to unite the club and go back to basics. You see Drinagh Rangers or Bunratty or Clon, you know their colours instantly. I saw an old picture of the Sullane team in 1991 and they were in blue and white stripes, so I said let’s go back to basics. Cill na Martra GAA, Naomh Abán, Clondrohid, they are all blue and white.’
That was one problem solved.
Sullane also implemented a playing style for all its teams, from underage up to its adult men’s team, to tie the club together.
‘When we sat down at the start of the season one of the biggest things we wanted to get out of this year was a style of play – and then try to get that into all age groups,’ Johnathan Mullane explains.
‘One of the key things I see is the same style of play from U8s to juniors, everyone is having fun from U8s to juniors, and creating that winning mentality. The juniors were the template this year.’
It strengthened the message when Sullane captured league and cup honors in the WCL Championship. They were, by a distance, the best team in the league. While Sullane lost their opening two Championship games, their response was emphatic: they won the next 16 in a row to comfortably win the title. Sullane scored 61 goals and conceded 18, and 13 of those goals were conceded in the first four games. Dedicated, phenomenal and incredible – they are just three of the words Mullane selects to describe the all-conquering Sullane team. The double has put Sullane soccer back on the map, and now they have a Premier Division campaign to plan for next season.
‘We need to come up with a plan to be competitive and ultimately win it (Premier Division),’ notes Mullane, and that’s a nod to the approach the club now takes, on and off the field. The success of the men’s team gives young players in the club a target to achieve: to be part of a Premier Division set-up. It also drives standards, and will increase expectations. The emergence of its U12 girls’ team is notable, too.
‘Seeing in 2021 where we had 80 registered players to where we are now with the junior teams and the underage, to almost 200, so there has been great progress on the field,’ Austin explains.
‘Off the field we have done a lot of work with Coolea, where the junior team plays and most of the underage; we have two portable cabins purchased and will turn them into dressing-rooms. We have fenced off the pitch to keep the sheep out once and for all. Building from there, dug-outs were put up.’
Build it and they will come – and that’s what Sullane has done, providing a structured environment where you can play soccer and have fun, and enjoyment is important too. Just like Austin loved playing underage with Sullane in the 1990s, the club wants the current generation to enjoy lining out in the blue and white now.
‘The club has been going since 1991, and there have been many ups and downs in those years,’ Austin says, and this is currently one of those highs. The challenge for Sullane now is to build on this.
