Aaron Gillane: How a junior player became a hurler of the year

It's 2013 and Aaron Gillane is struggling for confidence.

He'd been on Limerick 'B' teams at under-14 and under-16 level but now he's 17, in his last year minor and he isn't making the match-day squads. Gillane is from Patrickswell and, in the village of Patrickswell, hurling starts the conversation and it usually finishes it too. Of its 841 inhabitants, there are hurling legends like Richie Bennis around one corner and Gary Kirby the next. So even though Gillane is a budding soccer prospect, the foreign game - as they call it around here - never really stood a chance in the small Limerick village where hurling is as important as breathing. For a 17-year-old like Gillane, hanging on any sort of direction towards one sport over the other, he was always going to be pointed the way of those who went before him. Men like Ciaran Carey went before him. Carey strides around the Patrickswell pitch every other night. His finger on-the-pulse of everything Patrickswell GAA from the senior team all the way down to the under-6s. As a teenager, Aaron Gillane is in the middle of the pile and while he himself doesn't reckon that Limerick legend Carey knows all that much about him, he's really just underestimating the man who'd bleed blue and yellow if you'd cut him open. Carey knows his onions around his parish. For Christ's sake this is a man who recently lined out for their junior team at centre back when he was 43 years of age. He's seen Gillane alright. He's watched him play for the club's underage teams and he's spotted something special in him. He knows well that there's flair and high carat skill inside him just waiting to burst out through the grains of his hurley and over the green grass. Like many 17-year-olds though, he just needs that push though and, one evening, Carey decides to offer the push. He drives up to the Gillane household to give him the nudge that would eventually prove monumental for the whole of the county. His aim is to keep him on board. His aim is to set this lad's career in motion.

"Ciaran had obviously seen something in Aaron, he came up to the house one evening and basically just told him to forget all about that junior hurling, that he's not a junior hurler and that he was well able to make it in with the seniors," Aaron's father Damien remembers well Carey's visit.

Any Patrickswell person could have uttered those same words, but they weighed a hell of a lot more coming from the mouth of Carey, with all his stature in the game, a stature Gillane idolised since the day he first picked up a hurl. It could have came from Kirby, it could have come from a Bennis, Brian Murray, Sean Foley or indeed any of the the other members of the Patrickswell hall of fame but this time around it's Carey who steps up to the mark. The bottom line is Aaron Gillane was always going to make it as a hurler. His dad Damien would tell you that, from then, his son would continue to ramp up his practicing on the pitch - the pitch that's just 300 yards from his house. And it wasn't long before he'd left the Sonny Walsh tournaments in the vapours on his way to becoming a senior hurler. Fast forward 24 months from Carey's visit and with two solid years of club hurling behind him, Gillane's form finally earns him a call up to the Limerick senior and under-21 panels for the year. This is his town and he's flying it now. But the dreaded reaper knocks on his door later on that season when, after a spell of patchy form, he's just cut. Just like that, he's gone from the Limerick senior panel and struggles to get a game for the 21s. His wrists and sharp hurling brain don't desert him in his club colours, as he points the way in their county title winning run and he stands out in their Munster semi-final loss to Glen Rovers too but his Limerick dream is on ice again. Someone else was watching his club hurling though. Mary I's Fitzgibbon manager Jamie Wall went to the Gaelic Grounds that day against Glen Rovers with one eye firmly planted on Patrickswell's number 10. Wall had known Gillane from the previous year as a fresher in Mary I and just like Carey before him, he'd sniffed a diamond in Gillane's will, skill and hardness. On that November Sunday, the Rebel was blinded by the diamond as Gillane mixed with graft, with grace and self-sacrifice with opportunism. His scouting mission was a success, Wall had found the missing piece in the jigsaw.

"This lad had it," Wall recalls. "Something stood out for me about him that day. We needed a scoring forward after Declan Hannon had finished up, and Gillane looked the perfect fit. I'd known him from the freshers team in the college the year before but that day against the Glen he just looked a class apart. "He took his scores well, he had that rare ability to win his own dirty ball while at the same time knowing what to do with it when he got it. He knew where the goals were, he knew when to pass, he had the pace to get away from lads, the strength as well, he had it all."

But Gillane himself doesn't know how good he actually is. Being dropped from the Limerick team gnawed away at him, not making the under-21 starting team has seen his progress stall to a degree. It's January 2017 now and the Fitzgibbon Cup is only around the corner. Mary I are preparing for a game against IT Carlow and Wall wants to set his man alight.

"We called him aside before a Fitzgibbon game with Carlow, we just told him 'we rate you' " We said, 'we believe in you, you're as good as Cian Lynch, you're as good as anybody here,'" Wall says. "I just don't think he knew how good he was."

No great military tactic, some old-fashioned honesty was all it took for Gillane to take flight.

"He threw the shackles off that year and he absolutely went to town for us in the Fitzgibbon Cup all the way up to the final where he scored 1-5."

That whole campaign with Mary I was something of a watershed for Gillane but Wall wasn't surprised that he'd come of age.

"College hurling does that for lads. It's unique in that it's a higher standard than inter-county under-21 and it's just below senior inter-county but it doesn't have the same levels of pressure... lads just go out and hurl and that's why you see so many players emerging out of it," he said.

That's where Gillane had come from. He was at home in Mary I alongside his club mate and friend Lynch and many more friends but maybe it was that absence of familiar pressures that allowed him to flourish instantly, and then after a while he didn't even know what pressure was anymore. It wasn't long before he was leading defences a merry dance in the green of a Limerick jersey as every opportunity was devoured like a man with a gun in his hand. He cut loose for the Treaty's under-21s that summer, shooting the lights out with 14 points in the Munster semi against Clare, following it up with five from play in the All-Ireland final against Kilkenny, and rounding it off crowned as the best under-21 hurler in the country. Fast forward another year and Gillane is preparing for the biggest game of his life, only one more massive performance away from a Hurler of the Year award. He was one of the National League's best hurlers and he continued that fine form into the championship. He lined up and took out every member of the Tipperary full back line one-by-one in their Munster championship opener and more and more defenders have been handed their P45s since. Limerick wouldn't have made it to a final were it not for his nerveless display of score-taking, both from play and from placed balls in the semi against Cork - in particular this one below so late that it missed the evening news - and now Gillane spearheads the Limerick challenge as they level it towards the final hurdle. https://twitter.com/officialgaa/status/1023601505063063552 Things have changed very quickly in Aaron Gillane's life in that the youngsters of Patrickswell are now looking up to him because they were too young to know about lads like Ciaran Carey. Damien assures us that his son is always conscious to devote as much as he possibly can into the club that made him who he is today. A Patrickswell man, a Limerick man. But the last word goes to Wall, who could almost write poetry out of his respect for Gillane.

"When you get to know Aaron a bit better, what really stands out about him is his inner steel. He's cool, he's calm as they come, he doesn't get carried away, but he's steely, he's tough," said Wall.

Either way, Gillane will trod back to the dressing rooms on Sunday evening fighting. That's all Limerick folk can ask for. That's all Aaron Gillane ever wanted.