In January of this year, Thomastown joined an exclusive club. The Kilkenny side’s AIB All-Ireland Club Intermediate Hurling Championship victory meant that it had secured national honours twice, having won the junior title in 2013.

Before Thomastown’s win over Cork’s Castlelyons, only one other club – Bennettsbridge – had managed to claim the all important All-Ireland junior and intermediate titles.

Their fellow Noresiders’ achievement had come in consecutive years – 2015 and 2016 – but now Thomastown has created its own piece of back-to-back history.

The 12-team Kilkenny senior league feeds into the championship, with the top team in each section going to the league final, while the runners-up play off in the shield final. Just as important, all four earn seeded spots in the championship quarter-finals.

Given the spread of quality across the county, few would have expected the side just up from intermediate to challenge immediately. Well, few outside the club anyway – chairperson Ger Walsh felt that there was a chance.

“I won’t say I was confident, but I remember driving home from the convention after the draw was made and thinking we had a good chance of getting to a shield final,” he says.

“That puts you straight into a quarter-final and you have your shot then, which proved to be a fantastic thing.

“We believed that we were there on merit and that we had a chance to win. Nobody else did, but within the group we did and within the club we did.”

Wins increase belief

That belief was well-placed, as wins over Ballyhale Shamrocks, Mullinavat and defending champions O’Loughlin Gaels earned them the Tom Walsh Cup.

Now, they progress to the Leinster senior club championship, facing Westmeath champions Castletown Geoghegan this Sunday in Mullingar (1.30pm).

They will aim to keep their momentum going as they have worked so hard to earn it – before winning the county IHC last year, they had lost three of the previous four second-tier finals, losing at the semi-final stage in the other year.

“One of the trainers referred to it before this year’s county final,” Walsh says, “the day that we lost to Danesfort two years ago, I stood up in the dressing room and I said that we had no option but to keep going.

“Throwing in the towel wasn’t an option. It was something I felt I had to say, to lift them. There was always a belief that we were going to get there.

“A big thing for the club, shortly after losing that final, was that we won a Roinn A U21 for the first time in our history.

“That showed that we had good lads coming through. Some of them were playing that day against Danesfort and they took the benefits of winning that U21. It lifted the club.

“We knew that we had the players and we knew that we had the management and there were huge learnings from that year for everybody.

“When we turned around and started back for 2023, there was a different mindset.”

Then, having finally got over the line, they cruised through the Leinster and All-Ireland series with the same ruthlessness.

Our intention is to be as good as we can, as strong as we can and to win as much as we can. You need to accomplish what you can when you get the chance

“To win Kilkenny was a weight off,” Walsh says. “At the same time, we always say down here that if you win Kilkenny, you have to go on and win an All-Ireland – if you don’t, it would be viewed as failure. We pride ourselves on having hugely competitive championships here and if you look back on the records for the junior and intermediate All-Irelands, they’re predominantly Kilkenny.

“You do celebrate for the couple of days but then you’re back down to the brass tacks. What was satisfying was that we kept our form the whole way through – we won every match all year by at least 15 points. That was relentless from the team to keep doing that and that’s their mindset.”

It’s a culture passed down the generations and it extends to football, too – along with two Kilkenny senior hurling titles, Thomastown have been football kingpins on five occasions, the most recent in 2021.

In Walsh’s own playing days, the intermediate hurling win of 1983 and a senior final appearance in 1988 were joined with a golden period in football.

“We were highly competitive back then,” he says, “and, believe it or not, we were even highly competitive in Leinster.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on being a good football club. Even at under-age, we would have contested a lot of Féiles – we always used to laugh when our hosts realised after the first 10 minutes that we could actually play football!”

It was perhaps a similar level of surprise as that witnessed by the rest of the county as they progressed through the senior championship this year.

Past achievements

While the roll of honour does show a previous Thomastown win in 1946, that was more of a confederate effort also featuring players from Bennettsbridge and Gowran. Although there had been final appearances in 1967 and 1988, as mentioned, this was a new frontier. And, given how they achieved it, nobody could say it was a soft county title.

“Bar Ballyhale Shamrocks, nobody has retained the senior title in the last 20 years,” Walsh says, “so that shows how hard it is to win it.

“The Shamrocks have been consistently brilliant and to beat them in the quarter-final was a huge day. That’s what you aspire to be, that good and that consistent.”

Now, a second straight campaign extends into winter, but Thomastown are looking forward to it.

“Again, it’s hugely competitive,” Walsh says, “it’s a step up. The difference between intermediate and senior hurling is a gulf and this will be more physical again. At the same time, it’ll be like it has been for the last number of years – our intention is to be as good as we can, as strong as we can and to win as much as we can.

“You need to accomplish what you can when you get the chance.”