Conor Burke Aiming To End St Vincents Long Wait For Hurling Glory

By Paul Keane 

For over 30 years now, St Vincent's have been sitting on 13 titles in the Go-Ahead Ireland Dublin senior hurling championship roll of honour.

Conor Burke wasn't even alive back then, when the Marino outfit won their last title in 1993, and he attempted to put the giant gap into context.

"There are lads whose fathers were on the last winning team that are on the team now, the sons of those players, so that kind of puts it into perspective," said Burke.

He is speaking at Parnell Park at a media event for the Go-Ahead Dublin GAA Club Championships 2024 and the sun is shining brightly. The evenings will be considerably shorter by the time two teams roll up for the final in a couple of months' time and perhaps St Vincent's will still be standing at that stage.

"There's tons of hunger there and every time we start the Championship we aim to win it," said Burke. "We've been bubbling around the semi-final stage for a number of years now so we'll hopefully try to push on and take that one or two steps further."

The 26-year-old's influence will be vital in the coming weeks after a positive few months in the blue of Dublin.

A few people have told the versatile performer that it was his best season yet at inter-county level after a switch into midfield though Burke isn't so sure about that one.

"I probably scored more this year so maybe that brought more attention but I feel personally that I was contributing to games as much as I was when I was centre-back," said Burke, who started, and scored in, all of Dublin's Championship games this season, returning a healthy 1-18.

"Just because you're not getting the scores, you might still be assisting them or whatever it might be. I feel like I was contributing the same way but if you're scoring a little more, probably people have a keener eye on it."

Dublin are currently searching for a new senior manager following Micheal Donoghue's departure. The Galway man was in charge for two seasons and of the 24 league and Championship games that Dublin contested in that period across 2023 and 2024, Burke started 23 of them.

He was a central figure for sure and described it as a transition period of sorts for the group.

"I think from Mattie Kenny's era to Micheal's, there was a huge turnover of players," he said. "It was really building from scratch. Year one for Micheal was really kind of just getting to know players a little bit better whereas in year two he really had an opportunity to embed a style of play and a way that we wanted to approach games.

"I think those types of things take time and we saw a lot of green shoots of the type of style that we wanted to play which were really, really positive."

Wins over Carlow, Antrim and Galway in this year's Leinster championship secured Dublin a prized place in the final. Kilkenny won that provincial decider and Cork knocked Dublin out of the subsequent All-Ireland race at the quarter-final stage though Burke and his colleagues went down fighting, finishing strongly against the eventual MacCarthy Cup runners-up in a five-point game.

"Every time you lose a game you think it's an opportunity missed because you only get a finite number of opportunities," said Burke of the Cork defeat.

"The Cork game, like, you're obviously analysing the game slightly differently than people looking at from the outside would be. I think we lost by five or six and if you tot up the number of wides we had from scorable shots in play and frees, of course you'd be disappointed but that's part of sport.

"You're always going to have times where you have a certain number of wides or a certain number of should haves or could haves, you just need to find a way to allow for them and still find a way to win."

A really important thing from Burke's perspective is that the entire Dublin senior panel is back again in 2025, with few drop offs.

"That's definitely important, for sure," he said. "I think it's difficult to build on what you've created or started when you're taking a couple of steps back to try and bring people up to your level. You (have to) get them to understand the game plan that you're trying to implement, the things that you value as a group, all that type of thing. It's important that we have everyone back and then hopefully some more lads to keep everyone honest and pushing hard as well."

By that stage, when Dublin get going again, maybe Burke and St Vincent's will have ended the longest of waits for that elusive Go-Ahead Dublin senior hurling championship title.