Tuesday morning and Conor McHugh is fresh off the physio’s table. Although is fresh really the right word? The weekends are bleeding into each other for him now like colours in a toddler’s painting. Football, hurling. Hurling, football. His club Na Fianna are in the Dublin finals of both and McHugh is the only starter on both teams.
Na Fianna are in the throes of a run that has included, among others, three consecutive one-point wins in football and an extra-time victory in hurling over Cuala. He’s a scoring forward in football and a shutdown full-back in hurling. This will be his seventh weekend in a row in action.
Fresh? How would you be fresh?
“It’s mad,” he says. “When I was younger, my big thing was, ‘I want to be sharp for the match.’ But now it’s, ‘I want to be actually on the pitch for the match and get through 60 minutes.’ That’s literally all I plan for now.
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“I used to do loads of kicking during the week. We were in both finals in 2022 and I’d say I probably used to kick 100 balls in the week before every football game. Couldn’t do enough. But now I’d say I’ll probably kick 20 balls all week and that will be that. It’s just making sure the body is good and going from there.
“You have to change your mindset, just because of the build-up of everything. It’s hectic but it’s a good complaint to have, I suppose.”
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Good complaints are the hallmark of his GAA career these days. He turned 31 in April, the same month he made his championship debut for the Dublin hurlers. It meant that he and his wife Lorna, having got married on Valentines Day, had to put the honeymoon on the back burner. Na Fianna making it to two county finals hasn’t exactly sped up the process either.
They couldn’t have dreamt he’d see a year like this. This time two years ago, Na Fianna hadn’t been Dublin football champions in over two decades and the club had never won a hurling crown. McHugh was 29 years old, a handy dual club player with a great future behind him. The idea of his playing career causing any disruption to wedding plans in February 2025 would have sounded entirely off the wall.
Since then, everything has changed. For the hurlers, he’s been a fixture at full-back as they’ve won back-to-back Dublin titles, parlaying last year’s one into Leinster and All-Ireland glory.
The footballers still haven’t won a title since 2001 but they’ve reinvented themselves as The Men They Couldn’t Hang in this year’s championship, pulling injury-time wins out of nowhere against Ballinteer, Ballymun and Kilmacud Crokes. In between it all, he became a Dublin hurler, which nobody saw coming. Least of all himself.
McHugh grew up as a genuine dual player. It wasn’t that he was a footballer who could hurl a bit, or even vice versa. As a youngster, he was on Dublin development squads in both codes. In 2012, he was a starting forward in three All-Ireland minor finals – a draw and replay defeat against Tipperary in hurling and a victory over Meath in football. The fork in the road came soon after.
“A good few of us played minor in both,” he says. “Me, Cormac Costello, Ciaran Kilkenny, a few others. I played a year in the 21s in hurling and then it was like, ‘You know what? I want to be a Dublin footballer.’ I was asked in by the Dublin hurlers around that time. But football was where I wanted to be.”
In all truth, it would have nearly looked wilful had he chosen hurling at that stage. The 2014 Dublin under-21 footballers will go down in history as probably the most stacked underage team there has ever been. The starting 15 in the final against Roscommon went on to win 57 All-Ireland senior medals between them, with the likes of Jack McCaffrey, Brian Fenton, John Small, Paul Mannion, Cormac Costello, Davy Byrne and Niall Scully among their ranks.
Conor McHugh wasn’t just another face in the team photo. Against the Rossies in that final, he kicked 1-6 from play. When the time came to name the player of the year at that grade, he came out top of the pile. Over the winter, he joined Jim Gavin’s senior panel. He made his debut off the bench in the opening game of the league the following February. The next cab off the rank.
And then it just ... never quite happened. McHugh stayed in and around the Dublin panel for the next seven seasons without ever making the breakthrough. He played just 20 games, only eight of them from the start. He never earned himself a run in the team, nor even a presence in the match day 26. The competition was just too hot.
“There were tough days,” he says. “You’d think you’d be going well and it was just, ‘Sorry, no, we’re going with Kev Mac or Eoghan O’Gara on the bench today. And then you’re annoyed. But you’re like, ‘Can I be that annoyed?’ It’s not like they’re no good! They’re class players.
“So it was just the way it was. It was mad. But it was just the environment you’re in. When you’re involved in teams that are getting to All-Ireland finals, there’s a chance of playing in Croke Park in front of 80,000 people and you’re there and you’re close, you just keep going and going and going. In hope more than anything.”
He says in hindsight that he should have stepped away for a year or two. When the Dubs were in that imperial phase between 2017 and 2019, he reckons he’d have been better off putting in time with Na Fianna and getting his confidence back where it needed to be. Easy said now, impossible to consider when you’re in the maw of it.
“At that age, all I ever wanted to do was play with Dublin. So it’s very hard to leave voluntarily. And I don’t think Jim would have cut me either. Jim would have always wanted me there because I was a good player. I’d be pushing lads, I’d be good in the internal games, things like that. So I was always in the top 30. But it was just getting from that into the 15 or the five lads on the bench. It was the hard thing to do.”
Ask him how he reflects on it all now though and he doesn’t hesitate for a second.
“Best years of my life.”
Really?
“Oh yeah, absolutely. Honestly. People say, ‘Oh, it’s shame you weren’t born at a different time.’ I don’t look at it that way at all. I think it was unbelievable. Some of my best mates are from there. Even Lorna – we went on great trips away and some of her best friends are from those times. Absolutely no regrets whatsoever. Loved it. Loved every minute of it.
“As tortured as it was at times and tough as it was, I wouldn’t change it. Like, it’s no one’s fault other than mine that I didn’t play. I’d never blame a manager or anything. At the end of the day, you have however many sessions in a year – make your mark. If you don’t, that’s on you. Whatever happens is up to you.”
Ordinarily, the end would have been the end. Conor McHugh had his go at playing intercounty, it didn’t work out. So be it, have a nice life. He went back playing for Na Fianna and settled happily into his club career. He’d played a few games for the hurlers here and there over the years, usually when they were in relegation trouble. But now Niall Ó Ceallacháin leaned on him to give more time to it, to properly commit. He did so with a full heart.
Bit by bit, a serious hurling team came together. They lost a couple of county finals before they won one but since they started winning, they’ve found it hard to stop. A club that couldn’t raise a minor team for most of the 1990s were All-Ireland champions just a generation later.
In the middle of last year’s campaign, Ó Ceallacháin was named Dublin manager. The week after Na Fianna beat Loughrea in the All-Ireland semi-final, he texted McHugh and asked to meet for a coffee. It was more or less the first time it dawned on him that there was a chance of swimming back upstream.
“I never in a million years thought I’d play Dublin hurling again. I was happy out with the club, playing both. Nelly texted me and I was going, ‘Why would he be doing that? Sure we were only talking down at the club a while ago.’ And then I went, ‘Oh, that has to be about Dublin.’ He basically said, ‘Look, we’re building a team and the level you’re playing at, you’re well fit for intercounty hurling. You’ve been marking intercounty forwards.’”
Delighted as he was to be considered, McHugh asked could he have a think about it. He was getting married, he was enjoying being a club player. And not just because the Na Fianna hurlers were going well – he felt he owed the footballers plenty as well.
“It’s funny, probably one of the biggest things for me at the time was, how would that impact my football for Na Fianna? I had played with them lads for 12 years at that stage and I was feeling guilty about sort of saying goodbye to them for most of the year. But I spoke to a few of them and they were like, ‘Don’t be f**king silly, this is your career.’ They said go and give it your best and then come back and give it a go with the footballers. So it’s worked out well.”
On the face of it, the footballers have outstayed their welcome a few times over this campaign. They took an unmerciful hiding against their final opponents Ballyboden in a group game back in the lazy days of August.
So badly were they beaten, McHugh points out that it took until their win over Crokes in the semi-final for them to bring their points difference for the 2025 championship back to zero. But they got there – and if they finish with a +1 tally for the campaign, they’ll be county champions.
There’s always a way back. No matter how far off it seems.
