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Europe|Hurling in Ireland: Is the ‘Clash of the Ash’ Becoming a ‘Battle of Bamboo’?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/world/europe/hurling-ireland-ash-bamboo.html
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Ireland Dispatch
For centuries, the sport’s wooden sticks have been made from Ireland’s ash trees. But with a disease destroying forests, the ancient game is turning to different materials.
By Megan Specia
Megan Specia reported this article from County Clare and County Limerick, Ireland, visiting woodland destroyed by ash dieback, workshops of hurley makers and villages where hurling is part of the fabric of daily life.
Aug. 31, 2024Updated 4:22 p.m. ET
The horde of helmeted players raced up the field like warriors headed into battle, with the slap of a ball against the wooden sticks they wielded, known as hurleys, ringing out as they sped toward the goal posts.
With powerful grace, the players deftly switched between passing, carrying and smacking the small leather ball, which sometimes whizzed through the air half the length of the enormous pitch to the delight of the crowd.
It was the All-Ireland Hurling Senior Championship, the pinnacle of the sport, with County Clare eventually winning the final against County Cork in front of about 82,000 spectators at Croke Park stadium in Dublin.
Hurling — one of Ireland’s national sports — has long been known as “the clash of the ash” for the sturdy hurleys that craftsmen have fashioned for centuries from Ireland’s ash trees. The formidable, three-foot-long sticks are core to the game, which to an outsider can look like a cross between baseball, lacrosse and rugby. They are used not only to pass the ball, but also to carry it, and of course to score, either by whacking the ball over the goal’s crossbar or whipping it into the net below.
But when the country’s elite players took the field in Dublin in July, the hurleys in the hands of some of them were made of an innovative material not native to the island: bamboo.
After hundreds of years of players using ash hurleys almost exclusively, the shift has been born of necessity. A disease known as ash dieback has decimated forests across Europe and is expected to wipe out 90 percent of Ireland’s ash trees within the next two decades.
