Minnows’ heroics show 2019 can be anyone’s year

IF only 1% of clubs can consider themselves champions at the end of a calendar year of football and hurling, then December is the greatest month for a player’s frame of mind.

There are no actual games to start the rollercoaster of emotions. If you are in a county squad it’s all about the purging and sacrifice of pre-season.

All that feel-good stuff that is all about keeping the head down, yet with the promise of getting off the leash and dropping the belt buckle down a notch over Christmas week.

If you are a club player, chances are that your club could have just made an exciting managerial appointment. Maybe an outside man, someone ‘without baggage’ who ‘won’t have favourites’.

At the very least, there will be a huge amount of intrigue and no team meeting is as well attended as the first team meeting of the year when players and management suss each other out.

If you are looking for inspiration, you need look no further than the heroic provincial finals in Ulster and Leinster.

By now, the achievements of Mullinalaghta in becoming the first Longford club to win a Leinster Championship will be coming into focus. A club of a mere 400-odd members, beating a club like Kilmacud Crokes with over 10 times the number of members.

It’s the stuff of dreams and something for any team at any level to aspire to.

Social media has been a corrosive force in many respects, but in gaining a glimpse of the Mullinalaghta celebrations — where a pipe band brought the newly-crowned Leinster champions through the local cemetery to honour those that went before them — were spine-tingling.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we see the small triumph over the gargantuan in Gaelic Games, we never fail to patronise them.

Monaghan, for example, are one such county that continually out-perform their supposed population restrictions.

But from speaking to their players over the course of the last few seasons, they are sick of hearing it.

A fair number of teams should apply that thinking to the current dominance of Dublin.

When Meath players make retirement statements noting that they haven’t a chance of winning silverware, then you know that pessimism has taken hold in an unlikely place.

2019 — It could be our year, your year, anyone’s year!