O’Toole and Healy shine
Garden County finally rise
WICKLOW’S Gaelic footballing journey of 2021 started against Wexford in the first round of the Leinster championship. They were successful, winning by 4-12 to 2-16 with Dean Healy the man of the match.
They won the quarter-final against Kildare by 2-15 to 0-6 which put them in the semi-final against Meath.
They drew 2-12 to 1-15 but in the replay, they went all out and beat Meath 5-12 to 0-9 with Dean Healy scoring 5-6. He’s the top scorer in the championship so far, but he and his team had the toughest challenge yet in the championship when they faced the five-in-a-row All-Ireland champions, Dublin. Dean Healy had to mark Brian Fenton, the 2018 All-Star.
Dublin were winning by 2-9 to 0-4 with two goals coming from Ciaran Kilkenny, but Wicklow came back and won by 2-19 to 2-18 with the winning point coming from man of the match Dean Healy.
Everybody in Wicklow was partying. They had never won the Leinster championship before. But the players had no time to party because they had Kerry, Mayo and Tyrone in their quarter-final group.
First, they played Kerry but they lost 4-16 to 2012; David Clifford was just too good. Against Tyrone they were losing 2-13 to 0-3 at half-time. Little did Tyrone know that Wicklow had a trick up their sleeve – their star youngster Padráig O’Toole.
Padráig scored 3-8 to give Wicklow a comfortable 3-20 to 2-16 win. They had to at least draw with Mayo to go through, but they went one better and beat the O’Shea brothers 0-20 to 2-6. They made history but they had bigger fish to fry against Galway in the semi-final.
Somehow, they managed not to score or concede in the first half. There were 10 minutes left and Galway were winning 2-4 to 0-2. Padráig O’Toole rose from the bench and scored 2-3 to put Wicklow in their first All-Ireland final, against bitter rivals Dublin.
There were five players to watch: Padráig O’Toole, Dean Healy, Stephen Cluxton, Brian Fenton and Ciaran Kilkenny.
At half-time it was 0-6 to 0-6. Then there were four minutes left and Brian Howard and Padráig O’Toole got sent off.
With one minute of additional time left the score was 0-9 to 0-9.
Dean Healy caught the ball in the midfield area and hit it first time and it sailed over the bar.
The 40,584-strong crowd from Wicklow all roared at the same time – they had won the All-Ireland final.
No-one could have thought that Wicklow would win the All-Ireland Senior football championship 2020.
All the pubs were packed in Wicklow. Every other county was happy for Wicklow and for all Wicklow people it was the best day of their lives!