Huge Coo for Saints to get hands on cup once again
GALWAY star
Conor Cooney says a second All-ireland club title is reward for a decade of hard work and near misses.
Cooney was among a group of St Thomas’ players who won
All-ireland finals in 2013 and again last weekend. It was a belated second triumph because they lost five of their next six games outside of Galway after that 2013 win.
That amounted to four All-ireland semi-final defeats and an agonising final loss to Ballyhale in 2019.
It was only last month that the six-in-a-row Galway champions finally broke the losing streak with their All-ireland semi-final defeat of Ballygunner.
Cooney said: “Look, the criticism was probably fair that we hadn’t performed in semi-finals. We were always beaten by the better teams.
“But this now, it certainly validates all the effort, to come back and to get on top, to give everything and ultimately to get over the line in difficult circumstances.”
Cooney, whose second-half switch to full-forward was key to the St Thomas’ win last weekend, said he never stopped believing it would happen for them.
That’s despite the pain of a shock All-ireland semi-final loss to Antrim’s Dunloy just 13 months ago.
Powerful Cooney said: “We’d talked about it and made the point that a lot of us were young lads, we were kids really when we won the first one in 2013. We probably didn’t appreciate how hard it is to get back to the top.
It remains to be seen how many of the all-conquering St Thomas’ players will be called into Henry Shefflin’s (right) Galway squad now.
Remarkably, not a single Thomas’ player started last year’s All-ireland semi-final defeat to Limerick.
Cooney and Fintan Burke were used as impact subs that day while David Burke, Man of the Match against O’loughlin Gaels, was out with a cruciate injury.
Cooney came into his own on Sunday when moved to full-forward early in the second-half, a role that could pique
Shefflin’s interest.