Turning 32 on Cup final day, Brian Gartland might be one of the elder statesman of the Dundalk dressing room but as he prepares for his fourth November outing at the Aviva Stadium in-a-row neither his form nor desire show any signs of waning, writes

THE morning after lifting the league title following the recent victory over Sligo Rovers, Brian Gartland took to social media with a Tweet that summed up his burning desire for success.

It featured the black and white colours of the club and town that has become his home; four trophy emojis, demonstrating the number of league titles he has won in his time at Oriel Park; and two simple words: ‘Never enough.’

If four leagues is never enough though then surely one FAI Cup isn’t either?

‘No, not from us,’ he says, without hesitation.

‘Nobody wants to lose a final. We’ve lamented on the previous finals but we don’t go into any game thinking about the past. We just think about this game going forward and what we can do to win it. We can only look after ourselves. You’ve got to beat what’s in front of you. Whatever happens on the day you just have to make sure that you come out winners so regardless if we had won or lost the past finals we’d be going into this as hungry as ever for success.

‘You want to come out with as much trophies as you can and as I said it’s never enough because when you finish playing and even while you’re still playing you’ll always think I should have won that or I should have scored in that. That’s our mind set here and that’s why we’re successful because we don’t rest on our laurels. We’ve all won leagues now and some lads have won two, three, four, five and six but we all want more,’ said Gartland.

The centre half, who joined Stephen Kenny’s side from Portadown in July 2013, said playing at the top level was something he always aspired to despite plodding along with a struggling Monaghan Unite d side for much of his early days in the League of Ireland. He told The Argus that Dundalk was the ideal fit for him to realise his ambitions of being the best he could be.

‘From my point of view I always trained like a professional,’ he said.

‘At Monaghan we would have trained two nights a week but I would have done another two, three or four sessions at least in the gym and I’d be doing extra cardio because it’s what you need to do if you want to play at a higher level.

‘It’s something I like and enjoy, which I suppose is rare amongst a lot of lads but I just always had this hunger to succeed. It just comes from when I was younger. All I wanted to do was play football, to be the best I could be and make a career out of it. Obviously the ambition then was to go as high as I could in England but when I didn’t make that I just said I need to make the most of what I’ve got here and try to get as far as I can.

‘I was always looking at the teams at the top of the league here when I was playing in the First Division and they were always what I was aspiring to be so I always had that hunger. The thing that is different here is that if you have a hunger like that then it’s facilitated. If you have your sets sight on one thing you’re nearly raised up to think ‘I want more’ and ‘I want higher’. The environment here from the coaches to the staff is all to facilitate people who have that hunger and if you don’t have that hunger then you better get it when you come in here because if you don’t get it you’ll be out the door.

‘Some players, it didn’t click with them and they didn’t last too long. That’s how the gaffer is and rightly so.

‘If you want to be successful you can’t not do the work and expect to get the rewards. You can see the difference in lads from when they come here to a year later, from the size of them to their attitude on the pitch. I remember half a season in looking at Jamie McGrath and he was battering a few lads. That’s something that wouldn’t have been associated with his game. He’s technically an unbelievable player but it was another side that he added and that’s to do with hunger and a change of attitude.

‘There’s a will to win and a will to drive on and succeed that is here and it’s infectious,’ said the defender.

All going well Gartland will return to Dundalk on Sunday with the FAI Cup in hand, joining an elite few to have won two doubles for the club in the process. If that happens and he sits down at the end of the year to look back on his season, you’d expect him to be happy. Not quite though. There’s one thing that is niggling away at him… the fact he has scored just one goal this season.

‘I knew this was going to come up!,’ he laughed.

‘It’s doing my head in, nearly as much as