Crokes keep their heads and the ball to deliver title against 14-man Slaughtneil

ALL-IRELAND CLUB SFC FINAL

Dr Crokes 1-9 Slaughtneil 1-7

NEVER has this Dr Crokes team scored so little yet won so much. Three second half points - against a 14-man opposition - is hardly All-Ireland title winning football but seldom, if ever, has a Dr Crokes team aggressively attacked 30 minutes of football by becoming so ultra-defensive and been rewarded so handsomely for it.

Dr Crokes went to Croke Park last Friday with a singular aim: to win the All-Ireland Club football title. They achieved that aim and nobody - just like Slaughtneil in those final ten minutes - is going to dispossess them of that.

Twenty-five years ago Colm Cooper was the impish eight-year old mascot to the men of ’92 - the first, last and until Friday the only team to bring the Andy Merrigan Cup to Lewis Road in Killarney. On St Patrick’s Day gone the 33-year Cooper thrust the Merrigan Cup skyward as most of those greying Crokes heroes - his brothers Danny and Mark among them - looked on as delighted as anyone that they’ve finally got company on the club’s highest rung of heroes.

Cooper, by his own incredibly high standards, gave far from his best performance in Croke Park but it’s doubtful Dr Crokes would have won without their greatest ever footballer. His first meaningful contribution was quintessential Gooch: peeling off his marker to receive a Daithi Casey pass and slip the ball through the only available letter-box of space to score Crokes’ only goal.

His other telling contribution came in the last ten minutes of a wretched second half as Crokes - two points ahead of a Slaughtneil team toiling with 14 men since the start of the second half - went about running down the clock by holding the ball in a manner that was as effective as it was necessary, with Cooper the fulcrum around which Crokes possession game revolved.

If the second half - or at any rate the last quarter - was a sow’s ear of a spectacle then the first half was a silk purse by comparison. There can be a purity - if not quite an innocence - to club football that’s all but gone from the inter-county game now, and while no one would suggest either Dr Crokes or Slaughtneil can’t be cynical or negative at times, that opening half was ‘run it and gun it’ football near to its best.

Case in point was that Slaughtneil’s goal came courtesy of midfielder Padraig Cassidy and their next best goal chance was from centre-back Chrissy McKaigue, while Crokes best goal chance, aside from Cooper’s, came via their centre-back Gavin White who blazed wide from a few metres out after a scorching solo run from beyond midfield in the ninth minute.

At that stage it was honours even, 0-2 apiece, Brian Looney and Cooper (free) matching early points from Shane McGuigan and Christopher Bradley as the Derry champions settled earlier and better into the contest.

There was an assuredness about Slaughtneil in those early minutes and exchanges that suggested the 2015 beaten finalists were fully tuned in and meant business, while Dr Crokes looked a fraction out in the mechanics of their game.

Twelve and a half minutes in, with Crokes leading by a point, Cormac O’Doherty’s clever flick sent Cassidy in behind the Crokes cover and with a neat step inside, the midfielder finished confidently past Shane Murphy to regain the lead, 1-2 to 0-3, for Slaughtneil.

Further points from Christopher Bradley - set up by full back Brendan Rogers who was in the ascendancy in his individual battle with Cooper - and a Paul Bradley free - won by Chrissy McKaigue who was fouled on the edge of the square - pushed the Ulster champions four points clear by the 18th minute.

Momentarily Crokes were rattled if not quite rocked by Slaughtneil’s boldness of taking the game to the match favourites, but when the leaders allowed themselves a fleeting lapse in concentration Crokes pounced.

As if he was personally slighted by Slaughtneil’s derring-do, Daithi Casey snatched a ball around the middle of the field, pinned his ears back and lunged at the opposition defence in that signatory way of his. Casey’s immediate threat drew a couple of defenders to him and away from Cooper, so that the former could slip the ball to the latter and there was only one result from there.

With Antoin McMullan advancing to cut the angle, Cooper did what he has done into that Hill 16 goal against the best of the best goalkeepers down the year. Green flag; game on.

Three of the last four points before the interval were Crokes, the last two from Brian Looney who was a participating teenager the last time Dr Crokes played in Croke Park a decade earlier.

With a swirling wind carrying a heavy drizzle into the stadium, both teams would have been content to have got to the dressing rooms with Dr Crokes leading 1-6 to 1-5, but late in the third minute of the additional three allowed by referee Maurice Deegan came the game’s absolute turning point.

An insignificant coming together of a couple of players on the Hogan Stand sideline was a thing of nothing until Padraig Cassidy reflexively threw a hand at Kieran O’Leary with enough force and contact to leave Deegan with no option but to issue a straight red card.

It was a senseless act more than an aggressive one but a strike is a strike and so Cassidy’s race was run. A game that was there for Slaughtneil to win every bit as much as Crokes was suddenly a long climb up a greasy pole.

Seven minutes into the second half Paul Bradley’s free levelled the score but thereafter this final descended into an arm wrestle of wills. Slaughtneil’s will to win it from a handicapped start and Crokes will simply not to lose it, under any circumstances.

Casey tapped over a closerange free, in the 46th minute substitute Micheal Burns doubled Crokes lead from an acute angle, and five minutes later Cooper pointed a 14-metre free, but thereafter Crokes showed little interest in going for more scores.

When Paul Bradley made it 1-9 to 1-7 in the 54th minute Crokes decided enough was enough. The mantra became ‘what we have we hold’ and the Kerry champions slipped into ‘keep ball’ mode.

From just before the 58th minute until the 64th minute Crokes retained and protected the ball as if it were a piece of plutonium, with Slaughtneil getting their hands on it about four times in that period.

Shane Murphy and Cooper missed added time frees to register an insurance point but in the end it mattered not.

A quarter of a century after Johnny Buckley went up the steps of the Hogan Stand on his father Mike’s shoulders, the son walked up the same steps to accept the Andy Merrigan Cup.

One small step for Johnny Buckley, one giant leap for this Dr Crokes team and the GAA club.