McGrath welcomes learning experience for new St Brendans players

ST Brendans’ manager Gary McGrath was obviously pleased to get the win, acknowledging Dingle’s strong challenge. However, in terms of what lies ahead, there are many factors that will determine if The Sem are capable of repeating last year’s success in all competitions.

“Up until today we have been winning very easy but we knew coming here Dingle had prepared very well. We beat them last year in the competition and obviously they were going to come back and they were going to have a go at us. We are delighted to just get over the line.

“I suppose we have done very little work because with Kerry winning the Minor and with East Kerry involved in the Minor Championship here the lads have been playing a lot of football. We haven’t been training a whole lot at school because we are just trying to keep things fresh, keep things ticking over.

“We learned a lot today, I think the lads, even though we won, weren’t overly delighted with their performance. We missed a lot, but saying that, Dingle missed an awful lot also, so we would have taken a draw with five minutes to go, and I suppose Dingle would have taken a draw also,” McGrath said.

“We have only two competitive games between now and Christmas, and you could be playing the quarter-final sometime at the end of January. There are advantages and disadvantages but definitely I think that it’s better that (this game) was played before the weather turns. It’s nice to play in Austin Stack Park on a lovely day, the pitch was in great condition and it suited. It was a fast, free-flowing game of football.

“This is a completely new group of players. There’s a lot of young fellows there who wouldn’t have been involved at all last year, so they just need time to acclimatise and to understand what we are about, the process that we are going about. Every day you are learning, and hopefully the lads will learn a lot from today, we are not looking beyond it.

“We have to play Macroom in two weeks time, and we have to win that to make sure that we qualify for the [Corn Uí Mhuirí] quarter-final, and that’s our main ambition now.”