O’Malley praises never-say-die attitude of his Beaufort players

AT times it was difficult to hear Eanna O’Malley through the cheering and chanting emanating from the Beaufort dressing-room but the winning team manager was clear in his words of praise for those players thoroughly enjoying what must have felt like the sweetest of victories in the circumstances. O’Malley himself played many a great game with his club and with the Mid Kerry divisional team but he can scarcely have been involved in a game of such drama.

“What can I say,” he offered under the Austin Stack Park stand, “I’d say it was an incredible game for the neutral. We were dead and buried a few times but these lads never give up, you don’t even have to tell them, it’s just in them naturally. We’ve done that several times before, we did it in the Mid Kerry final last year, we did it in a county league game against Legion, we did it twice in the semi-final (against Churchill) when we came back from three points down and four points down, so there’s no end to them.”

O’Malley was only too aware that this county final could have gone either way - maybe even to a replay - but while he acknowledged that good fortune might have played a small part in Beaufort’s win, there was also plenty of method among the madness of those final 20 minutes.

“There might have been an element of luck in some of the goals, with possibly guys shooting for points and they dropped in. But the lads followed them in and we often have that as a sort of a tactic, for someone always to follow it in, especially if it’s drifting to the back post. The boys got in there and got the goals and it maybe looked like we were over the line. We were unfortunate to concede a fairly soft goal at the end and we were kind of hanging on at the end.

“(At full time) you just want to get fellas to calm down, try to get their heads around what was going on. Try to concentrate on what we were doing well and try to do that a bit more and cut out the things we weren’t doing so well. Sometimes we give the ball away a bit and maybe shoot from play a lot but that’s the style of football we play. We’re a fairly open, expansive team and we don’t try to prescribe too much to them what they’re to do. From a coaching point of view I’m a big believer in giving them a broad enough game plan and leaving them at it then.

“It was the first time this year we’d the opportunity to play on a really good pitch, maybe apart from Crokes (Lewis Road) in the county league, and we got a really nice day for it, so we were really excited about today and looking forward to it. It didn’t start out too well, the game passed us by a little bit (at the start) but that happened us in the Mid Kerry final last year but you just need to get some foothold. We got the first goal at the right time and that really got us going.”

The Beaufort manager said the team’s Division One experience this year, albeit just three games so far, was a big help to the team, especially in forging a resilience in the team when they’re in tough spots.

“I was anxious at the start of the year that if we were getting beaten in a couple of games that it wouldn’t go to guys heads and get them down-hearted, and we went into every game like that, just trying to get something from it. Crokes gave us a bit of a hiding in the end and that was a kind of a lesson, but I always felt that we got a bit of a bounce in our performance after playing a county league game.

“Ger Hartnett is playing a long time and he’s as good a back as there is in the county. Ronan Murphy, fantastic player. Liam Carey, sometimes he gets a bit of stick around the parish but cometh the hour cometh the man, and he really stood up and was counted today. And then you’ll always have a couple of guys that maybe you wouldn’t be expecting to be one of your match winners and they just come up trumps and we’d several of those guys as well.

“We’ve county league now for the summer and then hopefully a share of the lads will be in with Mid Kerry and that’ll bring fellas on another bit.”