A chance to put things right for Pat’s

LAST year hurt the Dunbur Park fraternity and it hurt them bad. There’s no easy way to say it. The defeat to the Village hurt.

Why it hurt so bad has many layers and most of those layers were not the fault of the team, or if there was a fault on their part it was in peaking too soon and recording that significant victory over Rathnew earlier in the championship. That win brought an expectation of the Miley coming back to the county town. That eventuality never materialised. And that hurt.

A year later and Robert Hollingsworth and Paudge McWalter meet Wicklow People Sport in the same dressing room to discuss the approaching final against Baltinglass.

‘Holly’ is seated in his usual spot in the corner and is calm and as entertaining as always. Paudge is summoned from upstairs and is a thorough gentleman who is as focused as I’ve even seen anyone on righting the wrongs of last year.

And that’s where start with the preview. What went wrong and what was the dressing room like after the final whistle.

“Everything, pretty much everything went wrong,” said Robert Hollinsgworth. “The dressing room after the match was devastating. I’d say for about four months after it, at one stage the wife wanted to send me to the doctors. She said she thought I was depressed. And I probably was. It was just devastating. I just think that everything that could go wrong went wrong from our point of view.

“On the day we just didn’t do the right things. I’d be at pains to say to the lads that from my own point of view I was disappointed with my own performance; the decisions we made. It was just a bad day at the office,” he added.

We wondered what could he have done better in his opinion?

“A lot. Not match ups because I don’t really play the game thinking about match ups. Just the way we set up and the changes we didn’t make really, positionally and then during the game. It was a poor performance,” he added.

Paudge McWalter references the victory over thbe neighbours earlier in the championship and that confidence was high.

“We obviously went in confident. We had beaten them earlier in the year but we just didn’t perform. That was really hard to take,” he said.

Robert Hollingsworth said that while he had been confident ahead of that final there was something niggling him about a fall off in intensity in training and preparation for the decider.

“When I spoke to you last year I was confident but at the back of my mind there was that doubt in that I had seen a different performance in training and in the games we played. And people were saying, “Oh, you bet Rathnew in the second round so ye thought ye had the championship won”. But that wasn’t the case. None of the players believed that. I certainly didn’t believe it. I do feel that a lack of experience on the management side of things in that we trained and we trained hard early and the lads ran out of steam. I said to people that if the county final had been played at the end of August no one would have beaten us. But from that time on (when we met for last year’s preview) I could see a dip in everything from the lads. That was playing at the back of my mind. Obviously we went into the game confident and hopeful but it just wasn’t to be. But we’ve learned a lot,” he said.

So a new year dawned and new choices have to be made. One of those is the selection of captain. The man sitting along the seat from Hollingsworth has already had two stints in the job but if you’re looking for a leader you can’t really go wrong in Paudge McWalter.

“A very easy choice,” said Hollingsworth.

“He came to me at the start of the year,” chipped in McWalter. “I’ve been captain twice. The first year I couldn’t play because of the knee and the second time was in 2013 and we lost both games. So I said, “Ah, are you sure?” And there had been a vice captain and he (Robert) said he had spoken to Ciaran and Ciaran just wished me all the best. He was only too happy.

“I suppose because so many young players had came into the panel, there wasn’t that many options probably,” he added..

“Yeah, we were pretty desperate,” said Hollingsworth.

“I think a lot of the time the captain is just a name. Like, this year we’ve had a lot of young lads step up this year. Last Sunday it was the young lads that got us through really. The captain sometimes can be over-rated,” said McWalter to which Hollingsworth only partially agreed.

“It can be but at the same time everybody in the club would look up to Paudge, not just in our club but all over the county.

“No matter what game you go to, people would always be looking for Paudge to go over and shake their hands and all that. It wasn’t a hard choice. He’s a great leader and he’s got great heart. Because we have such a young panel we needed somebody who had those attributes and those qualities for them to look up to and for them to sort of say, “For me to get to where he is, this is what I need to do”.

With the captain selected the creation of the team for 2017 was next on the list for Hollingsworth and his management team. With the likes of Darragh McEvoy and Paul Earls no longer taking part there was a need for the young players to step up.

“They had to (step up). I know for the last three or four years people have been saying that we are a team in transition but we haven’t really, we haven’t. This year you could say it but we don’t really look at that. This year the youth had to come in, they had to and we had to change things up because I suppose as someone once told me, “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got”. We had to change things up and last Sunday we had eight players playing who didn’t start the county final last year,” said Robert Hollingsworth.

Paudge McWalter added a third huge St Pat’s name into the list of players not playing when he said that Daragh O’Sullivan had retired in August.

“It’s a huge turnaround. You mentioned players. Daragh O’Sullivan only left at the end of August and he gave a speech before he left and he said that he felt a lot more comfortable going knowing that there were lads there who had probably overtaken him. It’s just a natural progression. Paul (Earls) had struggled with injuries and he’s gone travelling now anyway. Darragh McEvoy had said that last year was going to be his last year. So they were probably the most senior players who stepped away but they were three great players for us,” he said.

“Three great servants,” said Hollingsworth, before focusing on the young players who have starred so far this year. “They were great (the young players). John Crowe is on the county team. These are good footballers. Emmet Cullen, fantastic footballer. Niall Donnelly, who everybody seems to not be talking about this year, fantastic footballer, still only 19. There’s a lot of talent around. We’re blessed to have them.

This year’s championship, while tricky, has never really tested the Pat’s team to the limit. At the beginning when Eire Og came out of the hat it had the makings of a cracker but with Stephen Kelly missing Pat’s were always going to be favourites.

“We got a tough draw early on. Eire Og are one of the teams to be reckoned with,” said Paudge. “In their defence, Chester was a huge loss, and subsequently they were strong that day, apart from Chester, but we played really well.

“We were down a few ourselves that day and we just played really well and that sets you up because if you lose the first game, like the depth of the championship is not great but you can draw someone and that happened us three years ago.

“To win that (the Eire Og game) gave us a lot of confidence and then in fairness Coolkenno gave us a good game but we still felt that if we had out away our chances early on we could have won that a bit better. The Newtown game, without being disrespectful, because of all the injuries they had, it wasn’t a massive challenge. I thought we were poor but we kind of knew that we would get over it.

“And then the last day it was championship football, it was knock out football, and we knew that. At half-time it was in the boiling pot. We didn’t play spectacular but I thought we fought very hard and dug in in the second half.

Key to Pat’s good fortunes this year has been the performances of Tommy Kelly. So how much of a blow was losing the talented attacker in the first half of the semi-final against Blessington.

“This year he has been a very good player for us,” said Robert Hollingsworth. “I think up to the semi-final he had scored 2-27 in championship football which is fantastic. We would have a meeting on the Friday night before matches and we would always say “What if this happens?” So it didn’t phase us because the quality of the panel is good.

“When Ruairi (Marron) went (through injury) I was starting to think that everything is going against us. But there’s 23 or 24 players there and they all know that they can start on a championship team.

The Blessington game was tight and tense in poor conditions. What did Robert Hollingsworth see as the key moment or moments from that game?

“I thought we went out in the second half and the two points we got early on were vital because if they had got them it would have been level and we would have been under pressure but to push it out to four points gave us a bit of breathing space and then they really had to push it. They missed a few frees because they were under pressure.

Paudge McWalter has no interest in reflecting on semi-finals and he warns that just because you turn it on for a semi-final doesn’t automatically mean you’ll do the same for a final.

“We’ve always been accused of not having it. But I’ve been in the dressing rooms and lads do want to win, it’s just sometimes in the crucial moments maybe we haven’t stepped up.

“But doing it on semi-final day doesn’t mean you’re going to do it on final day so we were delighted half an hour after and then it was just parked and let’s produce it next Sunday. It’s going to be a battle, the pitches are softening up and these games then become about who can win the dirty ball, who works the hardest.

Facing them are the men of Baltinglass who have been guided along very intelligently by their manager Paul Garrigan. Hollingsworth has nothing but respect for the Meath native.

“Everybody in the county knows the qualities that Paul has. I’ve came up against a few times in ladies football. I think the qualities that he would have are coming through with the men’s ream. They play a great brand of running football and they’re fit and energetic. Without pin pointing any specific players, they’re goalkeeper, Mark Jackson, is exceptional, some of the saves he’s pulled off this year, his kick outs are excellent and then he trots up and slots over 45s. They’re good; it’s going to be a good battle. A lot is depending on the weather, the pitch in Aughrim last weekend was shocking,” he added.

There have been rumours that Tommy Kelly is gone for the final and there are rumours that the full-forward is available. Hollingsworth puts one set of those rumours to bed.

“He’s not a gonner. It’s great to hear everybody saying that he’s a write off. It’s really great top be able to say that it was the best of a bad injury that he got. It was a clean dislocation and they just slipped it back in. He hade an x-ray on it and that showed positive. It could have been a lucky break, for want of a better term,” he said.

Hollingsworth says he doesn’t car for focusing too much on the opposition’s players and instead prefers to try and get his own house in order.

“I don’t really have concerns as such (about any Baltinglass men) because I don’t spend too much time focusing on the opposition players because when you start doing that you can forget about your own lads. I think if we just focus on getting our own lads and concentrate on getting our own game plan right and let them focus on themselves,” he said. .

“This year will be a lot easier to keep the lads focused because it’s Baltinglass and not Rathnew and there’s not that local hysteria, the buzz around the place, two teams in the same parish. At least now it’s Baltinglass at the other side of the county,” he added.

Paudge McWaletr said that one of the big differences between gearing up for a final against Rathnew or a final against another team is he’s not faced with it every time he walks down the street.

“You’re probably not faced with it every time you walk down the street. Everybody is just concentrating on their individual and collective performance, I know it’s a very token thing to say but it’s the truth. Gary (Jameson) is very good out there on the training pitch and everything he goes through for us is just getting specific so you don’t turnaround and say, “Oh, we haven’t prepared for this”, and that just keeps everyone concentrating,” he said.

Robert Hollingsworth has the cut of a man who has learned an awful amount in the last 12 months with the harshest lesson of all coming in Aughrim around this time last year when he had to face a deathly quite and devastated dressing room following their defeat to the old enemy. This year he’s hoping for a different scene when he returns from the battlefield.

“Hoping for a lively dressing room. If the feeling in the dressing room last year and the year before doesn’t drive things on then I don’t know what would because it was just diabolical. So come 5pm on Sunday we’re hoping that it will be a winning dressing room no more than they are,” he said.

And he has one thing to ask of the St Pat’s supporters.

“The town always gets behind the team and I want the whole town to get up to Aughrim and make noise. These lads have been training hard for nine months and I want to call on the people of the town to come out and support them,” he said.