Joe’s a perfect fit for proud Ballinacor

IF you were looking for the best example of a club and a manager being perfectly suited to each other then the combination of Carnew legend Joe Murphy and the Ballinacor Intermediate footballers would be hard to beat.

Ballinacor, based deep in the ruggedly beautiful Glenmalure valley, seems a perfect home for the tough, battle-hardened Murphy who guided the Carnew men to many a GAA crown not to mention his exploits in the Wicklow jersey.

A man who would not suffer fools, he is at the helm of a club who are as hardy as their landscape and who take all challenges and difficulties in their stride.

We meet Joe Murphy and Ballinacor and Wicklow star Chris Murphy at their early (very early) training session last Sunday morning not long after the sun has peeped above the Wicklow Mountains for the first time that day. We asked Joe how the job in Glenmalure came about?

“A friend of mine in the hotel (Glenmalure Lodge) over there, one of the Dowlings, approached me and asked me would I be interested and I was actually going looking for a job so I said I’d give it a go. I came up here and met the boys and got involved and haven’t looked back.

Prior to having this chat the lads could be heard calling Joe ‘Murph’. Chris Murphy says the actual title is ‘Big Murph’, leading us to wonder if Chris is ‘Little Murph’.

“I’d say they’ve called me worse than that,” said Joe. “But, honestly, they’re a deadly bunch of lads and I’ve had no problems with any of them and when I came up here they welcomed me very well,” he added.

Despite him standing within touching distance of Joe, we asked Chris to describe the impact of Joe Murphy on the Ballinacor footballers.

“Not too bad. The last few years things haven’t been great for us. We had a couple of hard years there when we came up. We were bet in a few Intermediate finals, we got promoted to Division 1 league and it’s hard to keep that momentum going and it kind of fell back in the last couple of years and, to be fair, Joe came in at the start of the year and straight away he brought a new energy to it, he was very positive with the lads and encouraging to everyone around the place and lads starting coming back to the field, lads who hadn’t been around for the last couple of years and when the lads come to the field it’s easy doing the training.

“In fairness to Joe he’s straight with everyone, you come to training and you’re here for an hour and it’s good, hard training and you’re out the door then,” he added.

But there seems to be more to just the appointment of a manager when it comes to the turnaround in fortunes for the Glenmalure based club. To go from Intermediate relegation battle to being 60 minutes from playing Senior football in 2017 takes something special, surely?

“Hard to put my finger on it,” said Chris. “It’s a combination of things. In fairness to the lads behind the scenes in the club, especially in the winter, they ran the ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ and they put an awful lot of effort in and all the small fundraisers they ran got everybody out and got people back talking about football and interested in football and interested in the local area and I think that as much as Joe’s new approach that it’s just football training it made everything a bit more enjoyable and made lads want to come training and as you can see if the lads put in the effort it will take a good team to stop us,” he said.

Ballinacor’s start to the championship was frantic and Joe describes the journey as a “roller coaster”.

“Bit of a roller coaster really. Obviously the first one against Arklow we looked like we were dead and buried but I knew the boys were better than that. We just said at half-time that we would go out and ask a few questions of these boys and in fairness they did and they got the result. That mightn’t happen the next day now, if you went 10 points down every day you’d be in trouble.

“Then we went on and played Donard and we got the draw against them in Arklow which I thought was a good result against them and then we went on and beat the Billies and we’d one flat day against Stratford and they turned us over. What I was saying to the boys was that Stratford were backed into a corner and they had to come out fighting.

“Semi-final was a slog, a horrible wet day in Aughrim. We’d the hard work done when it came to the important part of the match.

On Sunday afternoon, Joe Murphy will send his men out to take on the young and talented AGB side, managed by a man who Joe knows very well from his playing days, Damien Redmon. Chris says that the AGB side are a serious outfit.

“We’re expecting to be under pressure from the get go, very much so. We know what Arklow are, they’re a serious outfit of young lads, they’ll run all day. Some of the boys were saying they were hoping that Arklow wouldn’t be in the final because they said the last time we played them they ran for a solid hour.

“We know the first day we knew we shouldn’t have been in a position where we were 10 points down, it was a mixture of them being really good and us a bit slow to start or maybe not expecting them to be as good as they were. But having said that at half-time in that game, the message was still clear, do the simple things, play the way we play football and it will come, and thankfully it did on the day but there’s no guarantees in the final,” said Chris.

Chris Murphy says that the buzz around the local area is really good in the lead up to this final.

“It’s really good. When we got promoted to Intermediate first and we got to those two finals there was a serious buzz around the place. They were really good times.

“Players shouldn’t do, but you think that this is going to happen the whole time and it didn’t. And then things went lean.

“This year has been a bit quieter than what it would have been if we had kept that run up because people kind of saying, “God, isn’t it great that they’re doing well and that they’re back there”, because they knew that for those few years that that wasn’t us, not performing and not getting to that end of the championship, we should be there and people are just happy that we’re back there and a lot of people I’ve been talking to have said that we’ve played so well all year that if we just sort ourselves out for the final the result will take care of itself and hopefully it does.

“It’s a lot for the people of the area, people going out and selling tickets and fundraising, it’s for those people that you’d like to bring a cup home but thinking about cups at this stage is madness.

Joe Murphy is calling on all Ballinacor supporters to get down to Aughrim for the big game this Sunday afternoon and lend their support to this very talented bunch of footballers as they go in search of Intermediate championship honours.