‘This is our most united team’
ST Pat’s full-back Shane Murley mightn’t have etched himself on the scoreboard in the Renault Senior Football Championship final replay, but he still played a massive role in bringing Miley back to Dunbur Park, defending like a lion and attacking with menace.
Murley reflected on that match-saving point from the first game and said that he took come friendly criticism for not picking out Tommy Kelly with a pass before fisting the ball over the bar.
‘The lads were slating me last week for not passing it to Tommy – I didn’t even see Tommy, I just seen Dignam (Peter) running at me and he’s about nine foot tall so I said, ‘I haven’t score a goal since I was about eight and I’m not going to start scoring in a county so get it over the bar and get out of there’.
‘But we hadn’t performed last week, either. We were lucky to get the draw.
‘At the end of it I’d say it was sweet enough for both teams because I could have got that goal and they could have won it as well so we’re lucky to get out last week and today I thought we were bet, I thought we were gone,’ he said.
The proud Pat’s man said that they had worked hard on what they believed was Rathnew’s main threat and that defensively, apart from the AGB game, that makeshift fullback line had performed well throughout the championship.
‘We were terrible in the first half, we just couldn’t get going, and, in fairness to Rathnew, they were decent. They were a lot sharper than us at the start, it was like last week, they started quicker than us.
‘We knew that their main threat was the high ball, we knew that last week and we knew that this week and we had worked on it. And to say that we are a small full-back line, I’m only filling in at full-back for ‘Jem’ Kavanagh, we lost him last year, so we know that other teams think that’s a weakness, but, in fairness to us, teams have been thinking that all year and we’ve dealt with it apart from the Arklow match where we got caught a couple of times, but the rest of the year we’ve been dealing with it all right.
A win against the neighbours in a county final is as sweet as they come but add to that the fact that this is their first championship since 2012 and it must be a taste sweeter than any they have had for a long time.
‘It’s unbelievable. The amount of times we’ve stood here and watched them, and the likes of Baltinglass, more so Rathnew. It’s 2012 since we’ve won it. I tell you, I’ve been on Pat’s teams with far better footballers, but this is the most united team and team that’s stuck together.
‘Other teams that I would have been on would have wilted, Casey has instilled steel in us this year. We had something different this year, it felt different.
‘Casey was hurt here the last time when we lost two, and then when ‘Holly’ (Robert Hollingsworth) was here, and in fairness to ‘Holly’ he was a good manager, too, and we were unlucky that we lost two again, but when Casey came back, he had the bit between his teeth.
‘We were poor last year, getting bet in the quarter-final, we knew we let ourselves down, so we said this year that we had to give it a go. And it’s good, there’s lads in there in their first championship seasons, or one or two championship seasons under their belts, these lads aren’t afraid of anyone, it’s the rest of us had the baggage, these lads don’t care,’ he said.
A word for his captain, Dean Healy, who drove hard at the Rathnew lines across both days and represented his club so well on the county team over the last number of years.
‘Immense, he’s an animal of a man. He’s being doing it for the last three or four years the county and he’s being doing it for us as well.
‘When the chips are down, he always stands up. He’s been banging goals in for us. You can’t stop the man, he’s an animal, he’s a beast of man, brilliant all year,’ he added.