Overcome the saints
Yeah, I rate St Peter’s very highly, they’ve very good individuals on that team. We played them in Roundwood and I think we were very lucky to get past them in the semi-final of the Wicklow Cup so today we knew they’d be up for it because they owed us. But we just seemed to get the goals at the right time, after a few minutes it seemed to settle us down and then we got the penalty just before half-time which obviously, you score just before half-time it gives people a kick, so we knew at half-time just come out and try and relax. We knew they’d push everything at us, which they did but luckily we got the third goal which sort of killed the game off, so then it was just a matter of seeing it out.
How important was it to score early on?
Again, we’d spoken of that before because we scored early on, well in the 26th minute, in Roundwood and they had us under the kosh, so we played them twice in the league, we gave them a two-goal start up in their place, we came back to 2-all and at home we drew 2-all and they scored after five minutes, so to score I knew there’s still a long way to go, still a long way to go and I’m very respectful of that team and knew that they’d come back and wouldn’t just let us win. It was nice to score, it did settle us down but obviously still a lot of work to do.
How far can this Newtown team go?
These guys can go as far as they want. We’ve lost a lot of experienced players over the years and the lads play Gaelic as well so it’s difficult for those that play both, so we’ve integrated a lot of young players, there’s a couple of lads there that haven’t reached 21, like one of our most experienced players is our vice-captain Sean who is 23, but he’s been around for a long time. So integrating the younger lads with the older lads, the likes of PJ at the back, Neilly the captain, Matty Kennedy who wasn’t playing today, they’re gaining experience all the time and when you’re winning something like that it makes the lads want to come down and train and put the effort in so going forward I’m very hopeful we’ll continue the progress.
Finally, winning trophies such as the Charlie O’Leary Cup today gets lads to training so would the plan for next season be to go further and maybe even defend this trophy?
Well hopefully yeah, we always set our goal out every year, we know we have the talent and we like to play football, I don’t think we seen an awful lot of it today but I’m very much of the opinion that we can pass the ball.
We didn’t see much of it today because Peter’s were very good but going forward we want to defend everything we can, we’ve won the same cup for the last two years, we won one final so hopefully we can win another but I won’t deny that the league is the holy grail for me.
We haven’t won the league in the three years I’ve been involved in the club but next year is the big one for me without a doubt.