KEANEY STICKS HIS NECK OUT
CONAL KEANEY always dreamed of playing in an All-Ireland club final at Croke Park on St Patrick’s Day — he just never imagined running out onto the field without a hurley in his hand. Ballyboden St Enda’s are the surprise story of the football championship because it wasn’t meant to happen this way. The county’s hurlers have been the standard bearers in Dublin and beyond without ever making the breakthrough on the bigger stage. Now, with a core group of dual players backboning the team, the footballers are one step away from history. ‘I suppose if I was very honest I’d have thought it would have been hurling that would have come first, and not the football to be fair,’ admitted Keaney ahead of tomorrow’s final against Castlebar Mitchels. ‘Four or five of us were primarily hurling with this club and we just happened to fall back into football when the hurling was finished. ‘Andy [McEntee], he’s impossible to say no to... “Ah, come down and have a look”, and then all of a sudden he puts you in full-forward and before you know it, you’re playing! ‘So he’s very hard to say no to and I’m kinda glad now we went against what we said at the start of the year. ‘It’s working out well and hopefully we get a bit of silverware at the end of it,’ added Keaney. McEntee, as manager, is on record as saying the run wouldn’t have been possible without dual players and former Dublin countystars like Keaney and Stephen Hiney. And it was his cajoling that saw the dual players break their own pledge to concentrate solely on hurling for the year. It’s a quirk of fate that saw them reconsider when the hurlers crashed out of the Dublin championship. ‘I think last year in the hurling championship we were disappointed in how we were beaten,’ explained Keaney, ‘and we asked, “Why were we beaten, and how were we so flat?” ‘Maybe it was because we were trying to juggle both. Three or four of us were saying, “We’re getting a bit older so we’ll just focus on the hurling and give it one, big crack.” ‘And we kind of tried that and it didn’t work so we went back to playing football then and look where this has kind of developed for us then,’ he added. ‘You just never know what’s down the road and what lies ahead.’ Keaney has flirted publicly with the notion of retirement from the county senior hurling team but any decision has been put on ice until after tomorrow’s game. In the meantime, the 33-year-old has been at the heart of the club’s football story.