FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME
Niall McInerney says 300-kilometre round trips to training are worth it to play in a Connacht final
THOSE who spin the line that Roscommon have had the easiest of routes to tomorrow’s Connacht final should spend a little road time with Niall McInerney.
Yes, they beat Leitrim by 14 points to make it into the Championship’s last 12 — but the commitment for those involved has been anything but easy.
McInerney, who will begin his final year of medical studies in UCD in September, is one of 18 Dublin-based players who have been making the 300-plus kilometre round trip to training twice a week for the last three years.
They all pile into a bus and head west partly for the cause but mainly because they love it.
But it swallows up chunks of time that they always don’t have and, on occasions, McInerney would try and bury his head in his books, but the Roscommon bus lacks the studious ambiance of a library.
In the end, this spring he opted out after the third round of the League to give his studies the time they needed and watched from afar as his team-mates booked him a return ticket to Division 1 football.
‘It was a good decision at the time, but every Sunday I found myself on Twitter following to see how we were doing. You miss it when you are away from it,’ smiles the 23-year-old.
They missed him too. The softyspoken St Brigid’s clubman has become their chief firefighter and has played every second of Championship football since making his debut on a nervy New York night two years ago when they scraped over the line by a point.
That is 11 Championship games and counting, which makes all those hard winter kilometres worthwhile.
‘We usually leave at five and we get home between 11.30 and midnight.
‘It’s a big commitment for everyone involved. ‘You have some lads who are working in eight to five, nine to five jobs and it is a serious commitment for them to leave the house in the morning and not get back until midnight.
‘It is a huge commitment but you are playing for days like this when you are in a Connacht final.
‘It makes it a small bit easier when there is a carrot like that there to play for.’
They got a taste for it last year when, against the odds, they took down Galway by nine points in Pearse Stadium.
For the game’s major powers, provincial success may no longer be a big deal, but when you spend most of your time as the meat in a Galway/Mayo sandwich you tend to place a lot more value on your provincial successes..
‘It was great to just take that step and beat Galway,’ says McInerney, who saw the other side of the final coin when they were hammered by 11 points in the 2016 replay.
‘It galvanised the group and brought us all together.
‘We had a tough League campaign, having got relegated, and just to get that win was brilliant, it gave everyone a little more confidence.
‘It really pushed the whole thing on,’ says McInerney. That may well be the case — their promotion back to Division 1 this spring may in part have been sourced in the confidence which last year’s Connacht triumph provided — but they hit a speed bump last August which could have stalled them. Eight days after drawing with Mayo in an All-Ireland quarterfinal they were given such a hosing — they conceded four goals while taking a 22-point hammering — that can leave the kind of scar which never goes away. ‘When you win you are great and when you lose you are nothing. ‘We have experienced both sides of that, probably more so losing. You take the good days but you have to realise that there have been bad days before. ‘Unfortunately we have lost heavily in some big games but you always know that you are never so as good as people say when you win or as bad they think you are when you lose. ‘It wasn’t the way we would have liked to finish, a mediocre League, a good Connacht Championship and then, when we wanted to play well, especially against Mayo, we went out that day full of confidence and they just showed that day why they have been the second best team in the country for the last five or six years.
‘You learn a lot from the way they went about their business that day, they were just so clinical they really just destroyed us.’
Roscommon’s bounce-back this year to the League’s top tier can be explained by the modest standards in Division 2 — three of the eight counties — Louth, Cavan and Meath — lost their first-round Championship games while Tipperary, Clare and Down have all suffered double-digit defeats, while a kindly draw has eased them back into tomorrow’s final.
But McInerney believes that under Kevin McStay (left) and Liam McHale — both of whom he played under with St Brigid’s — belief has been repaired.
They now have two stabs at clearing the new Super 8s bar which will define their summer and they are not in the least daunted by the prospect.
‘We would not fear anyone when we go out to play. We would be fairly confident in ourselves and I think you have to be like that. You can’t go out trying to limit the score.
‘We are going out to take on teams and beat them regardless of who we are playing.
‘It is hard not to think like that when you are around people like Kevin and Liam.’
‘Every Sunday I found myself on Twitter to see how they were doing’