GAA
Longford’s best ready to take on might of Kilmacud
Mullinalaghta want to land blow for the ‘little guy’
YOU crunch the numbers on the tiny half-parish of Mullinalaghta in the north-east of Longford and suggest to Shane Mulligan that there can’t be more than 100 males of actual footballing age in the entire community.
‘100?’ gasps Mulligan, laughing. ‘God no, anyone who is there and who is eligible will probably be togged out on Sunday. The fall off of fellas who don’t actually play would be small. And it has to be for us to compete. There wouldn’t be near 100 anyway.’
Whatever way you chop it up and dice it, the statistics associated with this Mullinalaghta team are remarkable as they find themselves an hour from a Leinster club title success.
Somehow, the smallest club in Longford, hard against the Cavan border, has established itself as the dominant force in the county, winning three-in-a-row, and is on the brink of a truly memorable triumph now.
‘It’s hats off to the guys who work at underage level really, they’ve managed to get every possible lad out to fulfil fixtures and they were winning championships too, playing 13-a-side and getting only 15 lads out but winning the 13-a-side championship,’ said Mulligan. ‘That’s kind of where our strength has been.’
They have other strengths, too — like their humility. Throughout the course of a 30-minute discussion about all things Mullinalaghta, Mulligan doesn’t once mention that he spent well over a decade playing for Longford, a period stretching from the early 2000s to 2016 when a broken leg effectively retired him.
He started the 2011 and 2012 National League Division 4 and Division 3 finals for Longford at Croke Park, winning both, and was in the team that took out Derry in the 2014 qualifiers.
There are other indicators from Mullinalaghta’s remarkable journey that their players realise their part in something special.
When they won their first Longford title in 66 years in 2016, for instance, they celebrated in nearby Gowna before returning to the local graveyard that evening.
‘I suppose we just wanted to stop off at the graveyard in memit ory of those lads who’d won it back in 1950,’ said James McGivney, one of the club’s county players, earlier this week. “We wanted to show our respects, that they were still being thought of as highly as they are now.”
The unfortunate reality for Mullinalaghta, however, is that they are probably not going to win tomorrow and they may not even be back in another Leinster final anytime soon.
Mulligan naturally disagrees with the first part of that statement but shrugged his shoulders at the second part and acknowledged that it is probably correct.
‘That’s a fair assessment,’ he said. ‘If you even look at the first Championship we won (of the three-in-a-row), you were talking about 1950 then for the previous one. You’re talking about 60-odd years of being out in the wilderness and then we finally get back there. I guess these things come in cycles and there’s every possibility that you’re right, especially because we’re such a small club in numbers.’
If it wasn’t for football, many of the Mullinalaghta players might have left the community and cut their ties with it long ago. As it is, around half their players travel back regularly for training from places like Dundalk, Ashbourne, Blanchardstown, Limerick, Galway and even Leeds in England.
Mulligan reckons the club will contribute ‘seven or eight’ players to the county team in 2019, an incredible output in the circumstances.
‘I’d say we are the smallest club in Longford,’ said the defender, underlining the scale of their task tomorrow. ‘I guess if you look at the stats and the population and things like that, people would say we’re punching above our weight. But when we go back and look at it in terms of our dressing room and when we put up the teamsheet, we actually think we have a very talented team there and that on any day we can be competitive with anyone.’
Pat Burke, the Kilmacud forward who’ll they come up against at O’Connor Park, made the point that Mullinalaghta aren’t the only ones battling to hold onto players. The ex-Dublin and Clare forward noted that Kilmacud have their own tug-of-war with rival codes in the Stillorgan region and pointed to the amount of players Leinster Rugby in particular have plucked over the years.
‘There’s no rugby, no soccer, no hurling, there’s always been football for us and that’s just the way is,’ acknowledged Mulligan.
Still, even Burke wouldn’t attempt to claim that this is anything but a David versus Goliath encounter with all the trimmings, a Biblical encounter.
Mulligan says a Mullinalaghta victory would compare to something a little more supernatural.
‘I don’t know, maybe it would be like arising from the dead, would it?’ smiled Mulligan. ‘I don’t know, look, we’ll see how it goes. It’s definitely a novel pairing and it’s a bit of a fairytale for sure.
‘At the minute we’re probably just in the middle of a little golden era. That group of players have just come together.
‘We’re joined with Abbeylara for underage, Northern Gaels, and there is a group of players now with us that would have won from Under 14 right the way up, U16, minor. So they’ve been successful and whether you get a batch of them to come through again, I don’t know. Because that was the final push we needed.
‘We had a good core of players and then when you get a batch of five, six or seven of those lads coming on it pushes you over the line.
‘Whether you can ever replicate that again, I don’t know.’