Sligo is small. So success in sport is result of hard work
SO SLIGO ROVERS are joint top of the league. And it’s brilliant, on many levels. Local academy players coming through, the team playing nice football, and the club doing things right both on and off the pitch. Making their supporters, and indeed Sligo people all over the world proud.
The club’s gesture of giving a free jersey to every newborn baby born in Sligo University Hospital this year was a stroke of genius. It has been covered in these pages over the last few weeks, but it is one of these ideas so good that you assume it must have been done somewhere before. But no, and huge credit to the club for following through on it so well – it cast them and the town in a hugely positive light nationally and abroad also.
Our Gaelic football team go back training together this week, unfortunately for now at the opposite end of their league. It has been a lean few years for Sligo GAA fans, as well as management and players, and it tallies with something I’ve heard people saying around the town over the years: “You’ll never get the football and the soccer going well at the same time.”
And in fairness they have a point. In July 1975 Sligo beat Mayo after a replay to win only their second ever Connacht Senior Championship. A few months earlier, Rovers finished bottom of the 14-team ‘A’ Division in the League of Ireland.
More recently, when Sligo won the same competition in 2007, Rovers finished sixth in the Premier Division, 27 points off champions Drogheda United. Not bad, but not setting the world alight either.
But then you have 2010. A memorable summer where the footballers beat Galway and Mayo and lost a Connacht final they should have won. And later that same year, Ciarán Kelly made those famous four penalty saves to deny Shamrock Rovers and help Sligo Rovers to a famous FAI Cup win in front of 36,000 people.
So it can be done. We are a small county, and hence any sporting success that comes our way should never be taken for granted, but rather viewed as the result of a lot of hard work which enables our teams to sometimes punch above their weight.
So here’s to the Rovers continuing to do just that, but here’s also to our footballers who have the difficult task of rebuilding ahead of them. I believe they are a better team than their league position of the last few years indicates, and we all hope for a strong campaign this year.
Kieran Quinn plays piano and brings people together in music. He can be contacted by email at kieran@kieranquinn.ie. More at kieranquinn.blog
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