Memories to last a lifetime
A couple of weeks ago the players and management gathered together ten years after the Senior Connacht championship of 2007. The first thing to say is where did the ten years go.
Some of the lads that were organising the occasion had asked me to find some team material from that time to play at the reunion.
While trolling through boxes of material to find the required item it brought back a lot of memories from that time where I came across dozens of DVDs which were used for match preparation in addition to the statistics sheets, meeting notes, training schedules, opposition profiles etc, and now understand when my wife reminds me that I wasn’t at home for two years.
I can’t say it was ever high on my list of priorities to manage Sligo and it certainly wasn’t on any radar when I took over initially in a caretaker capacity, after Domonic Corrigan’s services weren’t required any more, after a poor start to the league in 2006. John Murphy the new Chairman of the County Board came to me the morning after the now ‘infamous’ removal of Domonic, to see if I would be interested in taking the Senior job, and he was taken aback by my insistence that I hadn’t the time to do it and I told him that he would have to look elsewhere. In the hours that followed the heat was turned up in the media with the ‘white van stories’ regarding the sacking and I told John that I would handle things for a couple of weeks to allow him time to pick a permanent replacement. I don’t think he ever approached anyone else and I decided after a defeat to Cavan in Markievicz that I would take the job on a permanent basis as I had seen even in that defeat there was something to work on, and both John Kent and PJ Langton agreed to join me permanently on the Management team.
We won our remaining league games and had a good run in the qualifiers which included a great win over Down, however lost in controversial circumstances thereafter to a last second goal when down to thirteen players, after Sean Davey’s tan was mistaken as Eamonn O’Hara’s, with Eamonn picking up a second yellow card in a case of mistaken identity. Shortly after we lost Padraig Doohan to a straight red after only what I could describe as the sweetest shoulder to shoulder challenge I ever saw, but the Referee didn’t agree and left us very depleted. We got both decisions overturned thereafter and the referee contacted Eamonn a couple of days later and apologised but unfortunately that wasn’t good enough with Westmeath getting that last-minute goal when we were two points up.
I was relatively pleased with 2006 and along with John and PJ started to plan for the following year. We really believed after the improvement shown in the second half of 2006 that there was real potential to win a Connacht title. However, to realise that ambition we knew we had to convince a couple of players to return to the panel, that had drifted under Corrigan, most notably Kieran Quinn and Michael McNamara. I met both players separately in early 2007 and laid out my plans and ambitions and told them I really felt a Connacht Championship was there for us but that we wouldn’t do it without them. Michael’s return was straight forward enough but Kieran was starting out on his music career which entailed significant night time work which is not conducive to playing county football. While there was hurdles in the way of Kieran’s return I was determined to get over them where I said that if he had a gig on a training night I would train him individually at lunch time and we would assess his work at weekends that clashed with games on a case by case basis. I always felt that if I could get him to commit that he would figure it out from there. The first time there was a clash was in a game down in Wexford as Kieran had a long-term commitment for a gig somewhere in Cork and he didn’t get back to the Hotel in Wexford until the early hours of the morning. As a management team we had made the decision that our league form may have to suffer to achieve our main goal of winning a Connacht Championship and we felt that even though both Michael and Kieran weren’t back up to county level yet we needed them to get as much game time as possible so they both started that Wexford game. We lost the game by a couple of points but received a huge backlash mainly against me that I didn’t know what I was doing and John Murphy was under pressure to sack his second manager in twelve months. As we had set out our plans with John he knew exactly what we were building towards and said just stick to your beliefs and plans and not get influenced by anything outside our circle.
Having said all that, we had two important games remaining in the league against Antrim in Markievicz and Wicklow in Aughrim with two results needed to retain our league status. We defeated Antrim narrowly with Mark Breheny scoring 2.6 and Paul Taylor and John McPartland both coming on to steady things and make sure of the result after O’Hara had been sent off with two yellows.
So, it was now a win or bust game against Wicklow managed by Mick O’Dwyer in the ‘lions den’ of Aughrim. We stayed in Dublin the night before and the players knew this was a huge game not only for our league status but for our overall goal of winning Connacht as a loss here was going to leave confidence levels very low and I wasn’t sure would we recover with the New York game a couple of weeks away.
It was always tradition to have team meetings the night before a game and I never saw a more focussed group of players than in the Stillorgan Hotel on Easter Saturday night before that Wicklow game.
That focus was very evident the following afternoon where we played brilliantly with a number of spectacular performances especially Tony Taylor at midfield and Brian Curran with even Mick O’Dwyer paying reference in his autobiography of our performance that afternoon. Unfortunately, we lost Tony Taylor to an injury in a Club game shortly after that ended his season.
Next up was the real business of New York travelling out to Gaelic Park to play the first ever Championship game on an artificial surface.
We prepared really well for this game even travelling to the Thomas Davis club in Dublin as they had a full-sized pitch similar to what we were going to play on in New York. I have to say as a management team we were very nervous about this fixture as we prided ourselves on profiling our opposition but we didn’t know the make up of the New York team and were continuously working off rumours.
If there was any complacently amongst the players about the fixture it was well gone after we showed a recording of the New York/Roscommon game from the previous year at the Saturday night meeting, where Roscommon just about survived.
Similar to Aughrim a few weeks previously we handled the game very well winning very comfortably and now was settling into a training camp for a further four days with Roscommon in a semi-final awaiting us.
There is no doubt that it was the New York trip that won us a Connacht Championship as the players trained very hard and formed a strong bond on that trip which hasn’t been broken to this day. It was obvious to me on this trip that this was a special group of players as not one player stepped out of line or broke curfew for the week buying totally into winning a Connacht title which was very difficult when you are in the social capital of the world.
We also learned on that trip that the country fellas were better on the chin up bar and town fellas were better soccer players in case we didn’t know it already.
The resolve and belief in the squad was truly tested in the semi-final against Roscommon when trailing by seven points early in the second half but in an incredible last twenty-five minutes took over with an exhibition of forward play to run out two-point winners.
Talking to the players after the game they said the were never worried and had total belief they would reel them in.
As we had choice of venues between the Hyde or Castlebar for the final against Galway, it was a no brainer to go back to the same venue where we had won the semi-final which was going to be very familiar to us.
On match day we replicated our preparation from the Roscommon game and were very confident even though we were 6/1 outsiders.
We won the toss and decided to play with the benefit of the breeze in the first half and after a good start Galway started to overrun us and we were in bother in a number of positions. Brendan Egan then started to drop a little deeper to give Eamonn and Kieran a bit of help on breaking balls and all of a sudden, we turned the tide back in our favour capping it off with that O’Hara goal which has to be the best goal ever scored in a Connacht Final. Our defensive display in the second half was exceptional holding Galway scoreless for 27 minutes even though they had a significant breeze.
It still amazes me that a member of our full back line didn’t pick up an All-Star that year such was the brilliance of all three of Ross, Noel and Charlie.
Had we taken all our chances in the second half we could have won by more but a point win was enough in the end.
So, ten years on it was great to meet up and look back at the game and looking through the room at all the faces it reminded me of the unity that was and still is amongst this group of individuals and it was very unfortunate that at least one more Connacht title wasn’t achieved to set these players apart. Any team is only as good as your panel of players and when I look back at the quality of our replacements that didn’t get much game time, that had continuously pushed the regulars all the way to keep bringing out the best in them, when fearing someone was going to take their place, is another reason why success was achieved.
For Kieran, I don’t think he made the money he thought that year as after two individual lunch time sessions and that gig in Cork he readjusted his schedule and I can’t remember a clash for the rest of the year, as I said earlier I knew Kieran would figure it out…