This article is from page 92 of the 2009-12-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 92 JPG
A SMILE still stretched across his face, Sean O’Sullivan, Spa manager tells it like it is. A Munster interme- diate title that the club never dreamed about, a scoreline that probably flat- tered the Kerry champions and a Spa full-forward that the Kerry manage- ment must call upon.
“This win will take a while to sink in,’ he says. “We never dreamed we could even get this far but we worked so hard.
“I’m sure Cratloe are the same and my heart really goes out to them because losing a Munster Final like this is difficult and I don’t know how I would handle it if we were beaten here today because it means so much Comte
“The bottom line is I’d have to congratulate Cratloe after the year they’re after having and Id have huge respect for them. Huge respect.
‘As for ourselves, we had a target and a game plan coming up here and we were always going to stick to it. We’re after picking up a couple of bad injuries and we’ll have to assess that damage but right now the cup makes up for it.”
There were some shaky moments, O’Sullivan says, when Cratloe clawed their way back into the game and put Spa under pressure. But he identifies Mike O’Donoghue’s second goal of the game, just before half-time, as an important score.
“The second goal came at a cru- cial time. And no better man than Mike O’Donoghue. He really stood up to the pressure today. Even when we lost Andrew Garnett, that was a savage loss, as was the loss of Niall O’Mahony and Brian Gleeson, but after we lost Andrew, Mike inter- cepted a ball and got a savage point out of it.
‘That was another big score for us. We needed it then and Mike stepped up and looking back on that game, that was a serious turning point. The bottom line is that Jack O’Connor should be seriously looking at this ner eb
“But we did lose our way a small bit in the second-half. At half-time we knew we were in a decent posi- tion, up a few points, but I saw Crat- loe play Valley Rovers in Clarecastle last week and I knew that they can play well against the wind.
“I knew we were going to be up against it in the second-half. We had to consolidate our win but they made us work very, very hard and we did pull away in the end but that score- line might be a small bit flattering.”
And off he goes into the half-light of the dressing room, the short road and bonfires on the edge of Kuillar- ney laying in wait.