This article is from page 86 of the 2011-09-27 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 86 JPG
CHRISTY ‘Rusty’ Chaplin was braced. His team too, once the draw pitted a ‘Bridge team with Tony Carmody in its ranks against Inagh/ Kilnmona. Braced for a battle to the last.
Against this backdrop, it’s always about coming out the right side of the battle, something Chaplin hammered home to his players when dragging them up to the Stamer Park end of the field for a talk after that battle was over.
Chaplin wasn’t to know that medical prognosis was that goalkeeper Derek Fahy has fractured cheekbone and right half-back Barry O’Connor a double-break on his wrist and out of the semi-final.
“Look, it’s over, it’s done with,” he says before hearing the bad news. “We move on from here. We are delighted we’re in the next round. What we came up here to do was to get to a semi-final. We’re there. We didn’t play that well and that’s down to In- agh/Kilnamona.
“It was a tough, tough battle. We coming up to his all week that it was going to be a serious battle. We played Inagh/Kilnamona once or twice in the cup and you get nothing easy.
“They have a great bunch of hurlers and they were never going to die. They were going to used everything they could. We played it down, but they were going to use the Tony Carmody thing. They hounded us and won a lot of personal battles all over the field.
“We gave away a lot of stupid frees that were were punished for. That was our ill-discipline and we could have suffered for it. We knew young Arthur would punish us – he did it in the last round against Tubber and we had our lads warned but we gave away stupid frees.
“We turned up a bit flat today and it’s very hard to push the button when you’re not going well. We have two weeks to get ready and have a lot of work to do on that display,” he adds.
But what better way to focus the minds of his players than dangle Cratloe blue in front of them. “The ‘Bridge and Cratloe,” smiles Chaplin. “We’ll be drinking with them tonight and we’ll be enemies in two weeks time. It’s a game of hurling. We live together. We have players with some Cratloe women, they have players with Sixmilebridge women. There’s a lot of families tied up. It’s going to be a battle. We’ll enjoy this but two weeks time will be a different day and a different situation.”