This article is from page 75 of the 2011-10-11 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 75 JPG
IT’S been a long and winding road for Ennistymon over the past five years. They won the minor A title back in 2007 with a group that followed through to win an under 21 title in 2010.
But in between that minor win four years ago and Saturday in Miltown they’d lost three finals in the grade – to Cratloe in 2008, Lissycasey in ’09 and Doora-Barefield in ’10.
“It hurt an awful lot losing the last three finals,” says manager Mark Shannon after the losing streak was finally ended.
“Yes it was a great achievement getting to five in a row, but we wanted to be getting another win on the board. We were really determined today and really wanted to get off to a quick start.
“Goals was the key for us this year. The year we won the minor championship in 2007 we got goals. This year in all our games we’ve had forwards of the calibre to get goals. They continually got goals for us all year and we got two more early in the game and that set us up. We lost our way a bit in second half but when it came to the crunch we did the business,” he adds.
As Shannon was parsing the year, one of his joint captains Óisín Vaughan was talking about bringing Jack Daly back to the north Clare capital. “It would be great,” says Shannon, but we can’t get complacent.
“Minor and under 21 success doesn’t automatically say that it’s going to happen in senior, but that’s what we’re working towards that and hopefully one day we can win a senior championship.
“For this minor championship I knew we would have been contenders because we had a lot of the same group that we had for last few years. I knew in the last two weeks that it was going to take a good team to beat us. We had an unbelievable amount of work done in the last few weeks in training.”