This article is from page 71 of the 2011-10-18 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 71 JPG
IF ever we wondered how defeat can bring out the greatness in a team, just look at Kilmurry Ibrickane.
You know the scéal. Kilmurry a goal up on Doonbeg in last year’s semi-final on the cusp of the last ten minutes. Then bang. David Tubridy shaking the rigging with a goal. Then Enda Doyle shooting for the stars with a point.
The response from Kilmurry, as midfielder Paul O’Connor reveals seconds after the final whistle is to dwell on defeat for a few months, then return to training in January and go through the year unbeaten.
That’s greatness. That’s hunger. That’s Kilmurry.
“After the high of March and reaching an All-Ireland club final to be beaten in a county semi-final we should probably have won,” he recalls. “I think it refocused us. We got an extra few months off – it focused everyone as a group.”
“Any time you get beaten you’re going to come back the following year and prove a point,” says Enda Coughlan. “We had a tough enough run when getting to the All-Ireland It was tough enough on the legs and maybe in fairness to Doonbeg, they beat us fair and square last year and maybe we didn’t just have it in the legs in the last ten minutes, but we were very hungry this year,” he adds.
“Ger (Lawlor) came in and John (Kennedy) then came and this group of 30 have trained really hard since January 1, the first day we trained. We really wanted it this year, we wanted it badly,” continues O’Connor.
“Our game plan was to hit them early and get a couple of scores on the board. It was their first final, so we wanted those early scores. Luckily for us they went over. Ian McInerney had a couple of super kicks early in the second half and they settled us down. We had a strategy and it seemed to work for us. We created a lot of space and we got scores from it.
“I wouldn’t say we were more up for this game than we were for the Cratloe or Cooraclare games, it’s just that we decided that we wouldn’t be kicking from the positions we kicked from against Cratloe and Cooraclare. We worked the ball in a bit closer to lads who found their range a bit better today.”
It all means that 31-year-old O’Connor now has four county medals – he missed out on the win in ’04 when he was playing his ball in Van Cortland Park in New York and not Páirc Naomh Mhuire in downtown Quilty.
“They’re all sweet,” he says. “Every medal you add, especially when you’re pushing up the years like me, is sweet, but this one really is especially after what happened to us last year.”
Hunger is the best sauce.
Kilmurry Ibrickane bare testimony to that.
St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield will hope to in time after this huge learning curve.