This article is from page 98 of the 2009-10-13 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 98 JPG
THE backbone of Sunday’s victory was laid in the weeks and months of the earlier part of the year. Back in Quilty, half an army trudged regu- larly to Pairc Naomh Mhuire to take part in training. Strength in num- bers.
“There’s been great competition at training,’ says Dermot O’Brien. ‘“There’s a dozen players you could pick our forwards from. Even against Doonbeg we brought on five subs and they made the difference. It was the same thing again today.
“Over the last few years we lacked a deep panel. We seemed to have only 15 players and that was it. It’s different now. We have 33 lads train- ing every night and it’s so intense at training. Before, maybe you could only manage a game of backs and forwards. This year we can have 13 or 15-a-side at training every night and that pushes everybody along.”
O’Brien was involved in two of the most important incidents in the opening half, Kilkee’s two goals.
“The first goal, I caught a high ball and I saw two lads outside me. I went to hand pass it and I’m not sure if I slipped, but I fell down, the ball slipped out and it seemed to re- bound into the net. I can’t make any excuse. I caught the ball, so it wasn’t the sun.
‘For the second, I came out against him [Geardid Lynch] and thought
he was going to round me, which is what he did. I just spread myself and blocked it and for a split second I lost where the ball was. Then, I just saw the ball going past me and into the goal.”
O’Brien’s initial save from Lynch was one of the few highlights of the game and like the first goal, consid- ering where the ball dropped, luck wasn’t on the goalkeeper’s side.
In the end, it didn’t matter though.
“T still think we haven’t reached our peak this year. We reached our peak for ten minutes against Doonbeg and ten minutes against Kilkee. It’s been a long year and it can get to lads but we Il have no excuses.”
O’Brien described the game as both mentally and physically tough, made difficult by Kilkee’s insistence that Kilmurry Ibrickane wouldn’t have Omer aan E
“We had a game plan going out but we never stuck to it. We had planned to drive the ball in long and hit our two or three men inside but any time you looked up there seemed to be lots of Kilkee players up there and we seemed to drift up there with them instead of staying back. So, instead of kicking ball into four or five lads, you were then kicking it into to ten or twenty lads. So the game plan went O) ULM aTomy Yau eLeCO)\ ee mm Melo On acl must.) Fame
Even when the now back-to-back champions went three up near the end, O’Brien wasn’t taking the result for granted.
“T didn’t figure we had won until the final whistle to be honest. I never thought we had the game won. When we went up two, we pushed on to three but they had a free in the last few seconds of the game. If a high ball went in from that, anything could have happened. They could have got a goal.
“Before, we might have been com- placent but that’s not the case any- more. Little things like that can make a huge difference.”