Final will come down to focus

SOUTH meets North in the AIB Club Hurling final, from one end of the country to the other.

While Kerry and Galway accents are hardly similar, the different cadences used by Newtownshandrum’s John McCarthy and Dunloy’s Malachy Molloy are noticeable. Their words come out in a sort of song, in different keys of course.

John McCarthy is one of the oddities in the Newtown story, in that he didn’t start school the same day, as it appeared most of the team did. “If I took off my baseball cap you will discover that I wasn’t one of those fellas,” he laughed. “The spine of the team are from the same age group, and they have had success the whole way up.

“But, I don’t know if getting to an All-Ireland final in Croke Park was in the script.”

But that is where Newtown, with a style that has split the purists of the ancient game, have arrived. And McCarthy thinks back to this time last year, when all they thought about was getting one over on Blackrock.

“Blackrock was our target last year, had been since they beat us in 2002.”

After the Cork title was won, things just seemed to fall into place. “When we won the county, we regrouped and decided to give it one right effort in Munster. And I think the Toomevara win steered us in the right direction. That was a big game for us to win.”

McCarthy was a spectator for some of Newtown’s bigger games in this campaign, with an injury, and it is an experience he is glad he won’t be repeating on Wednesday. “Well, actually I don’t mind being a spectator as much as a sub. When you are on the bench, you always have to be switched onto the game, you can’t relax because you might be called upon at any moment.”

One individual whom Newtown are bound to call upon on St Patrick’s Day is Ben O’Connor. The talented forward has been key to the team’s progress this year and McCarthy explained why O’Connor has come into his own outside of the county.

“Throughout the Cork campaign, Ben played in the corner and because the county had always been our target, I think the management deliberately underplayed the team in the opening rounds of the Cork championship.

“And you could see that in Ben, he is a fantastic player. But, it is the same with any of the four clubs here, or with any club in the country, there are always particular individuals who are crucial to any club side.”

In Dunloy, one of those individuals would be Liam Richmond. Their talented forward is still uncertain if he will be played, but Malachy Molloy, his captain, believes Richmond will do his utmost to recover.

“When you get to this stage, everyone wants to play. But for Liam, because he played so well for us, it will be particularly hard if he misses out.

“In the semi-final against Portumna, that was definitely in the minds of the players, that we will try that little bit harder for Liam, to make sure we get there for Liam,” Molloy says. Of course, it is not like they haven’t been there before. This will be Dunloy’s fourth final in eight years.

Each time, they are told it must be this time. Each time, they leave empty-handed.

“Can we do it this time? That’s the big question. I am sure Newtown aren’t going to give us the title on sentiment alone. But we have gone back up that road three times now without the title and it never got easier. In fact, it is harder each time.

“The worst thing is the few days after the match, when it’s going through your head what went wrong, why did it go wrong, what should we have done better. That doesn’t get any easier with each year. Probably, there has been a perception that our semi-finals were our finals in other years. But this is definitely our final this time.”

Newtown are trying to end a famine, of sorts, for Cork clubs at that stage. It has been 17 years since a club from the biggest county has won the Tommy Moore Cup. But John McCarthy says his team won’t be thinking of that. “We won’t be concerning ourselves with history, that is the history of other clubs. We are just looking on history from our own point of view.

McCarthy maintained: “I think these finals will come down to focus. Out of the four clubs that will compete in Croke Park, it will come down to whoever focuses best in the hour, is likely to prevail in both finals.”