Geary piles pressure on Gunners
Half of the traditional Mount Sion-Ballygunner pairing have made it to the decider, but Ballyduff Upper will oppose the Gunners.
Not surprisingly, Ballyduff manager Maurice Geary is talking up the opposition.
“Ballygunner are hot favourites — they’ve very experienced players and themselves and Mount Sion have won every senior title since 1993.
“They also have a lot of good young players coming up. They’ve won this year’s minor championship and last year’s, while they beat us in the U-21 final two years ago, and supplied half of last year’s Harty Cup-winning De La Salle side as well.
“As for us, in our two last championship games we didn’t play well. We were lucky to scrape through both.”
For his part, Gunners manager Peter Queally accepts the favourites tag. Is it a burden?
“Not really, we’re short price favourites but only six weeks ago Ballyduff beat us by seven points, and if we hadn’t scored a late consolation goal it would have been 10.
“On top of that, they were missing Michael Molumphy that night. They’ve a brilliant track record for the last few years — they won the intermediate two years ago and went the whole year unbeaten. Last year they only lost one game, to us in the quarter-final of the championship, but that was a last-minute goal by Billy O’Sullivan. They’ve lost one game in three years, so they’re very resilient. We’re looking at this as a 50-50 game.”
Queally — who’s combining management with his playing career with Ballydurn — confirms the Ballygunner conveyor belt is working well.
“We’ve contested three U-21 finals, winning one and losing two, so you’d expect a sprinkling of players out of that. We’ve been in minor finals and won the last two of those, with young Stephen Power to come out of that. David O’Sullivan from the De La Salle Harty team is another player coming through, so the talent is coming through, lads who have experience of playing in and winning county finals at underage level.”
At the other end of the age spectrum, Paul Flynn has been plagued with injury recently, but Queally confirms he is a live option tomorrow.
“He’s not ruled out. He’s been training, and though he’s short of match practice. We haven’t ruled him out, though he won’t start.”
It’s that kind of revelation which worries opposition managers. Geary pays tribute to other Gunners legends.
“Fergal Hartley’s played out of his skin for them and he’s dominated every game I’ve seen this year. Wayne Hutchinson held Dan Shanahan to a late goal in the county semi-final. Then you have Stephen Power, who might be better than Paul Flynn from placed balls: he got a goal from a free 30 yards out against Mount Sion in the semi-final that most experienced players would have just popped over the bar. He buried it.
“But we’re well focused. A good few of our lads have been through the mill with Waterford — we had three on the senior panel and four on the intermediate panel — so we have good experience on our own side.”
And an Allstar. Stephen Molumphy was an inspiration for Waterford all season and fulfils the same role with Ballyduff.
“Stephen, of course, had a brilliant year,” says Geary. “It’s not that often that a player in his debut season will win an Allstar. He’s our captain and leads by example. He’s in Germany with the army for the last few weeks but he’s back every weekend. It’s not ideal, because he’s an inspiration and brings a lot to a training session. But we also have Tom Feeney, who’s been nominated for an Allstar, so he’s another man whose experience is vital.”
It’s a relative novelty for Ballyduff, but Geary wants his charges to savour the experience.
“I’m encouraging the lads to enjoy the atmosphere. There’s a great buzz around, the colours are up, we have good crowds at training — we set up a training fund a couple of weeks ago and money is flying in. We’re under no pressure — it’s all on Ballygunner.”
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