Manager McCarthy hails charges for coping with the pressure

HAVING been defeated by Douglas last year, Ballymartle knew yesterday’s victory was one to savour, marking as it did their first ascent to the senior ranks in Cork hurling.

In hindsight, it may be viewed as a win that was coming, with progress being made year on year, but manager Anthony McCarthy still found it to be a strange feeling.

“We’re absolutely ecstatic, words can’t describe how much this means to the club to win a county title,” he said.

“It’s the first time in the club’s history that we have gone up senior and that has been an ambition for a lot of players in the club for a long time.”

In many ways, Ballymartle could have been considered to be on a hiding to nothing going into the game, having beaten Tracton so comprehensively in the first round.

It was a pitfall McCarthy was keen to guard against: “It was difficult especially as we had beaten them so comprehensively in the first round,” he said.

“Losing last year was bad enough but then to effectively take the eye off the ball and lose to a team we had beaten by 10 points already would have been devastating.

“As a result there was a lot of pressure on the lads going in to the game. I think the true character of the team came out today.”

That character has been honed as the learning curve of the premier intermediate grade has been scaled.

“We won the lower grade in 2006 and we came up in ‘07 and there were only two teams that beat us during that time, Carrigtwohill and Douglas,” he said.

“Both those teams have held their senior status very well so we knew that we were going in the right direction and since we have come up from intermediate we have lost two semi-finals and one county final and now we have won a county final.”

Despite Ballymartle’s status as favourites, their journey to county glory was not all plain sailing, with the manager pinpointing one moment in particular when the year could have petered out.

“The Newcestown game in Ballinspittle was for us the turning point of our season,” McCarthy said.

“With three minutes to go we were down two points and we were finding it very hard to make scores so to get four unanswered points in the final three minutes showed the strength of character that we always knew the team had.”

“When we got over that we knew that it was in us to go the distance and this was our year.”

For his part, Tracton manager Kieran Kingston acknowledged that his side had been beaten by a better team.

He said: “we didn’t really settle. They started the game better than we did, we knew from the last time we played them that we had to get a good start.

“It didn’t happen for us either today and even though we brought it back to two points, I felt we just couldn’t get over that.

“We worked hard to get back and we felt at half-time that we were in with a great chance.

However, they got a few scores then in the second half and we just couldn’t break them down, we needed a goal and it just didn’t happen for us.

“Ballymartle have been there or thereabouts for the last few years, they got to the final last year, they deserve it, they’ve been knocking on the door for a long time.”