Saints go marching on new territory

Visualisation, they say, is half the battle and St Vincent’s captain Jonathan Buckley has seen himself on the steps of the stand in Mallow tomorrow afternoon.

He’s not getting ahead of himself but merely filling his mind with positive thoughts. He’s garnering nothing from Paul Galvin’s suspension or Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s injury for Finuge but what his own club have achieved this season.

“Yeah, it would be a magic moment,” he says when asked if he sees himself with cup in hand. “You just want to win every game at the moment.

“Making a bit of history is great but winning it among your family and friends would be unbelievable.

“Hopefully, we can win it and go all the way to play to Croke Park. To play there with your club would be the icing on the cake. It’s a dream for every GAA player, really.”

To speak to Buckley without referencing Galvin and Fitzmaurice’s absences would be ignoring the elephant in the room. He understands that but is ignoring what’s not being put in front of the Cork champions tomorrow.

“We’re ignoring them. The talk is that Galvin is out with suspension and Fitzmaurice is out with a broken jaw but Fitzmaurice could possibly play. Galvin is definitely out but we’re not looking into it.

“The fact he [Galvin] is a good player but he’s going to be replaced by another player and that’s our attitude approaching the game. It’s going to be 15 against 15 and we’re just not thinking about it.

“Once we came out of the Cork championship we have been taking it game by game and we’ve been playing on the same days as Finuge so we didn’t get the opportunity to look at them.

“But we know they’re a good footballing team. Kerry have won the Munster championship the last six years in-a-row so that says something.”

St Vincent’s progress to a Munster final comes after five years of bloody knuckles rapping on the door to senior level in Cork. Twice premier intermediate champions and having lost narrowly at final and semi-final stages on four occasions in that period, beating St Michael’s in last month’s final came as more than a relief than anything else.

But the manner of that performance demonstrated to 34-year-old Buckley that the team had grown tired of their hard luck stories.

“St Michael’s was the most impressive win we’ve had this year. They’re a good young side.

“Down to 14 men with 15 minutes to go, it looked like it wasn’t going in our favour but the character of the team once again came through. It was unbelievable and it carried us through.”

Relegated to intermediate level in 2007 followed a disappointing Munster intermediate campaign the autumn previous, the same mistakes weren’t going to be made this time.

“In 2006, we felt like we didn’t give it a good enough crack. But we got together in the clubhouse after we won Cork this year and said we’d love to give it a real go.

“We got back in training and had a great win over the Tipperary champions and the momentum was with us then.

“We are after making history already by reaching our first Munster final ever. To win one now would be a great achievement for the club and give it a real boost.”

As Buckley readily admits, this isn’t a young St Vincent’s side. Sure there are a few U21s like his brother Shane and 19-year-old forward Anthony Harte. But it’s the likes of himself, player-manager Stephen Ray (35) and defender Kevin Goulding (35) with a clutch of players hovering around the 30-mark that make up the biggest proportion of the team.

He hopes Conor Counihan gets to see some of what the young players are doing but figures it won’t be until they play senior again next season that they’ll be really in the shop window.

While reaching tomorrow’s final might be a story of perseverance for St Vincent’s, Buckley sees a bright future for the Knocknaheeney/Hollyhill club. “There’s a lot of soccer around the area but there’s a good bit coming up from under-age. They always played at top level at under-age.

“We won the U16 premier cup 14 years ago and then the minor premier cup with the same team two years later. There were a good seven or eight players who came through from that group.

“Outside of that, you had two or three players every year coming out of minor and that has kept going. There’s a good nucleus for a team and that’s why we’ve been knocking on the door for so long. We love what we do, we love just going up to the field. It’s part of our lives. It’s in our blood here.”