Connolly the inspiration

The tributes to the absent Eddie Connolly flowed thick and fast.

This was a victory in his honour.

The regular centre-half back took ill following the club’s semi-final win over Borris-Ileigh a fortnight ago and a growth was subsequently detected on his brain which necessitated immediate surgery.

“Eddie is my next-door neighbour and I was very down in the dumps over it,” said centre-forward David Kennedy.

“We had mass in the parish last Wednesday week and then we went training afterwards. We didn’t know what the story was, Eddie didn’t know what the story was. We trained and it was the best thing we could have done. It was therapy for me, personally.

“We had a football championship match on Friday week last and I didn’t feel like playing. There was a lot of emotion. Eddie had his operation on the Saturday and word came out it went very well. The mood lifted and there was a sense of relief. We trained the following Wednesday and Eddie was down there with his big pink woolie hat. I had a good laugh at that. The mood was good. It put everything into perspective. Your health is everything. It’s nice Eddie is going to get his medal.”

Kennedy alluded to the football championship quarter-final played nine days ago as a key factor in this narrow win.

“We beat Arravale Rovers in a really tough game. It was a dirty game under lights and we came through it. We could have lost it, but we didn’t. It showed we had the stamina to last the 60 minutes. We showed that out there. I think for the game today we were poor in the first 20 minutes and Nenagh were the better team, but we finished the last 40 minutes very strong. In the end there it was real dive-on-the-ball kind of attitude.”

Manager Declan Laffan said: “It [Eddie’s illness] really did galvanise the team as a unit. Even at half-time there today you could get a sense of everyone rowing in together. There is serious character in the squad. They went out and won it themselves. Our shot selection in the first-half was terrible — we shot under pressure, we shot from too far out. We didn’t play it around like we can. We had to be cuter and cleverer with the ball.”

Nenagh’s Liam Heffernan, not surprisingly, cut a dejected figure at the games end.

“When we were five or six points up after a quarter of an hour, we should have drove on but we took our foot off the pedal. We were still four points up at half-time and they brought it back to two and we pushed it out to four again and that’s a good sign of a team. Noel McGrath was the difference; he is a quality player and was able to get scores a little easier than we did.”