Conway proud to represent Kingdom hurling

Shane Conway is deeply proud of his Kerry roots. The popular and affable Lixnaw club man picked up his first Fitzgibbon Cup medal, and the highly-regarded attacker said: “It just feels brilliant.”

“It means a lot. For all the people here today from home, they got a bus up. All my family are here, so it is something special.

“Not too many have a Fitzgibbon around Kerry, not too many have them around the country either — it is a very hard medal to get. So, it is just great to have one.

“There is a lot of work being done down in Kerry.

"There were other players here before me only that they never won a Fitz final. They were on the panels.

"It is great to finally have someone playing.

It represents Kerry and it shows we are not just a mediocre team.

"We are pushing slowly but surely and thriving as well.”

The second-year student, who shares a house with Charleville players Tim Hawe and Jack O’Callaghan, maintained it was the hard-fought victory over DCU that gave UCC the belief they could kick on.

“We said at the start, we had 12 games. We got to the league final and we got to this final.

"We lost to DCU in the league final, so it was great to get one over on them in the Fitzgibbon semi-final because everyone was saying they were favourites and we wouldn’t be able to match them. But we got a bit of luck, and thankfully we pushed on today.

“We knew we had it in our legs if we could stay going like that for 80 minutes against DCU that surely we could turn up for 60 minutes.

“We were fairly confident that if we got our heads right, we could actually win.”