‘We were lucky we were the ones who tipped the scales’

All season long, the media shy Mickey Moran has requested his selector Conleith Gilligan to take care of media engagements.

He was out here again and his naturally sunny disposition went up another couple of degrees after winning the trophy he captured as a Ballinderry player in 2001 and 2013.

Asked of his impressions of the Kilcoo community as they all partied on the pitch afterwards, Gilligan said, “We knew coming in that we starting off (from) a very strong base.

“The work that Jim McCorry and Paul McIver had done before really set the thing up.

“Unluckily they came up short but today it would be remiss not to talk about the good work other people have done because it would be easy to take the credit now.

“So many people have done the work with these boys. We were lucky we were the ones who tipped the scales but it could have happened in any other year.”

Thoughts then turned to the injury-stricken Darragh O’Hanlon, who ruptured his cruciate ligament this summer while coming back from spinal surgery.

“My heart breaks for him today, not able to play today with injury. They are just good people.

All the talk about sheep, well that’s real .... They are sheep farmers – I’m just wondering when someone is going to ask me when the sheep will be milked this weekend.

Asked about the Mickey Moran factor, he stated: “Whenever you have someone like Mickey who has been there and done it there is always a bit extra belief when someone knows how to go to that end, people will go that extra mile and that is what happened.”

No doubt, this was an itch that needed scratching, but Gilligan insists they had to keep a lid on things.

“To be fair this was probably the most low-key fortnight we’ve had, we probably did more work for all the other games because this two weeks was about keeping them calm, take the emotion out of it, not to try and build it into something it’s not and to be fair we managed to do that.”