Arva still best as Listowel contest key referee calls
NO ROOM: Arva's Tristan Noack Hofmann has his progress blocked by a combination of keeper Cathal Keane and defender Eddie Healy at Croke Park.
Three moments from this All-Ireland club JFC final that will surely stay with Listowel Emmets.
Two points up, 38 minutes on the clock, and Bryan Sweeney is through for a score at the Hill 16 End but just as he pulls the trigger for a point, from nowhere comes Arva full-back Niall Collins with a Conor Gormley-esque block.
Eight minutes later, and now taking on water and level on the scoreboard at 0-9 apiece, Listowel’s Ger McCarthy is sent off for 10 minutes for a black card offence. He was late and a little wild with his challenge on Tristan Noack Hofmann for sure but was it technically a black card offence?
Later again, three minutes into stoppage time and four points behind, a goal is needed and it has to be now. Former Cork senior Joe Joe Grimes comes bursting through and despite being fouled by corner-back Finbar McAvinue manages to get a shot away to the net.
But wait, referee Anthony Nolan has intervened again and decided the free has to be taken.
Enda Murphy and his management team will reflect too on their own decision to take off midfielder Darragh Leahy at half-time. Their reasoning was that he was performing well but was on a booking and a tick so was flirting with disaster.
Without him, Arva’s brilliant midfield duo of Ciaran Brady, the team captain and a National League Division 3 winner with Cavan Park last year, along with former underage soccer international Hofmann, took over and lorded it in the second-half. A three-point half-time deficit ended with a three-point Arva win.
Brady and Noack Hofmann finished with six points from play between them and brought the urgency and determination to the game that their team had been badly lacking in the first-half.
Still, if all of those things had gone the other way and fell in Listowel’s favour, would they still have won the game? Perhaps, they did lead 0-7 to 0-4 at half-time after all but Arva also finished with perhaps the lowest possible tally they could have given the amount of poor wides they also shot themselves. They had a dozen wides in the end and, even at the lower junior grade, half of those should have been clipped over.
All in all, a deserved win for an Arva side that looks to be going places again having been a senior team as recently as 2017 though Listowel manager Murphy was still disappointed with the referee's calls for the black card and the late goal.
“It was a very harsh call,” he said of the goal situation. “I asked Anthony after the match, first of all he didn’t want to explain. Then he just said he thought we had lost the ball and he blew. I thought, look, everyone makes mistakes. I think Anthony made a mistake there. If we’d got the goal, we were going to push up high then, we might have got something out of it but look, that didn’t happen and overall in the second-half Arva were better than us.”
On the black card, Murphy protested: “Definitely not, from my point of view. Obviously we’ll watch it again. Those were two big calls against us. I didn’t think it was, not under the rules of the black card. But again, I’d like to see it. But definitely the goal (decision), that was definitely a bad call.”
Arva manager Finbarr O’Reilly praised 2020 All-Star nominee Brady for providing the platform for victory with his second-half tour de force.
“There were a few choice words at half-time, there’s no doubt about that,” said O’Reilly. “We really pushed up hard on their kick-outs in the second-half. They’d been getting out too easy. We weren’t finishing attacks either and we put that clearly to them and we definitely raised the temperature a little bit. We said that it was now or never, we’re not playing well and we’re not performing. It was time to step up and that happened.”
Listowel, who impressed in the first-half with a brace of points apiece from Cormac Mulvihill and free-taker David Keane, and a terrific spinning point from the left wing by Niall Collins, only scored one point from play in the second-half.
They didn’t score at all in the period when they were down to 14 players and the black carded McCarthy never actually returned as he was replaced.
Brady dug deep and mined out a diamond display, kicking three second-half points and doing his best to disrupt Listowel’s faltering kick-out strategy.
“He was on everything,” said manager O’Reilly. “I don’t think we would have turned it around without him.”
K Bouchier (3 frees), C Brady (0-4 each); P Morris (0-3); T Noack Hofmann (0-2).
: D Keane (0-3, 3 frees); C Mulvihill, S Keane (1 free)(0-2 each); N Collins, E Healy, S Tarrant (1 free)(0-1 each).
: C O’Hara; C Madden, J Morris, D Maguire; T Partington, S Sheridan, F McAvinue; C Brady, T Noack Hofmann; J McCabe, B Donnelly, D Ellis; P Morris, C Sheridan, K Bouchier.
C Stanley for Ellis (41); T Brady for C Sheridan (56); P Cassidy for P Morris (61).
C Keane; N Collins, J McElligott, C Pierse; E Browne, E Healy, M Kennedy; J Grimes, D Leahy; S Keane, G McCarthy, J McVeigh; C Mulvihill, B Sweeney, D Keane.
: D Lynch for Leahy (h/t); S Tarrant for D Keane (49); A O’Rourke for Sweeney (56); J Moriarty for McCarthy (56); C Holly for McVeigh (58).
: A Nolan (Wicklow).
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