Ilen Rovers off the canvass and looking up, not down
Ileen Rovers' Damien O'Sullivan (left) and James Lordan of Ballinora ahead of the McCarthy Insurance Group IAFC final at SuperValu Pairc Ui Chaoimh. Pic: Jim Coughlan.
THEY'VE swapped post-mortems for a press evening. Out with your September relegation, in with your November ribbons.
The Ilen Rovers freefall has caught a rope. They’re climbing again.
Manager Flor O’Driscoll, full-back Jack Collins, and inside forward Dan MacEoin were the anointed speakers at a press evening in Rosscarbery’s Celtic Ross Hotel. The three came not from Aughadown or Baltimore. They came instead from Ballincollig, Cork city, and Glanmire respectively.
Life has taken them up the road, the Ilen Rovers cause pulling them back down west at least twice a week. The smile on recent journeys is a new passenger. Too often the company was despair and despondency.
Dan MacEoin - remember that top-scoring name from Cork’s Munster U21 winning campaign of 2014 - made his senior debut for Ilen Rovers in 2010. They had been county finalists three years previous and county semi-finalists the year after that.
Genuine contenders, maybe not. But you certainly couldn’t exclude them from the conversation. They had at least earned that right.
On Sunday afternoon, and 15 years after his debut, Dan will line out in his first adult county final - the fourth-tier Intermediate A decider.
Between the 2010 debut and championship restructure of 2020, Ilen were only once part of the quarter-final line-up. The slimmed down Premier Senior grade left them exposed. With nowhere to hide, they wound up in the relegation play-off.
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Of the 19 players to feature in the survival-achieving victory over Bishopstown five years ago, seven would subsequently emigrate. The Ilen Rovers team building a life for themselves in Australia, for a time, rivalled the one at home.
Their Premier Senior status was lost 12 months later. Their status kept diminishing. A relegation rot set in and took hold. September 2023 saw them fall to Premier Intermediate. September 2024 saw them fall to Intermediate A.
“We were treading water at senior for a lot of years,” begins 32-year-old MacEoin, a primary school teacher on Cork city’s northside.
“We were maybe too good to go down for a long time, but we didn't have realistic aspirations of winning the county either. There were lots of difficult years and it is tough when you are losing lots of games. We are probably an example of the old structure and it being wrong.”
Jack Collins was another minor when handed his senior debut for the 2018 opener against Ballincollig. His remark that “we’ve had ups and downs, this is probably the pick of the years” is what you’d term an understatement.
Excluding this restorative campaign, Ilen Rovers played 25 championship games from the year Collins joined. Twenty ended in defeat. Of the five wins, two were relegation play-offs.
“In between Premier Senior and Senior A, we did lose a good few players to Australia, America. The last two years then, we have had a lot of long-term injuries. It has been a combination of things, really.” That is their slide painted and framed. But what of dressing-room morale during that deeply challenging period. The weekly spins down west surely can’t have been undertaken with any degree of enthusiasm.
“It is difficult when you are losing games and you can’t get that one win to get momentum behind you. But we have a core of lads who, despite the results, stuck at it. We always knew we could turn it around, it was just a case of keep working away until that time came,” said Collins, a secondary school teacher at St Colman’s Midleton.
It’s a sentiment repeated almost word-for-word by his forward teammate and semi-final 0-12 contributor.
“The game is tough, mentally, when you are losing a lot. You might get in a rut, mentally,” admitted MacEoin. “The one thing I would say is that no matter what ways the years have gone, lads have stuck together, lads have continued driving up and down the road from Cork.
“Conor O’Driscoll, who is living up in Carrigtwohill and who wasn’t training earlier in the year as he had a baby on the way, it is great to see him back, and back in a final (Conor was half-back for the 2007 defeat to Nemo).
“Peter O'Driscoll, Cork’s U20 winning captain in 2019, did his cruciate at the start of the year. Hasn't missed a session. He’s doing all the little jobs and adding to the group anyway he can.”
Flor O’Driscoll was a player/selector in 2004/05. Manager from 2006-09. Selector in 2010. Manager from 2018-20. Selector again for the two years after that. His third coming as manager earlier this year asked that he turn the tide.
The opening round championship win that he oversaw on July 26, at the expense of last year’s beaten finalists Boherbue, was the club’s first in 1,057 days. Drawing with Kilmurry next time out bridged a gap of six years to the last occasion they’d gone unbeaten in two successive championship games.
The locals never left them. In sickness and in health, and all that. But they’re no longer following them exclusively out of duty and unspoken vows. The locals have again a winning team to get behind.
“Because I am living in Ballincollig and not down there, I don't live and breathe it every single day, but what I would say is it doesn't matter the grade,” Flor explains.
“When we were senior, we thought it was all about the grade. Even though we were maintaining our senior grade, we weren't getting into play-offs, semi-finals, or finals, so we probably weren't in the mind of the community as much.
“It is hard to speak on behalf of the community, but there wasn't the same looking to the club as a positive beacon, it was more we are doing an important service for the community in terms of giving young people an outlet to play. It wasn't seen as this outlet where you could bring a lot of success.”
And so it is against this backdrop that he equates Sunday's Intermediate A decider against Ballinora with the senior decider of 18 years ago. Four grades in the difference, no difference in importance to this small, rural entity.
“I probably would have answered that question differently a couple of weeks ago, but when the final whistle went against Adrigole the last day, you see the U10, U12 players rushing on, so excited. You see instantly what it means to all generations.”
In the midst of annual relegation and aside from the problems posed by emigration, injuries, and their seasonal population, O’Driscoll concedes that, as a club, “we might have lost our way a small bit as well”.
Ilen Rovers are neither lost or falling now.
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