Kerins glad he held off on retirement

ALAN KERINS was seemingly omnipresent around Croke Park yesterday as Clarinbridge became the latest Galway representatives to All-Ireland club hurling honours.

Was he full-forward, centre-forward, midfield, wing-forward? He started at full and seemed to finish at centre, but really, after an opening 20 minutes in which Clarinbridge were all at sea, Kerins was everywhere, a will-o’-the-wisp man-of-the-match performance that left no less a centre-back than Brian Hogan floundering at times.

It left him an exhausted but happy man at the finish, proud owner now of an All-Ireland senior club medal at both hurling and football (Salthill/Knocknacarra 2006).

“We barely got out of the group (in Galway),” he recalled, in explanation of how they have become inured to setbacks on this campaign. “I remember looking up at the scoreboard in the Beagh match and thinking I could retire there and then. We were gone, down six points with about eight minutes to go and we would have been out of the group and out of the championship at that stage.”

They recovered, went on to win, but that wasn’t the end of their travails. “We started badly in the county final, started badly in the replay; we started badly against De La Salle (All-Ireland semi-final) too.

“But the one thing that’s grown into us all year is composure and I think we showed that again. We only hurled for five minutes in the first half and were still level so we knew if we just went out and just went for it instead of watching it we were in with a chance.

“Our first 20 minutes were very poor – maybe it was the day, the stadium, the occasion. But once we got our minds focused we knew our game-plan (would work), if we stuck to it.”

The game-plan had been devised by manager Micheál Donoghue and his fellow selectors, but there was far more even than that to the Clarinbridge preparations.

In 2002 Clarinbridge had lost an All-Ireland final, beaten by the great Birr side of Whelehans, Pilkingtons and so on, and Micheál – twin brother of goalkeeper Liam – had been centre-back and captain that day. It could have served as a reference point for this display, but it didn’t, said Donoghue.

“We never addressed 2002, in the sense that we never said that we had to go out and do it because of that.

“We just took every game as it came along and that was our motto all year; it was all about the next ball, and after that the next game was the most important thing.

“We went away last weekend, took the lads out of Clarinbridge because we knew that the game would be the most talked about topic. We went away for the few days to Dublin and visited Croke Park.

“But everything that we asked of them in terms of preparation, they have done – they’ve been fantastic. We are following some great Galway teams, but I know that some people didn’t give us the respect that we deserved.”

For much of the first half it was all going according to script for Gaels and their manager Michael Nolan. But all that changed utterly as the clock ticked down to the interval.

He said: “We were going great for 27 or 28 minutes in the first half (their five-point lead, 0-8 to 0-3, could easily have been four more) and then we conceded a soft goal.” Mark Kerins capitalised on a slip by his marker Andy Kearns to hit the net and help Clarinbridge to a most unlikely half-time scoreline (1-7 to 0-10).

“We couldn’t seem to get going again,” said Michael, “and they just hurled us off the field in the second half. We did lose our stride (just before the break), we knew we slipped a bit and that we should have been five or six up instead of going in level. But we got back to the dressing-room and we regrouped, came out focused again yet for some reason it didn’t happen for us. We were beaten in too many positions.”