'Someone is going to be a hero': Mark Scannell predicts tense cup final

The Address UCC Glanmire, Head coach Mark Scannell during a time-out. Picture: Larry Cummins

Glanmire aren't yet where they want to be but Mark Scannell has good reason to be encouraged by how far they've come.

Top of the Missquote.ie Super League after 11 rounds, the Cork club faces DCU Mercy in Sunday’s InsureMyHouse.ie Cup final as the rebuilding process that started a handful of seasons ago bears fruit.

“We’re very happy. Like every club, it’s cyclical. We’ve had huge success over the last 15 years really. Obviously players get older and they move on and retire for various different reasons, but we weren’t too far away before the pandemic first hit.

“We were second in the league and there or thereabouts, lost a very close Cup semi-final to Killester two years ago, and that team was very special. It was a good team and we were right there. A lot of younger kids had started to come through.” Their current rude health is, ironically, emphasised still further by a run of injury issues and the all-too-familiar Covid complications that have failed to derail ambitions thanks to a squad which the head coach feels is the strongest he has ever had at the club.

Scannell has gone on record recently to state that it has been too long since Glanmire claimed cup honours. It’s five years to be exact and the closing of that gap will depend on him being able to outdo an all-too-familiar foe in the form of DCU Mercy and their coach Mark Ingle.

It’s four years since the teams met in a sensational decider when the Dubliners denied their rivals a five-in-a-row after a superb encounter that ended when a last-ditch three-pointer that would have clinched it for Glanmire rebounded back off the rim.

“I can still see the shot,” said Scannell this week. “Ashley Prim took the shot and it rimmed out and it could have gone either way. Games with DCU are always very tight affairs. They’re normally brilliant games, we’d normally throw the kitchen sink at each other."

While the teams may be familiar with each other, and the coaches too, Scannell is keen to deflect the attention away from his rivalry with Ingle and towards a new generation of players who have taken over from the Dwyer sisters, Sarah Woods and Lyndsey Peats of this world.

“The new players coming through would have had some underage rivalry but not so much at senior level and obviously Aine Casey will be battling against the likes of Hannah Thornton and so on. It is a great rivalry.”

Scannell will admit that surprises, whether in tactics or personnel, are unlikely given the mutual history on both sides of the lines but he is expecting another entertaining affair once the first few minutes burn off the tension and any caginess subsides.

“We played them recently in the Mardyke. It was a great game, there was nothing in it, so I don’t expect there to be anything in it again next Sunday. I just think it will come down to the same as every final. Someone is going to be a hero.”