THE long whistle that brought last Sunday’s Derry championship final to an end gave Karl McKaigue a feeling of “pure euphoria”.
He’d felt it before, 12 months previously when he won his first county championship medal, and he hopes to feel that buzz again before the end of the year now that Slaughtneil have trained their sights beyond the Derry borders.
Defending their Ulster crown is the next assignment and they won’t have long to reflect on their double-double of football and hurling titles in Derry because provincial competition starts on October 18. Yes, it is hectic but that’s life in Slaughtneil and their success proves the old adage that if you want something done you should ask a busy man or, in this case, a busy club.
“It’s been massively tough,” said man-marking defender McKaigue after the final whistle on Sunday.
“We haven’t had much of a proper training session, it’s just trying to get mens’ legs fresh again and recovery and a bit of shooting in training – there’s no in-house games or hard runs. It has been very tough, but that’s what you get and sometimes you have two games in one week.
“Between the Magherafelt replay and the semi-final, we had something like five games in four weeks – it was just crazy, very difficult for players. Thankfully, we’ll get a week between games now.”
The Emmet’s refuse to be victims of their own success and there is a realisation that winning game after game has created a momentum that only Connacht and Galway champions Corofin (in the All-Ireland final) have been able to bring to a halt.
“There’s no substitute for hard championship games,” said McKaigue.
“Confidence rises through them and you get momentum and that has probably been helping us even though we don’t know it. That game today [Sunday] is worth 50 training sessions – it shows character, it shows fitness, footballing ability… Everything comes out of that game today.”
There’s no shortage of experience in the camp either and McKaigue explained that Mickey Moran and his backroom team have taught Slaughtneil to play the percentages.
“It’s drilled into us ‘don’t give the ball away, keep it until you get a chance to break the line and hit a score’ and that’s down to our management team and some of the older hands on our team,” he said.
“They’re always talking and communicating to players and telling them ‘the shot's not on, work it on, work it on’. It’s a very disciplined style of play – maybe it’s not easy to watch, but it’s effective for us.
“We got over the line today and in years gone by, if we had played like that, we wouldn’t have won. We have a lot of quality now, we have added from last year. We have a very strong squad and there’s no reason why we can’t progress.”
Last Sunday, Slaughtneil led by six points midway through the second half and survived a late rally from Eoghan Rua, Coleraine to win by a point.
“Everybody knows that Coleraine are probably the best conditioned side in Derry football and they always come on strong in the second half,” said McKaigue.
“We saw that in the Ballinderry game and they got over half their scores in the last 15 minutes and that just shows you the conditioning they have. We always knew they were going to come back, even though we had the wind, but we just held out to the end.
“We were the architects of our own downfall a wee bit too – we missed frees and dropped one shot and were losing the ball around the scoring zones but, luckily, we just held out.”
