Connacht Senior Football Championship quarter-final: London v Sligo (tomorrow, 3.30pm, Ruislip)
“WHAT’S the best way you go from here to Longford?”
Cathal Corey’s just hit Ballinamore in the northern tip of Leitrim. The advice from a passer-by is to head straight on through Mohill. The destination is Longford, home to Sligo training.
It’s not a training camp or a different venue for the night. Once a week they try and meet halfway across the country to suit the fact that two-thirds of their squad are based in either Dublin or Athlone.
“On a Tuesday night we try to get somewhere around Longford, Athlone, Mullingar, just that we break the journey a little bit. The Dublin fellas go halfway and the Sligo fellas go halfway. It breaks the journey for everybody.
“It’s more difficult now because the clubs are back training and you’d have youth teams, juveniles back playing, it becomes harder and harder to get somewhere.
“That’s what’s going on in Sligo, and everybody around the country doesn’t realise the effort those fellas are putting in to play for Sligo, it’s unbelievable.”
The Kildress native made his first significant step in management guiding the Glenties to a Donegal title in 2010, taking them to the Ulster final, and after that spent a bit of time on the Derry club circuit, most notably with Slaughtneil for a year.
After missing out on the Donegal job, he threw his hat into the Sligo ring and the Yeats county board gave him a shot.
The league was a raw surface on which they scratched their knees a few times. But when it came to it, having reintegrated a host of more senior players back in as time went by, they got the better of Derry in a faux championship encounter to save their Division Three skins.
“I remember travelling up that morning and we knew we needed some sort of result. In the back of your mind, you were hoping Westmeath would beat Offaly but you couldn’t be depending on somebody else.
“It had that championship feel about it, winner-takes-all, and it probably did take us on to another level.”
The ‘high’ they got from it had largely squeezed out into the ether before they had a chance to bottle it. ‘Club month’ in Sligo meant a run of Saturday evening games, with the county panel meeting up for a bit of very light work on Tuesdays. The Sunday morning was reduced to little more than a talking shop.
They’ll barely have broken a sweat this week either in the lead-in to their flight out of Dublin around 11am today, bound for Ruislip to play in the opening game of the 2018 football championship.
It’s a game that’s had exceptionally little attention in the past few weeks, with any chat about this weekend’s fixtures centring on whether New York can record a first ever win in Connacht against Leitrim tomorrow evening.
By that stage, Sligo will be heading for home. And they know they can’t really win no matter what happens.
”It’s probably not one of the fixtures that catches the eye – we’re not Mayo or Dublin or Galway, but for us, it’s everything.
“There’s no talk about this game before but if London win, there’ll be plenty of talk about it afterwards.
“For us, it’s probably a no-win situation but for London, if they win, it’s the news of the whole country.”
That’s the game. His early league teams were bereft of any kind of experience and there was a particularly chastening day against Armagh. But they survived and as the weeks passed, back came Charlie Harrison, Adrian McIntyre, Ross Donovan.
He heads to London with a few sweats on. Keelan Cawley is definitely out with a knee facture, while Niall Murphy, Pat Hughes, Paddy O’Connor and Adrian Marren are all doubts, albeit with all other than O’Connor named to start. The retirements of Mark Breheny and Brendan Egan leave them susceptible.
“Whenever I met the county board, they said to me that they’d had a few under-21 and minor teams where fellas had done well and they really wanted to see a transition,” says Corey.
“They wanted to see the young players coming in and getting a chance. Through the FBD and National League, we would have used 36 or 37 players.
“We got a chance to look at a lot of new players. Championship’s a different game and it’ll be good to see how the fellas get on.”
This will be, in the words on their own manager Ciaran Deely, ‘the most prepared London team ever going into a championship’.
They were a point short of their highest ever NFL total and with the Irish community set to weigh in behind a big day in the redeveloped Ruislip, there is every chance that the Exiles could repeat their surprise 2013 win over Sligo.
Cathal Corey’s aim “will be to get the fellas to the pace where they’ll battle for their lives”. That’s the least they’ll require if they’re to set up a daunting semi-final with Mayo or Galway.
THE TEAMS
London: G McEvoy; P Butler, C Dunne, C O'Neill; M Walsh, M Mangan, P Begley; A McDermott, M Gottsche; E Murray, L Gavaghan, T Waters; R Elliott, A Moyles, K Butler
Sligo: A Devaney; R Donavan, L Nicholson, C Harrison; G O'Kelly-Lynch, A McIntyre, N Ewing; N Murphy, K McDonnell; C Henry, C Breheny, P Hughes; L Gaughan, A Marren, Kyle Cawley
