AIB All-Ireland Club SFC final: Kilcoo 2-8 Kilmacud Crokes 0-13 (AET)
ON the days that Kilcoo would train, Aaron Branagan knew dinner beforehand was never an option.
A man obsessed by his fitness and nutrition, he runs a gym at home in Kilcoo.
And in it all week, he’d heard two things: How nervous people were, yet how sure they were that the trophy would come back to Down for the first time in 34 years.
“See when it went to extra-time, I know we came very close to being beat but we trained so hard. Mickey has taken our training to another level,” said Kilcoo’s corner-back, clutching the Andy Merrigan Cup.
“Every night you go to training, you know you are having no dinner tonight. Eat afterwards because you know you are so well trained.
“But I find there is a psychological element to that because you know there is nobody worked any harder and that plays in your head.
“We said that in the huddle, extra time, it is what we do, it’s our time. Our training, we always finish with really hard running and knowing that there is always that wee bit left in the tank.”
The first half had not gone to plan at all. Kilmacud were slicing them up at times and led by six.
Mickey Moran is not known for raising his voice. What’s rare is effective.
Just at half-time in the 1993 All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin, when Derry players were stunned into action by the uncharacteristic anger in his words, Kilcoo’s players received a well-timed volley on Saturday evening.
“It was calm enough in some point and then Mickey gave it in the finish,” recounted Conleith Gilligan.
“To be fair, Mickey does, every now and again, give really cross speeches.
“He hadn't done one really this year at all, he'd never raised his voice and that was the one where he basically asked the boys to stand up and be counted, or they may get their bags and go out to the bus now.
“The one thing he did say is that the game is still there and Mickey doesn't really say stuff like that, so whenever he said it, they believe him and that's the key to it.”
Gilligan himself was taken back to winning it as a player in Thurles 20 years ago, when he helped Ballinderry to a similar giant-killing act on Nemo Rangers.
He thought to his mother Adeline, who wasn’t able to travel yesterday, and late father Joey, the first person he met at the fence in Semple Stadium that St Patrick’s Day in 2002.
“Ah look it's lovely symmetry, 20 years and so much has changed. It's funny, at the final whistle, just by chance the first person I met at the final whistle after we won was my father.
“Supporters weren't allowed onto the field, Thurles were very strict and I nearly got stabbed over barbed wire trying to get...
“So it was emotional from that perspective, maybe so many people tight with me that maybe aren't here and mummy is of an age now where she couldn't travel down.
“In a minute like that, when you think back to that, it does kind of choke you.
“I suppose even in the week that's in it, Roger Morgan, the vice-chair, Roger’s grandson Odhran is in hospital in the Royal. Getting it pretty tight.
“And Roger has been brilliant to us. If you think about the final whistle, Roger was delighted. And it’s probably the only respite he’d had for that time.
“You do think about the enjoyment it gives to people that are getting it tight locally.”
The team’s strength of character is part the in-built nature of people living in a rural outpost where there’s nothing only football, and part manufactured on the training field.
“It’s absolutely amazing. It’s absolutely mad,” says Branagan.
“I run the gym and people in Kilcoo are completely unwise, I am not joking you.
“They talk more about the football to me. Saying things like, ‘I am not going to go to class this week, just too nervous.’ Grown men telling you they hadn’t had their dinner in a few nights through nerves.
“That’s just Kilcoo, couldn’t have went anywhere but somebody wasn’t mentioning it to you.
“It’s not like us 15 lads, the whole village is the exact same. There are some men there like Pat Joe Travers, I know they got him into an executive box there and he was on oxygen all week.
“Like, for the likes of that man to see where we have come from. For them men, big Sean Red, Jerome Johnston, all the work over the years, it is class.
“What’s amazing about the whole thing is, in Kilcoo if you don’t play football you are a stranger in the village.
I think it is brilliant.
“I stopped drinking a while back, because I had a goal. It can give you great purpose. It keeps you on the straight and narrow, stops boys going away to Dubai to teach or England for work.
“For a wee small rural village, you put your heart and soul into it and I think for the next generation it gives them encouragement.
“I have a wee boy, most of the boys have wee boys, I don’t know what way it’s working, but they are all boys.
This can maybe breed this on right through,” he said.
Kilcoo needed extra-time against Glen, St Finbarr’s and Kilmacud to get to here. It was a remarkable journey on more evenings than just Saturday.
Conleith Gilligan knows well the value. Ballinderry’s success in 2002 was backed up by a raft of county titles but they could only get out of Ulster once more, 11 years later, and then St Vincent’s got the better of them in a semi-final.
“Getting to one All-Ireland final is probably most small rural teams can hope for. You hope that you get there once, you can take it home and that’s the fairytale,” said the Derry man.
The fairytale is complete.
