All-Ireland Senior Club Hurling Championship: Watty Graham’s Glen 1-9 Kilmacud Crokes 1-11
From Andy Watters at Croke Park
BOY’S own stuff. Conor Ferris, Kilmacud’s hero, couldn’t have written a better script for himself.
The goalkeeper always carries the can and it was Ferris’s fumble that gave Jerome Johnson the chance to win last year’s All-Ireland final at the death but Ferris redeemed himself brilliantly yesterday.
Again Kilmacud were two points’ up in injury-time, again their opponents’ had a chance to snatch the game from them but this year Ferris denied Conor Glass with a finger-tip injury-time save.
Drenched in beer and smiling from ear to ear, he talked through his scant recollection of an instinctive reaction stop that will live with him forever.
“I don’t really know what happened,” he said.
“One of our defenders was to the left so the only place he could go (shoot) was to the right so I just jumped and hoped for the best. Thank God it (the ball) just went the right side of the post. I actually don’t remember the moment, I couldn’t have told you who had the shot, but I’m just so delighted it went the other side of the post.”
Ferris was the fall-guy for Kilmacud’s loss last year but he never contemplated quitting the game. On the contrary, the mistake inspired him to work harder and yesterday was redemption for him.
“Last year was one of the toughest day’s I’ve had,” he said.
“I said to Robbie Brennan (Kilmacud manager) a couple of months after last year’s final: ‘Where’s my silver medal? I want to put it on the mantelpiece so I can see it every day and have the motivation to come back and go one further than last year’.
“From a personal point of view, I came off very hurt last year and this is almost like a redemption, it feels good.”
Kilmacud manager Brennan revealed that he did ‘the old Joe Kernan’ with last year’s runners-up medal at the interval. The Dubliners led by a point at that stage having trailed by five after the first quarter.
“Last year – not that we lost, but how we lost – should have broken us as a group,” said Brennan.
“But it didn’t and we took strength from it as we went on. There are such fine margins, we could be sitting here having lost again and I don’t know what I’d be saying if that was the case.
“We had the runners-up medal in the dressingroom at half-time and basically I did the old ‘Joe Kernan’ and hopped it off the wall and said: ‘Is this what you want?’”
His side got over the line to win by two points after a see-saw second half in which the sides took turns to edge into the lead and then peg each other back. Paul Mannion started the game for Kilmacud despite training for just 30 minutes prior to the game. Mannion registered just one point but he moved well and created space for his forward colleagues.
“He’s done nothing and I mean nothing,” said Brennan.
“He did 30 minutes at training last Saturday. It was a massive, massive gamble but he was going to come in at some stage so we thought if we left it to the last 15 minutes and it flopped it might deflate us so we said we’d gamble and go from the start and then, if it didn’t work, we’d have time to fix it.
“I don’t know how he’s even playing to the level he got to today. Realistically he shouldn’t be able to.”
