EOGHAN RUA manager Padraig O Mainain describes Sunday’s All-Ireland club junior hurling final against Kilkenny’s Glenmore as a “David versus Goliath set-up”.
And O Mianain is under no illusions Derry’s Ulster champions will play the role of David in this scenario, even though the one-time All-Ireland senior club kingpins will be without captain Ger Aylward for the Croke Park decider.
The Kilkenny Allstar is ruled out after suffering a cruciate ligament injury in the Leinster champions’ All-Ireland semi-final win over Cork champions Dungourney: “It weakens their team, but we know ourselves, our Allstar camogie player Grainne McGoldrick suffered a career-threatening injury that she’s been nursing a year and-a-half, so it’s not something you’d wish on anybody,” said O Mianain.
“They’re still going to be a very strong team and you can be sure that this is going to galvanise them. He was their captain, he was absolutely at the top of his game; won an Allstar and everything. You can be guaranteed that the last one who’ll be speaking before they leave the dressing room on Sunday will be him and they’ll be going flat out to try and win it for him. It doesn’t, in any way, minimise or lessen the challenge that we have to face up to on Sunday.”
Eoghan Rua beat Down’s Ballela in the Ulster decider and went on to see off Galway’s Sylane 0-10 to 0-4 at the All-Ireland semi-final stage. O Mainain compared the Coleraine outfit’s campaign to “climbing a mountain range” - as soon as his team has overcome one obstacle, they’ve presented with an even tougher one to scale.
“We’re there and we’re looking forward to the challenge and we’re going to give it a good lash,” he said.
“On the field, they’ll have Liam MacCarthy medal winners - Eoin Murphy, Richie Mullally and a couple of the others have been Kilkenny panellists. They have experience and the club has been at the very top of the tree - they won the All-Ireland in 1991. It’s the club of [Kilkenny legends] Christy Heffernan, Willie O’Connor, Eddie O’Connor…
“They have won the ultimate prize in club hurling and we have never won a senior match in club hurling - championship or league - so it just shows that there really is a David and Goliath set-up on Sunday. But when you get to a final it’s a two-horse race and we’re certainly going to go flat-out. Our aim is to give the best performance we can get and, if they’re good enough to beat us, well they’ll have to beat us at our best.”
Glenmore have household names who will expect success, but Eoghan Rua have formidable competitors in their ranks too. Team captain Anton Rafferty, the McGoldrick brothers Liam, Barry, Sean Leo, Ciaran and Colm, Niall Holly and Kieran Lagan have stacks of inter-county experience and were involved in 2007 when the club reached the All-Ireland intermediate club football final.
“We’re a junior hurling club, we only became a senior club in Derry two years ago,” O Mianain acknowledged.
“The club has been established as a strong senior football club. They won the county title six-years-ago and they got to the final again last year. There are half-a-dozen boys on the Derry senior football panel and there’s three-or-four on the county hurling panel. There are boys who were involved when the club got to the All-Ireland intermediate club football final in 2011, so there’s plenty of big match experience and that’s going to help us. We have boys who have been in Croke Park before, they have been there on big occasions and they know how to manage a game.
“We’re confident that we’re well prepared and we can rely on our experience, fitness, strength and mobility. Hopefully, we can bring our hurling skills up to scratch, so we’re looking forward to putting up a good challenge on Sunday.”
