Ulster Minor Hurling Championship final: Derry v Antrim (tomorrow, 1.30pm, Owenbeg)
ANTRIM minor boss Colly Murphy believes Ulster Council missed a trick by not holding their provincial decider with Derry last night.
Because of the limited number of Sundays available to clubs and counties alike, he will take his Saffron side to Owenbeg knowing that the travelling support could be very thin on the ground.
A full round of Antrim club league games are planned for Sunday meaning that whatever fans will be there will most likely be in support of the home side.
With Derry clubs heading into a two-week break without adult games, there is nothing to clash with the decider from their end.
But throw in the temptation of the Munster hurling and Connacht football finals live on TV on Sunday afternoon and Murphy believes a bit of outside-the-box thinking was required.
“I think Ulster should have looked at playing it [last night]. You would have got crowds from everywhere. Friday night’s usually a good night because there aren’t a lot of matches on and you’d get a crowd at it, maybe a thousand or two instead of a hundred or two. A bit of foresight was needed but again, Ulster paying lip service to hurling in my opinion, as they always do.”
Following a hard-earned but deserved win over Down in the semi-final, the Saffrons will have a full squad barring the absence of corner-back Oisin McAuley, who is holiday-tied.
They will hope to avoid the same scare Derry gave them last year.
Then, the Oak Leafers found themselves ten points to the good in the second half only to be clawed back and pipped in extra-time.
Antrim’s preparations for this game have been much more sound than their counterparts, but Derry showed a measure of their quality in hammering a fairly fancied Donegal side last weekend.
It was hard to know how Derry would fair after a disrupted spring where they lost their manager, didn’t train as a unit since the end of April and had lost some of its better players to county minor football commitments.
But their response was emphatic and a measure of the genuine quality that exists. Whether there is the cohesion to see off an Antrim side that has been regularly testing itself against their under-21s in training and in-house games remains to be seen.
They are strengthened from that emphatic 4-16 to 2-6 win last weekend, with Ballinascreen’s Martin Bradley coming into the starting team along with Swatragh duo Martin Quinn and Peader McLaughlin, none of whom were in the squad last weekend.
Dual star Richie Mullan, who will be aiming to win provincial medals in both codes over the next eight days, was the pick of the bunch against Donegal, hitting 1-9 on an afternoon where they blitzed their visitors with a 1-5 to 0-0 start inside 9 minutes.
”I watched the video of the Derry-Donegal game and they’re strong down the middle,” said Murphy.
“A big thing for us is having Dunsilly where the minors and under-21s are training on pitches beside each other and able to cross over. You wouldn’t have had that last year, so it’s been a Godsend.
”A lot of our boys got plenty of games through the Celtic Challenge so we wouldn’t be lacking in that either.”
The winners will face either a fancied Galway, beaten Leinster finalists Dublin or the losers of Sunday’s Munster final between Clare and Cork in an All-Ireland quarter-final down the line.
Derry have the quality to trouble Antrim but whether they have enough done to get across the line against them is another matter.
