Football

Role reversal for Grant as Castlewellan boss eyes victory over familiar foes

Glenn will be without the influential Niall McParland for tonight's Down SFC clash with Castlewellan in Ballymartin. Picture by Cliff Donaldson.
Glenn will be without the influential Niall McParland for tonight's Down SFC clash with Castlewellan in Ballymartin. Picture by Cliff Donaldson. Glenn will be without the influential Niall McParland for tonight's Down SFC clash with Castlewellan in Ballymartin. Picture by Cliff Donaldson.

Morgan Fuels Down SFC round three: St Malachy’s, Castlewellan v John Martin’s, Glenn (tonight, Ballymartin, 7.30pm)

IN the days since Monday’s round three draw paired his Castlewellan side with Glenn, Brendan Grant hasn’t had to spend hours pouring over video analysis or casting out lines in search of nuggets of information.

Having managed Glenn for the previous two years, what Grant doesn’t know about tonight’s opponents probably isn’t worth knowing. Indeed, he was at the helm 12 months ago when Glenn ousted Castlewellan from the championship to seal a quarter-final spot.

The same prize is up for grabs in Ballymartin tonight, but this time around the Mayobridge man will be in a different dugout, plotting victory for the Town instead.

“I had a couple of people messaging me during the day saying ‘you’re going to get Glenn’, then as soon as the draw was made the text messages started coming though – ‘what did I tell ye?’,” laughs the former Down defender, who was part of the county’s 1999 All-Ireland minor winning side.

“Och listen, Glenn have a fabulous team. They had three Down panellists this year with Jack McCartan, Denis Murtagh and Niall McParland. You could also throw Patrick Brooks into the mix, he’ll be a county player in the future. Shay Millar, ex-county player – in my eyes still probably capable of playing county football if he wanted to.

“I know the pedigree of the players, so I know how tough it will be.”

Glenn, now managed by club stalwart Tony Bagnall and Ronan McCartan, will be hoping to bounce back from the disappointment of Saturday’s defeat to Carryduff.

But they will have to do so without the influential McParland, who – along with Carryduff pair Josh Connery and Ronan Beatty – was shown a straight red card following a fracas in the dying moments of that clash in Downpatrick.

Grant knows how important McParland is to the Glenn cause, but his full focus is on maintaining Castlewellan’s momentum after Sunday’s victory over Bredagh.

After a difficult league campaign that saw them relegated from Division One, Castlewellan pushed Loughinisland all the way in their first championship outing before putting the positives from that defeat into their performance against Bredagh.

On a day when the heavens emptied all over, the experience of men like Cahal Crilly, Liam and Donal McKibben helped Castlewellan across the line in Mayobridge.

And Grant hopes they can back that up tonight to secure their spot in Monday’s quarter-final draw.

“Getting a win like that injects a bit of confidence into a team, of course it does.

“When you’re getting beat it drains a team’s confidence to a certain extent but when you’re winning, it’s easy to keep things going, so you have to try and capitalise on the situation you’re in at that moment in time.

“Player availability was a problem earlier in the year. We said when we came in that we had to pick our teams on the basis of players who have given the commitment, players who are sacrificing other things for the betterment of the team.

“We had to set that precedent at the start, that this is how things were going to go, and we had to stick to it. We knew this year it was going to be difficult to stay in Division One… there’s a very big gap coming up from Division Two.

“It was a tough learning curve for a lot of our boys, a lot of them had never played Division One football. You had to keep preaching about what was going wrong, hoping it would land – and it did, thank God.

“Loughinisland was the first game where we had everybody available to us and we knew that if we did what we were capable of doing, we would be a game for anybody in the championship.”