DERRYGONNELLY’S dreams of becoming the first Fermanagh club to win an Ulster senior title were shattered by Kilcoo two years ago.
A 16-point chasm has to be bridged if Sean Flanagan’s Harps side are to take the prized scalp of the Down champions in Sunday’s Ulster Senior Club Championship opener at Brewster Park.
Two years ago this season’s opening duo were the final pairing of the provincial series and the Fermanagh champions were humiliated by a rampant Magpies outfit that restricted them to just three points and scored 3-10 at the other end.
But if you go back two years’ further, the first ever meeting of the serial county champions tells a different tale. In 2019 there were only two points between the teams at the final whistle and Derrygonnelly’s Shane McGullion says the Fermanagh men intend to better that performance in Enniskillen this weekend.
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“It’s a battle and we’ll be looking forward to it,” said McGullion.
“I feel we’ve a good chance of giving them a good rattle. Hopefully we can.
“Of course we’ll be underdogs but we like that title, it gives us something to fight for. Any game we go into in Ulster, we’re underdogs so we’re used to it at this stage.
“I have full belief in our team and if a couple of things go our way we can come out on the right side of it.”
McGullion has played in both of the previous meetings so he is in a good position to know where his club went right first time around and where they went wrong two years ago.
“Kilcoo are a seasoned team and it’ll be a massive battle for us,” he said.
“But we’ve been in against them in 2019 and we probably should have got something out of that game at the Athletic Grounds.
“We were in it until they got their goal – they took a quick free and we went to sleep – and we never really got back to them after it. We were very disappointed because we felt we could have made it to an Ulster and then they went on a good run.”
The Magpies beat Donegal’s Naomh Chonaill in the Ulster final a fortnight later and, after beating Dublin’s Ballyboden progressed to their first-ever All-Ireland final against a Corofin side who won a tactical struggle in extra-time.
Because of Covid, the Ulster series wasn’t played in 2020 meaning Kilcoo were defending provincial champions by the time Derrygonnelly met them again in the final in 2021. The Ernemen had taken out Tyrone’s Dromore and Armagh’s Clann Eireann to get to their first decider and, while they weren’t favourites, they were expected to test the Down outfit.
That test never came as Kilcoo cantered home by 16 points.
“We didn’t get going at all and they really gave it to us,” says McGullion.
“We had the confidence from playing them in 2019 and we were thinking we had a chance but we just didn’t perform on the day. It didn’t happen at all. It was close until they got that goal near the end of the first half and we didn’t recover from it.”
It took a while for Derrygonnelly to get that loss out of their system. After scraping past Ederney they lost out to Kinawley in last year’s Fermanagh Championship semi-finals and missed out on the final for the first time since 2015.
But they’re back this year and you sense they have a point to prove, a score to settle on Sunday. But Ulster Championship football is much more than rolling up the sleeves and getting stuck in. After several seasons of playing at provincial level, McGullion says Derrygonnelly have banked a lot of knowhow.
“I feel you need a few years playing in Ulster to adapt to it, it definitely took us a year or two to get up to that level – the speed and intensity of it,” he said.
“You have to get the basics right at this time of year, all your skills have to be on point and, if not, in these wet conditions you’ll be found wanting. So you have to iron-out all the small, wee bits in your role in the team and get up to the speed and intensity and learn the game – learn when to slow it down and when to build it up… It’s all about building your knowledge of Ulster football because it’s a big step-up and you want to challenge yourself against the best.”
