AIB Ulster Club SFC semi-final: Scotstown 0-17 Trillick 1-13 (AET)
From Cahair O’Kane at the Athletic Grounds
WE get it. Gaelic football is brutally unattractive most of the time. It is. But with the right lighting and angles, its redeeming qualities still get the odd showing.
Scotstown won the second Ulster semi-final, reaching their third final of this generation, having lost in 2015 and 2018. In doing so they denied Trillick what would have been a first provincial appearance for 49 years.
To everyone in the Athletic Grounds, it was only about winners and losers. But for the rest of the footballing public, that doesn’t matter.
From the moment Seanie O’Donnell rifled Trillick in front at Rory Beggan’s near post with the last kick of the first half, this turned into one of those absorbing games that it’s impossible not to get lost in.
The Reds’ 1-4 to 0-6 lead was scarcely deserved at that stage but from that point on, the two sides stood facing across the table and refused to buckle.
Scotstown went two up again midway through the second half. Trillick got level, then got ahead.
Level again, Lee Brennan kicks the Tyrone champions in front with 62 minutes on the clock from a controversially awarded 45 when Colm Garrity’s near-post wide didn’t seem to have taken any touch.
Nine days after winning an Allstar, Conor McCarthy had been a peripheral figure in Armagh. Daniel Donnelly, the most unsung of all the unsung Trillick stars of this year, had taken into him like a day’s work by the mixer.
But when Scotstown needed something, badly needed it, McCarthy took it upon himself. He squealed at Rory Beggan to give him the kickout initially but in the atmospheric Box-It Cauldron Grounds, it went unheard.
So he crept up the line and when the pass was on, he went hard into the space, taking himself right down the channel you’re most likely to get hurt in and kicking a magnificent equaliser off his right foot.
It was fair too because Scotstown hadn’t deserved to lose either. It was like Katie Taylor fighting Katie Taylor. Every time you thought one needed to take a knee, they’d gather themselves up, suck themselves in and go again.
The big players all had good moments and they all had spells of quiet because their markers inevitably did something too.
Like, Seanie O’Donnell and Ryan O’Toole. It wasn’t a match-up anyone expected to happen in Trillick’s attack but the wee half-Canavan was pushed up and hurt O’Toole in the first half. But then Monaghan’s find of 2023 started to slap back, landing a score of his own, getting on the ball, driving.
Darren Hughes and Richie Donnelly bumped off each other like somebody thought it’d be funny to place two diggers 50 yards apart and drive them headlong into each other. The Hughes and Donnelly families have had longstanding respect for each other and they played it that way. Hit, get up, hit again, get up again.
When Kieran Hughes got the opportunity for a trademark spinner in extra-time, he looked at it like he was bungee-jumping into a canyon. Will I? Will I? Can I? Ah no, I shouldn’t. To hell with it, I will. He did.
Jack McCarron’s radar was blinking all day, low battery, but he was a dictatorial figure in the dying moments when they needed a cool head on the ball.
None cooler than Darren Hughes, who just knows what to do and when to do it. The way he sucked James Garrity in to fouling him for the crucial 76th minute free from which McCarron kicked the Monaghan champions back in front was intelligence cultivated over two decades of top-level football.
In a game that began to border on the insane, refereeing calls were always going to come into it. Kevin Faloon was like a sleeping lifeguard, happy to just everyone thrash away and enjoy themselves, but that only becomes an issue at the death on a day like this.
He had given Trillick a free from which you’d have fancied, if not been absolutely certain of, Lee Brennan to equalise from but called it back when he spotted linesman Sean Laverty’s flag up to indicate that the kick pass in to Colm Garrity had gone out of play. It was marginal.
Scotstown got a couple of frees their way in the moments that remained that didn’t fit with the fouls given over the other 80 minutes but the minutiae has to fall somebody’s road. It fell Scotstown’s.
Trillick were sore over the last couple of calls but the two minutes of added time had turned to four before the last post and chorus came on their hopes of a first ever provincial title.
To win like this will only straighten Scotstown backs and puff the chests out that bit more.
The game had become so chaotic, so orderless for the last 50 minutes that it became a rare thing of beauty in its own way.
It’s a beauty so unique, where players that get nothing for this push their bodies until they’re only able to trudge as though they’re wading through the pre-season glar.
Somebody always has to lose. Only one senior club in Ireland will finish the season without being knocked out somewhere along the way.
Trillick won’t be happy that they lost but when it settles, they’ll be happy with how they lost for there was nothing left to give.
If Scotstown have another 60 minutes of this in them, they might need another 20 again.
MATCH STATS
Scotstown: R Beggan (0-1 45); B Boylan, D McArdle; R O’Toole (0-1), D Morgan (0-1), C McCarthy (0-1), E Caulfield (0-1); D Hughes, M McCarville (0-1); J Carey, S Carey (0-3, 0-2 frees), J Hamill, K Hughes (0-2); M Maguire (0-2); J McCarron (0-4, 0-3 frees)
Subs: M McPhillips for Hamill (50), D Murray for J Carey (53), R McKenna for Maguire (60+2), R Malley for D Morgan (start of ET)
Trillick: J Maguire; Stevie O’Donnell, D Gallagher; R Brennan (0-1); D Tunney, P McCaughey, D Donnelly (0-1), D Gallagher, C Daly (0-1); R Donnelly (0-1), L Gray; Seanie O’Donnell (1-1), N Donnelly, R Gray (0-1); L Brennan (0-5, 0-2 frees, 0-1 45), J Garrity (0-1)
Subs: C Garrity (0-1) for N Donnelly (38), D McQuaid for Tunney (48)
Referee: K Faloon (Armagh)
