CENTRE-forward Orla Gribben has been an ever-present on Clonduff teams over the past decade.
Coming into Saturday’s Ulster intermediate final, Clonduff had won three and lost three of the six finals they had appeared in. Five of their previous six finals were against Eglish.
On Saturday, Gribben claimed her fourth provincial club medal after another huge battle with the Tyrone side,
“Eglish gave us a really tough game today. The way they came at us in the first half, it took us a while to get up to the speed of things. That game was a level above what we had experienced in the Down championship.”
“We know Eglish are a great team and they have had time to prepare for this final; they had probably seen us a couple of times in Down. They just got in on every ball, gave us no time at all to settle.
“It was a really tough first half and we were probably lucky enough to go in level at half time.”
The reason they ended up on 1-5 each was because Gribben played a pass across the six yard line deep in first half injury time, picking out Beth Fitzpatrick who crashed the sliotar to the net.
“It was good going in level after the way Eglish had played. We were able to regroup and we matched them better in the second half and managed to play a bit more like we had been doing in the Down championship.
“But the game was in the melting pot right up to the last free from Ciara Donnelly. Our backs did really well,” says the Banbridge based teacher.
Former St Gall’s and Antrim player Kieran McGourty has taken over as manager of Clonduff this year and Gribben was also keen to give the “quiet man” from Belfast a lot of credit.
“Kieran has been in the background there for a couple of years now. This year he is in charge. He is a very good manager, bringing different things to us, a different mind-set and getting us thinking more about where we are placing the ball, rather than just getting it up the field.
“I really like hearing him talk. He has done a lot of work with us. Our stick-work has improved but you probably wouldn’t see much of it today though. It wasn’t our best performance.
“But we managed to get through and we are now playing against Clanmaurice of Kerry. We don’t know anything about them. We will have to find out more over the next couple of weeks.
“Three weeks aren’t long flying in and we have a lot of things to work on after that performance as well as find out more about the Kerry team.”