THE FUTURE IS NOW FOR ST MARY'S

Loath as I am to make brash predictions, the almost gravitational pull to say that Sunday’s Connacht Gold Senior Championship Final is the start of a new era of St Mary’s domination is feeling nearly impossible to resist.

Predictions come back to bite you on the ass as I know all too well - just last week, I trumpeted that an up and coming St Mary’s Kiltoghert were going to have to wait that little bit longer to end their nine year wait for the Fenagh Cup, that I believed Mohill, and Keith Beirne in particular, were going to be impossible to stop.

Here and now is all that matters when it comes to County Final day

THE LAST POINT

Long term planning and development is the key to success for most clubs, writes John Connolly, but once you get into a County Final, it is the here and now that matters

Trouble with boldly setting forth your opinions  is that games take on a life of their own and  while the  feeling that St Mary’s didn’t quite have the same firepower as Mohill might have been correct,  they did have just the right amount to win a tactical arm-wrestle that Sunday’s Leitrim club showpiece descended into.

I got it right that St Mary’s wouldn’t play with reckless abandon but you didn’t need to be Nostradamus to know that but nobody - Nostradamus, the Man above, Old Moore’s Almanac or even the most die-hard St Mary’s supporters - predicted that a fearless St Mary's would hunt down a five point Mohill lead and it would be the 2020 champions who ended up somewhat headless in the gripping final minutes.

The final quarter defies description - which is a bit of a problem given the business I’m in - but a Mohill team seemingly cruising to their expected victory conceded a barrage of points in a five minute spell that saw their lead wiped out and with the crowd now roaring them on, St Mary’s reached out for immortality.

When Mohill look back, this more than any other final they’ve lost will be regarded as the one that got away. They know better than most you’ve got to keep a young team down as long as you can, St Mary’s did it to them in 2013 after all but you just know that the young guns  are going to have their day.

Regrets, Mohill will have a few for sure - Ronan Kennedy missed a wonderful chance to put Mohill back in front when Keith Beirne opted to go short with a free when the world and his wife was expecting him to put it over the bar while Domhnaill Flynn also dragged a shot wide in added time.

But what really shocked me was seeing a vastly experienced Mohill team, whose 'sang froid' in the most high pressure situations has become their trademark down through the years, seemingly losing composure by pushing for a goal in added time when they had a man advantage thanks to James McGrail's black card  and all they needed was a couple of points!

THERE'S NO PERFECT WAY TO LOSE

THE LAST POINT

This is not kicking Mohill when they’re down, I’ve too much respect for a team that is more than young enough to come back to lift the Fenagh Cup once more but it was so out of character, so unusual that even fanatical St Mary’s supporters couldn’t believe what they had witnessed.

From what I’ve heard, even minutes after the final whistle, Eamonn O’Hara is copping most of the flack in a shell-shocked Mohill but I don’t know if that is really fair. Everyone makes errors, players, managers, referees, media but O’Hara and his management team got Mohill into the position they were in. And just how do you blame the manager for players missing shots they’d normally score with their eyes closed.

Pressure does funny things to people but Mohill  always  thrived on those moments and when Alan Tuthill snuck in for the game's only goal,  it looked as if Mohill had again found the edge in a game that was almost as tactical as a chess match. It is not a goal the St Mary’s defence or keeper Sean Reynolds will want to see again but  it  reinforced our preconceived notions that Mohill know how to win games and a young St Mary’s just didn’t have the tactical nous to challenge them - how wrong we were!

For a team hailed for its youth, it was one of the old stagers in James McGrail, appearing in his fifth final without ever tasting victory, who settled St Mary's  down at halftime. The message of “one point followed by another and another” is so simple it is easy to overlook but that is exactly what St Mary’s did.

You can’t quite say that St Mary’s were a different team in the second half - the first 15 minutes were a tale of missed opportunities and a sense that the game was slipping away from them. But what these young St Mary’s players have is an expectation of winning, a harder edge than we’ve seen from them before and once they got a sniff that there was a chance of victory, there was no stopping them.

Time to split the split season

THE LAST POINT

Jack Barnes had the sort of super sub introduction you  only dream about, intercepting a kickout from Padraig Tighe - who may not have realised that a new man was on the pitch - to set up Jack Casey for the levelling point. Barnes, disappointed to miss out on a starting spot, played like a man possessed and so did the rest of his teammates.

Now it was players in white & blue winning the 50-50, 30-70 battles as their disbelieving fans roared themselves hoarse and Mohill, those battle hardened warriors, crumbled in the face of it. The black card for McGrail gave Mohill an unexpected lifeline but their composure was gone and the chances they normally would pop over the bar were missed.

Credit St Mary’s for that - their defence harried and hassled Mohill’s deadly duo Keith Beirne and Jordan Reynolds so effectively that the men in green seemed reluctant to take on a shot while St Mary's youngsters played with a confidence and maturity that many of us, me included, thought was beyond them at this stage of their young careers.

No more than last year, I had a different candidate for Man of the Match and the same as last year, I can completely understand why so many of my colleagues went for Paul Keaney. He was St Mary's quarter-back in that final quarter, an inspiring presence in the middle of the park and he ended up the game’s top scorer.

Yet, and this is not taking away from Keaney, I’d have gone for Nicholas McWeeney myself. A case could certainly be made for Jack Casey, James McGrail or Mark Diffley, even Diarmuid Kelleher was in there but for me, McWeeney was the heartbeat of his team, keeping them grounded when it was going against them and driving them forward.

McWeeney is one of the veterans of this team but when he looks around, I imagine even he is dreaming of a new dynasty in Leitrim Club football. Eleven players 22 years old or younger starting and what seems like an endless supply chain in the background, the club’s Minor title victory a startling reminder of the talent in the St Mary’s ranks.

A split second can change everything

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It is why, coming back to the initial words in this column, I find it  hard to avoid making grand predictions about the future and St Mary’s dominating in the years ahead - a notion, I imagine, that  is causing quite a bit of consternation among St Mary’s potential rivals right now.

One observer of the Leitrim club scene whose view I’d trust remarked to me that  St Mary’s victorious Minor team is the first team to fully come through their superb underage system, that the generation of Paul Keaney, David O’Connell, Adam Reynolds, Oisin Bohan & Diarmuid Kelleher were outliers - this Minor team came all the way up through their academy but it is certainly not the last.

St Mary's aren't going to win each and every championship for the next ten years but they should win quite a lot. Nobody knows what will happen in the future - players lose interest, lose form, emigrate and that is why you've got to make hay when the sun shines - the sun shone on St Mary's last Sunday certainly and it looks set to shine for years to come.