*Liam Tierney keeps his foot on the ball and his hand on the jersey of Andrew Shannon. Photograph: Burren Eye Photography.
STARTING OFF in the Clare senior football championship with a win was the aspiration for St Breckan’s, it may not have been achieved but it hasn’t derailed their ambitions.
Kilmurry Ibrickane had one point to spare over last year’s quarter-finalists in the first round of the Clare SFC, the West Clare side hitting 1-03 without reply in the third quarter to send them on their way to victory.
St Breckan’s boss Declan O’Keeffe acknowledged that this was a “very costly” period. “I actually missed the second goal because I was turned around to Pat on the sideline and I don’t know what really happened, it’s very basic when you give away a goal like that, we’ll sit down during the week and examine it with the players.
“We’ll have to take the positives out of it and there was a lot of them, I thought we manufactured some great scores, there was some great individual displays at times. We need to tidy up a bit in defence but this is a three team group and three teams come out, we always said we wouldn’t depend on that and try to go out and win every game, that will be no different the next day against a very youthful and improving side from St Joseph’s Doora/Barefield, it’s all up for grabs for everyone in the group”.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, the former Kerry netminder outlined, “You go out to win every game in this competition, we’re disappointed but I thought the lads showed very well when our backs were to the wall and we were down four points, we brought it back to a point and they really fought back, they stayed in the game and you couldn’t ask any more of players, we had a couple of injuries coming into the game but everybody that took to the field did their best. It was a night for errors and it was always the team who made the least errors would get through and I suppose Kilmurry Ibrickane showed what a team they were and they had the team to get over it in the end”.
Already down four of last year’s starting team due to emigration, they were dealt a further blow when talisman Joe McGann was forced off with an ankle injury on fifteen minutes. “Joe is one of the top forwards in the county and one of our marquee players, it is very hard to do without him but the lads responded very well, Liam Tierney came in and scored a goal after a couple of minutes. The lads worked very hard, we’re down six players from last year and it’s very hard for a small rural parish to take, we’re not making any excuses though because we have what we have, we’re no different to a lot of teams in the competition, panels are narrow with the exception of a couple of town teams but we won’t use that as an excuse,” Declan commented.
Regrouping in round two is now the objective for the North Clare outfit, O’Keeffe said. “I said to the lads outside that we were very disappointed but it is not a fatal blow, we’re very much in the competition all the time and we’re going to prepare accordingly, we’ll take every game as it comes and see where it gets us, the end game is to try get in the hat for the quarter-finals, we’ll see after that because there will be only eight teams left then, that is where we’re at”.
