Éire Óg manager, Paul Madden. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill
In a year where Éire Óg were crowned Clare SFC champions, winning manager Paul Madden reflected on the end of their campaign by expressing his confidence for their future.
Cork side St Finbarr’s proved a level above Éire Óg in the Munster club when they recorded a 2-14 0-12 win. The green flags were the only goals conceded by the Ennis club in their 2021 championship run.
Éire Óg boss, Paul Madden immediately pointed to the concession of those goals when looking back on their provincial semi-final loss. “Goals win games and we knew we’d be under pressure today and we said to the lads that if we concede a goal, it’s not the end of the world but I think we’d be more annoyed about how we conceded the first because we switched off totally.
“Probably over the game as whole, that was the ultimate difference, those small margins. When you’re playing at this level, you simply can’t switch off, you’ve got to nail your frees and generally be on top of your game the whole way through.So look, this is a learning for a lot of our lads but I have to say how proud I am of them. We were facing down a barrel at half-time, having conceded two silly goals by our book and to a man they responded brilliantly and I thought we were fantastic in the second half,” Madden said.
He felt the Leesiders had a major chance to taste Munster glory. “At the end of the day though, you have to give credit to St Finbarr’s, they’re a fine side, are big and strong and have good forwards and they’ve a great chance of winning Munster as we would have if we had won today. But if we can take learnings from it which I’m sure we will as we’ve a lot of young lads playing, the future’s bright I’d say.”
