'County final day is one of the best days of your life, provided you win'

Athy won’t be heading up to Newbridge for the County Final just to enjoy the day out.

“As we said in the huddle afterwards, the county final day is one of the best days of your life, provided you win,” joint manager Conor Ronan told the Kildare Nationalist after Sunday’s dramatic win over Sarsfields.

But he is happy to go in as underdogs and understands that.

“We kind of felt we’d been underdogs throughout the championship. We’ve no issue with that, we know where we are. Naas, they’ve won the last number of county titles and rightly so, they’re favourites going into it.” 

But he reminded us of “the experience we have in that team. We’ve lads who’ve won two county medals in 2011 and 2020 and we’ll lean on the experienced lads.” Plenty of experience too in a management team packed with local clubmen.

“Myself, James (Eaton), Rossie (Bell), we’ve been around the block so we’ll get the recovery right straight away, we’ve picked up a couple of niggles there, we’ll get those bodies right and we’ll just get ready for Naas to have a real good cut at it in two weeks’ time.” 

As for Sunday, Ronan was relieved to get over the line having led by six points coming down the straight.

“When Sarsfields start coming back at you like that…previously I would have been on the pitch. Was it back in 2015 when we were winning a county final the same thing happened and they got over the line but credit to the lads, they just never wilted. We lost the ball in the last play and Padraig Spillane pulls off a great block right at the end.” 

He insists this performance was player-led. “The lads drove training for the last two weeks. We’ve had to say very little, they’ve just been saying ‘lads, we have to work like dogs, we know we have the football ability,’ but we just have to bring that level of work rate.” Despite a six-point lead he wasn’t entirely happy at half-time.

“Happy enough but our shooting efficiency was quite poor. I think we were around 60% or something in the first half after playing with the wind. But we were creating the chances and we knew in the second half if we played a similar way we’d still create chances and we know we have shooters in the team and any chances we got in front of the posts in the second half we took most of them.” 

Ronan reserved praise for youngsters like Ronan Kelly, Colm Moran “throughout the whole second half” and Sean Bride, as well as stand-in ‘keeper Shane Jackman, who had played outfield all through the league.

“Shane hasn’t put a foot wrong. We actually flagged it with him probably in the middle of June, ‘did you ever play in goals before.’ We were just playing around with the idea, not even thinking we’d need him. He knew two days before the Caragh game that it was a strong possibility, stepped straight in, didn’t put a foot wrong again there today, we can’t fault him on anything, he couldn’t do anything about the two goals, two great finishes.”