A fair conclusion to a fair-standard county final

Date Published: {J}

IN the 48 hours after their rousing semi-final replay win over Portumna, the club which has dominated the Galway hurling championship for the best part of a decade, some of the Loughrea team surely had moments when they thought that they were ‘champions’ already such was the scale of that achievement and the outpouring of joy in the parish as a result of beating the three-times All-Ireland title holders.

Against that background, it can’t have been easy for Loughrea to get their heads around the reality that they still had another match – two, as it now transpires – to play as the club closed in on their third ever county title and, for long tracts of Sunday’s drawn county final against Clarinbridge, it appeared that Joe Sweeney’s squad were struggling to rise to the challenge in front of a big crowd of 10,000 at Pearse Stadium.

Six points down early in the second-half, Loughrea were in a major hole and for much of a low scoring and uninspiring third quarter, the 2006 champions were finding it difficult to get anything going. Clarinbridge, the crisper and more mobile outfit, had done most of the classier hurling and with Mark Kerins rolling back the years on the forty, they already had one hand on the Tom Callanan Cup.

Loughrea, as is their tradition, continued to toil in the hope of a breakthrough and though gradually improving all over the field, they needed somebody to take the final by the scruff of the neck or else flooring Portumna was going to count for nothing. And right on cue, up stepped young Johnny Coen to dig holes in a previously secure Clarinbridge defence as a fair-standard encounter ended in a welter of excitement.

The Galway U-21 player picked off two priceless points before rifling a penalty to the roof of the opposition net to propel Loughrea into a scarcely believable 1-14 to 2-10 injury time lead. Clarinbridge must have been rocked by losing control of the match and while referee Michael Dolan made a harsh call – at least, in the context of not penalising what appeared illegal hand passes from David Forde and Alan Kerins earlier in the game – in pulling up Vinny Maher for a ‘foul’, the 2001 title holders were certainly entitled to a draw.

The pressure was now on Mark Kerins as he stood over that 55 yards free, but the Clarinbridge centre forward held his nerve in forcing the first county final replay since the 1998 decider between Athenry and Abbey/Duniry. Kerins finished the game with 1-9 to his credit with his well taken (and engineered) goal just before the interval giving Micheál Donoghue’s charges a deserved lead of 2-6 to 0-7.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.