Comer is geared up for St. Gall's challenge

Dara Bradley

IT’S amazing how a good clipping can focus the mind. It was early June. Reigning County and Connacht champions Corofin were embarking on their first outing of the 2009 championship campaign and underdogs Micheál Breathnachs beat them out the gap.

It’s not often Gaeltacht sides, or any other team for that matter, runs rings around Galway’s most successful senior club team in the county for the past two decades.

“Breathnachs wiped us off the field that day,” admits Corofin captain Kieran Comer this week, as he prepares for this Sunday’s All-Ireland AIB Club Championship semi-final clash with St Gall’s.

“We just never got going and they deserved to win it. We knew we weren’t as bad as we played. We had a meeting with all the players and management a few days after the Breathnachs match and we asked ‘do we want to go further or just throw it all in and give up’. It probably was the kick in the ass we needed.”

On that summer’s day in Pearse Stadium, you’d have got long odds on Corofin surviving until St Patrick’s Day – now they are just an hour away from making it back to Croke Park for the first time in 12 years. The North Galway kingpins luckily had a safety net – the backdoor. A ‘bye’ in the next round gave the champs time to regroup and lick wounds. They subsequently needed extra-time to see off An Cheathru Rua and two bites of the cherry against Mountbellew/Moylough in the county final.

Corofin basically stuttered out of Galway but have built momentum since with solid wins over the Leitrim and Mayo champions in the Connacht series and now – with a bit of luck – the Belclare man hopes they are peaking just at the right time.“It took us a while to get motoring this year and w

e were lucky enough to get out of Galway. There was nothing between the teams in Galway this year; every game was close. We just took every game as it came.

“I suppose it was difficult to motivate ourselves, especially after last year when we were going training from January (2008) to the following February.

“I know last year was a long year (because of an All-Ireland quarter-final match against Tir Chonaill Gaels in London last January) – we didn’t really stop training at all. This year we’ve had more time off, we had a few days rest. It’s nice to get the break. Training has been going well and it’s just a case of getting match fit – there’s a big difference between being fit and being match fit,” he says.

Of course the defeat at the hands of Breathnachs wasn’t so unexpected in hindsight. Remember, this was a Corofin outfit still hurting – and probably still tired – from the 2008 campaign which ended with in defeat to Dublin’s Kilmacud Crokes in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final.

How much will that defeat, which brought Corofin’s number of losses at the All-Ireland semi-final stage to three out of four attempts – play on their minds going into Sunday’s clash?

For more, read page 56 of this week's Galway City Tribune.