Gort captain Coen sums up spirit of new champs

STEPHEN GLENNON

ANDY Coen slumps against the wall and wipes his lips. Battered and bruised, dehydrated and mentally drained, a lesser soldier would crumble. Not the Gort captain though.

He has just delivered one of the most charismatic, passionate and noble victory speeches ever to grace Pearse Stadium and, right now, he is floating carelessly somewhere between the heady heights of a club hurler’s Utopia and the need for a deep slumber.

Sunday’s county final may have been the hardest game he ever played, but having waited so long for a county championship senior medal, he is not going to rest the weary body just yet. On these occasions, you look to find those hidden depths, as Gort did in the closing minutes of an exciting county final. Coen fervently draws the water from the well once again . . . a well that had previously been dry and dormant for 28 years.

“We would have put a certain amount of pressure on ourselves to make sure we performed. Every day before we went out in matches, we said we were to expect that of ourselves and put the pressure on ourselves to perform and, today, while at times it didn’t look good, we dug deep and got there in the end,” says the Gort captain.

Gort had signalled their intentions from the off in this contest, evoking a war cry fuelled by a thirst, by a hunger, by an intensity. Coen says, though, that this was something they had been very conscious of, given, one, the team had not started well in their quarter or semi-final games against Loughrea or St. Thomas’ and, two, by the mere fact that they were facing the All-Ireland club champions.

“We had to put pressure on David Forde and we had to put pressure on Jamie Cannon and Michael Donoghue and stop Barry Daly’s runs. Once we had our midfield and half-forwards putting the pressure on, we built our base from that. Once we got to half-time, we knew then we had to push on from the start of the second half.”

This they did initially, although the concession of a “freak” goal on 46 minutes – to secure Clarinbridge parity – threatened to undo all their earlier fine work, but Coen says there was a realisation that these things can happen in the final and the test of any team’s credentials is how they deal with these setbacks. He maintains Gort had the team – and, more importantly – the squad to do that.

“You often hear about teams down through the years that they have nothing on the bench and I suppose, truth be told, if they had them on the bench they would be on the field at some stage or other. But we are lucky that we have had a lot of underage players coming through the last few years and we just had a situation this year where we had two or three lads who were absolutely chomping at the bit to get on.

“Those players were unlucky not to start and the main idea was to have them not happy on the line so that when they did come in they would use that to get themselves into the game. Even against Loughrea, you saw that when Keith Killilea came on and got a great goal. Martin Nestor also chipped in during that game while Albert Mullins also contributed.

“Today, Kris Finnegan, who had come back from London, came on in goal and did his bit. So, everyone did their bit at some stage [during the championship]. And that is the way you have to have your subs. They cannot be happy on the line. They have to be mad for road.”

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