Headford juniors power into Connacht final

Cill Chomain 1-7

HEADFORD footballers swept into this Connacht junior semi-final at MacHale Park with a passion that stunned Cill Chomain and from which the Mayo champions never fully recovered for the entire hour.

Sinewy and dogged, the Galway men dictated most of the play against opponents no less strapping, but a lot less convinced of their own attributes, and the four points that separated them at the end was a merited margin.

It was junior stuff in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, honest, hard-hitting and not for the faint-hearted. The resolve of the Galway side was evident from their opening blitz.

Although the Mayo men were first to score, Headford’s domination of the exchanges reaped enough self-belief to sustain their authority after Cill Chomain cut their lead to two points ten minutes from the end.

The crucial score came in the 11th minute, a simple enough goal fisted into the net by Padraic Walsh from a centre by Niall Meeneghan. Its affect was catastrophic. Cill Chomain¹s challenge visibly wilted. The sum of their effort was one further point for the remainder of the half.

To add to their woes, they lost their pivotal centre back David Coyle midway through the half, forcing a hold-up of some six minutes in play while medics attended to the injured player.

The break gave a chance to the North Mayo men to weigh up their situation, and while they did mount stiffer resistance afterwards they were unable to avert the danger emanating from Headford’s full forward line of Padraic Walsh and Sean and Niall Meeneghan. From that trinity stemmed all but one point of the winners’ total, most of them from frees.

Well supplied from midfield where Eoin McHugh and Darragh Bane had the edge over Brendan and Derek Moran, the two Meeneghans bagged the final three points (Niall’s two from play) of the first half, setting the team up with a comfortable cushion of 1-4 to 0-2 to carry into the second half.

Cill Choman’s meagre total was an indication of the pressure exerted by the Galway champions, and their difficulty in finding a way past the Headford hard-tackling half-back line of Reece O’Toole and Fintan and Pat Joyce. Full report