Four Roads’ county final to lose
READY TOP ROLL: Cathal, Jack and Daniel Crehan at Athleague training last week ahead of Sunday's senior hurling championship final against Four Roads in Athleague.
For the people of Four Roads, they were the halcyon days. Eight county titles in a row between 2008 and 2015, and while success in Connacht eluded the club, they were by far the dominant power on the local stage.
Of course, once they backed up that narrow 0-6 to 0-5 win over Pearses in 2008 with a dominant performance in the following year’s decider against Oran, one knock-on effect from their superiority was that the showpiece domestic occasion in Roscommon hurling — the county final — didn’t have the same appeal to neutrals in terms of a competitive spectacle. Pearses pushed them to the wire in 2012, but it was only when the Tisrara-based club started to slip back into the pack that the big day started to feel like a “can’t miss” occasion all over again.
Suddenly, even while Roscommon hurling struggled to live up to former glories on the national stage, county finals were more enjoyable than ever for neutral supporters. Oran’s dramatic replay win in 2016, Pearses ending a 30-year drought 12 months later, then Athleague edging a tense “Old Firm” before Four Roads secured revenge next time out.
Two thrilling and tense semi-finals led to high quality 2020 showdown, and rarely has the county seen as much buzz and hype as there was for the 2021 Athleague versus Tremane parish derby. Finally, there was last year, when Four Roads won well, but very few would have expected it to be as comfortable as that.
Making an argument for why this year’s final should be a belter of a game that needs to be seen is much tougher altogether. On the one hand, Shane Curley and his management team might not want to read that they are anywhere from six to eight-point favourites for a county final, and yet it would be an insult to their form and their play so far to say that they are anything else.
Four Roads are moving the ball very slickly, they’ve got scorers all over the pitch, they regularly use their full bench and still maintain the same high standards, and they have a much greater ability to win their own ball from the puckout. This is a result of their ability to stack half-forward line with powerful ball-winners this year, and their use of space and angles is also very good in this regard, particularly in terms of creating pockets for players like Cathal Dolan to drop back and pick up handy 60-yard darts from Noel Fallon.
If there were concerns, some of them might have stemmed from Brendan Mulry’s lack of form relative to the heights that he can hit, but he’s still coming up with goals, including one in the semi-final against Tremane. Equally, the deployment of Micheál Kelly in the forward line has raised a few eyebrows, and while there have been stages in the championship when he dropped back into his more usual role in the half-back line, Curley has persisted with the move and he is delivering scores.
So instead of looking for chinks in Four Roads’ armour, because if any exist, they haven’t been exposed so far, the question instead becomes: What can Athleague do to elevate their game to a level that will make this contest competitive?
First and foremost here, the answer has to be pace and power in possession. Goals have carried Athleague through a lot of games this year, most notably their semi-final win, and it’s their ability to break the tackle and create overlaps that has opened up the majority of those chances.
Tommy Morris has been the find of the year for Four Roads so far, as the 18-year-old has defied his inexperience to make the centre-back berth his own. The temptation for Athleague must surely be to put Aengus Lyons up against him, offering a whole new level of test for Morris, who is sure to be coveted by at least a couple of county panels next spring.
Athleague need Lyons to make a significant contribution here, just as they do his brother Tadhg in the corner, where the match-up will also be crucial.
Johnny Moran — the 2022 county final Man of the Match — would have the guile and the cuteness not to let the younger Lyons brother sneak in behind him, but at roughly double the corner-forward’s age, it would be asking a lot of Moran to take on Lyons in straight line runs. Jimmy Hoey might be a better match in that regard, though an early foul or two from Hoey might necessitate a Plan B.
More than anything else, however, Athleague need their half-back line to dominate in the air, and they have the potential to do so. Eoghan and Naoise Coyle have both the hurling and the physicality to match up well with anyone, while Stephen Kilcommins has stepped up to a new level in 2023 and is one of the main reasons why Athleague emerged from the chasing pack as the clear “number one contenders” to Four Roads’ throne.
It becomes much tougher to find gaps for short puckouts when the opposition has closed off the option of Fallon simply hammering the sliothar downfield, as players like Eoin Ward from midfield and Tomás Clayton from the inside forward line can each drop into those gaps on either sideline, and they certainly won’t shy away from putting the tackles in that are needed to discommode Four Roads and disrupt their ability to create anything up to 40 scoring chances in the game.
Though they could never admit as much, Athleague may have been suited by Dr. Hyde Park a bit more than their own home field here. If their half-back line goes well, that might lead to the Four Roads half-forwards stepping out and trying to create an opening for Noel Fallon to overshoot them, and to bring in the likes of Conor or Brendan Mulry as a primary target, which will be a whole other conundrum for Gary Fallon and his selectors to solve.
Athleague will also point to their bench as a strong point, and certainly they got plenty out of Cathal Crehan, Alan Moore and, in particular, Robbie Fallon last time out. Will they profit any more than Four Roads do from the likely introduction of Conor Kelly, Liam Óg Coyle and a few other of their younger prodigies? That’s another matter.
They say the last refuge of the scoundrel is patriotism, and that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. In GAA, the last refuge of the team with a mountain to climb is usually tradition, or history.
There is a significant local rivalry aspect here, and of course on any given day, the pressure of the occasion can be a lot of the favourites to bear. There have been instances too in recent years where Four Roads have underperformed in big knockout games, having looked impregnable in round robin competition.
Quite often, however, these are things that might swing a close game by a point or two. When one considers how well Athleague will have to hurl to make their own strengths hold up, then one adds that to the issues they will have in negating the most impressive attributes of Four Roads, and a lot of things would have to fall into place for this to turn out to be a close game.
There have been some intriguing and unpredictable county finals over the past decade. The grim prognosis from an Athleague perspective is that this game does not belong in that category.
