Quine content to be back in the hot seat

Oran Hurling Club has six county senior hurling titles to its name. It says something about Francie Quine’s legacy that he’s had a hand in three of them.

As a player in 1998 and 2004, he experienced the glory days, while he was also part of the management team alongside Colm Kelly and Harry Crowley that oversaw the Mickey Cunniffe’s Cup last redeployment to Rockfield in 2016.

This season was supposed to be different. Having been part of Kieran Farrell’s management team for the previous two seasons, he had intended to put his feet up. But watching a group of players soldering away on their own at the start of the season didn’t sit easily with him.

“I suppose it’s hard to get away from it. I’m coming here for the guts of 40 years. I said after last year that I’d take a break from it, so it wasn’t a job I went looking for.

“The players had come together at the start of the year. When I was approached first, my first question was ‘how are we for numbers’ because we struggled for numbers last year. But I soon discovered that they had seven or eight sessions done themselves.

“I went to three or four league games and a couple of junior games. I found it hard to see them there without anyone on the sideline. Damian and Eamonn Kenny put a good bit of pressure on. I remember Damian ringing me on a Monday night to see would I take them for the year? To see no one with them, with a good bit of the year gone, was disheartening,” he recalled.

Not surprisingly, Quine’s arm was twisted. Padraig Crehan had some early groundwork done with the group in terms of training. Brian Crehan — described by Quine “as genuine as the day is long” — was also recruited, and, suddenly, Oran were in business.

“If you’re away for a few weeks, miss a few games, or don’t happen to get to Rockfield for different reasons, it might drift into the back of your mind. Then you might come in here and see a game, and you’d look to be stuck in the middle of it again.

“I have no doubt that if someone else had taken the job, I’d be here supporting the lads 100 per cent. But I couldn’t just watch a group of honest lads knowing there was no one to look after them, so that’s why I’m here,” he continued.

Quine had felt that the margins between success and failure were wafer thin. In his eyes, an extra couple of per cent on the training paddock, and Oran would be in with a shout of being part of Roscommon hurling’s showpiece occasion for the first time in nine seasons at King and Moffatt Dr. Hyde Park next Sunday.

“I suppose they (the players) sat back and had a hard look at themselves over the last two years. Kieran Farrell, myself and Mike Fallon would have been here every evening with small numbers. We never failed to show up.

"We lost a lot of games last year by a puck of the ball. We had Athleague beaten twice in Creggs, and we still lost the game. The margins were small, so once the lads came together and decided to put in a bigger effort, that was enough for me.

“Maybe we have deserved to be the underdogs. We were underdogs in games last year, and deservedly so, because we lost them by a couple of points. I would have told the lads last year that those small differences come down to being together. If they had done a bit more last year, we probably would have got over the line in some of those games.

“But the work has been done this year. We’ve got over the line in most games. We were lucky to draw with Athleague, we beat Tremane by two points, beat Dominic’s by a couple of points and then played Four Roads in an unusual type of game as both of us were in a semi-final.

“We went at it to a certain extent, they went at it to a certain extent. We were missing four lads that day genuinely through injury. They were missing a few lads.

“Then it was Dominic’s again, and we just got over the line again. Getting over the line in those games, the bit of work that we didn’t do last year has got us through this year,” he explained.

But a clash with the county’s hurling kingpins next Sunday will require these Oran players to go deeper into the well.

“We are in bonus territory. I’m under no illusions about what Four Roads are capable of. All we can do is do our best to keep the scoreboard ticking over on our side and find a way to slow down the firepower that they have.

“At the start of the year, I would have felt that there were six teams — ourselves, St. Dominic’s, Pádraig Pearses, Athleague, Roscommon Gaels and Tremane — at the one level. But Four Roads are a step ahead.

“To me, it was whoever worked the hardest among those six teams would give themselves a great chance against each other.

“But I’m looking at Four Roads all year. They just set the standard. We’re the ones out of the six that’s there on Sunday to take them on. It’s a huge task.

“When you’re on your own during the day, it can be scary thinking about their six forwards and their attacking half-back line, not to mention the pace they have around the middle of the field. But we have to work as hard as we can between now and the final to get the lads ready for that challenge. I haven’t figured out yet how we are going to stop them, but I’ll work hard at it,” he vowed.