Creggs delighted to finally get 'monkey off the back'

With the final whistle long gone and the cup getting passed around so different players and families could pose for pictures, James Brandon could finally put words to the tension that was impossible to miss in the Creggs camp in the lead-up to Sunday’s Connacht Junior Cup final.

Matched up against a Dunmore team that contested their first-ever final last year, on the crest of a wave after they secured league glory with a superb win away to Connemara, it looked to outsiders as if the stage was set for a coronation, rather than a contest.

Within the Creggs camp however, Brandon knew that seemingly gentle terrain could very easily turn out to be a minefield.

“I was listening to the build-up the other day and there was talk of how Creggs were favourites for this reason and that, but that wasn’t how we looked at it,” said the team captain.

“Once bitten twice shy, we came into a final three years ago against Westport and went home empty-handed. Thirty years very easily turns into 31 years and then 32 years so it was time to get the monkey off the back. But there was definitely nerves there, it was a very big occasion”.

Two early tries should have settled their nerves, but when two scores didn’t become three with half-time looming, the flanker was conscious of how they were still in a tight contest.

“It was very humid to begin with, we were wrecked after the first 20 or 30 minutes. We had been down here (pointing to the near end of the field), camped in their half but we only got two scores out of it, until we got that third just before half-time, which was very important.

“They had taken a yellow card and we had a wind with us, so we knew that they were going to get a purple patch in the second half and that duly came. But thankfully we had enough in the tank”.

It wasn’t that the opportunities were there. A couple of close calls went against them for forward passes, while a lot more opportunities were fumbled just when it looked like the defence was about to open up.

“That’s cup rugby, it doesn’t matter if it’s the first round or the final, that happens, and happened to us in all of our games” Brandon replied.

“We even knew from our training last night, it wasn’t a case of nothing going right but it wasn’t ideal but it was a cup final so that was always going to be the way that it was always going to go”.

So Creggs met expectations with their win. The club’s second team didn’t get a win, but their narrow defeat to a strong J1A side in Castlebar was a result that exceeded expectations, and it also proved to be a valuable distraction tool for the firsts.

“That took our minds off the game as well, it was great”, Brandon said.

“We didn’t come up here for the whole day, we would have felt that would have been too long, but on the bus up, that’s all we were thinking about until we were 20 minutes outside Ballina. To have the seconds going that close to Castlebar, who are in the top four of the top division, is a testament to how good those players are, any one of them could slot into the firsts and they’d hold their own.

"The last few training sessions have been 15 on 15 with extra lads to come in, and when you can do that you come on in leaps and bounds,” he said.

So will their next leap carry them past Bective and into an AIL play-off?

“It wasn’t written down at the start of the year or anything, but our attitude at the start of the year was to win everything. We got knocked out of the All-Ireland Junior Cup against Tullow early on when we were still missing lads with football and we were disappointed with that, but since then we’ve kicked on and won everything in front of us. 

"We don’t see Bective any different, we’ll go up and try and win the game, and if we win it we win it, we’ll carry on from there”.