St. Mary’s rebuild on the cusp of bearing fruit

A fiercely competitive Leydon Brothers Junior A championship where every one of the seven participating clubs would have started the season with realistic aspirations of winning silverware has been whittled down to two sides that have emerged as the clearly dominant teams over the course of the last two months.

Both Northern Harps and St. Mary’s lean heavily on their respective free-scoring attacks, with Harps averaging over 21 points per game and St. Mary’s bettering that by two.

Many of those games were played in top of the ground conditions however, and as winter sets in, the big question will be which side is better able to adapt their game.

St. Mary’s have already answered that question in the quarter-final when Northern Harps were not in action after topping their group and thus securing their straight passage through to the last four. The weather all across Roscommon that afternoon four weeks ago was dismal and still St. Mary’s put four goals past a competitive Oran team to progress.

“From the knockout games against Oran and our semi-final, we’ve pushed on and got some performances together. Definitely, we’ve improved as the championship has gone on,” highlighted Aisling Callaghan, who will be a central figure in the St. Mary’s defence on Saturday.

Callaghan was one of several players from the Tulsk-based club who picked up county medals on their run through the ranks at the end of the last decade, and she feels that the club is in a great position to go the same road again.

“We had a great run at junior and intermediate in 2017 and 2018, then fell back down again when we lost players,” she recalled.

“We’ve been rebuilding since then, girls have come in each year and last year we had a big influx of U-19s. They’re getting really confident in themselves and they’ve lifted the level of training. It’s a similar feeling to 2017 and it’s great to be back there.” 

 It’s all a lot newer for Northern Harps, one of the newer clubs in the county and a side that wasn’t even in existence back when Callaghan was winning county medals. Many of this Northern Harps side have grown up together and that has been a huge factor in the Elphin and Ballinameen club staying united and staying involved as they try to make that breakthrough.

“When Northern Harps first started, I was U-14 and most of us are still playing since then,” remembered Ciara Cunningham, one of her side’s leading attackers and a player that could well end up taking on Callaghan directly in Ballyleague on Saturday when the match gets underway at 11.45 a.m..

“We’ve always got on well, we push each other on, that makes a difference if players aren’t feeling the best at training. That group dynamic really stands to us.” 

Cunningham is open about the fact that Northern Harps haven’t always produced their best football in the big knockout games.

“We’ve put a lot of work into our fitness, but also our mindset,” she outlined “There’s no getting away from it, we used to do really well all through the year then we’d get to semi-finals or we’d get to finals and the heads would go and we just wouldn’t be able to push ourselves over the line.

“This year, it has to be just another match, we know what we can do on the field and we have to just go out and do it. Nerves are still there, it’s still a huge game, but we need to be able to strip all that away and just play football,” she pointed out.

Northern Harps won the group game between the two, but when it came to knockout football, St. Mary’s have looked that bit better. On the face of it, they look like the narrowest of favourites for the first game of Saturday’s treble header in Ballyleague.

Verdict: St. Mary’s