Taming the bear and teaching the students

Let's get straight to the point. What was David McHale from Knockmore saying to Aidan O’Shea in that photograph from the county semi-final?

“Ah look, it was just the two of us being competitive and trying to get the best for our sides,” McHale told The Mayo News at the county final press night in Hastings Insurance MacHale Park.

“Aidan had just kicked a free and I might have had a couple of verbals with him and that was it. It was all over in a couple of seconds.”

What did he say back?

“He just told me where to go really,” laughed the tough-tackling corner-back. “It was great to come out the right side of a battle like that. Breaffy had a fantastic year. It looked like they were coming out the right side for the end of the year but we got a bit of an impact off the bench and a bit of a red card that turned the game back to a bit level, and we just kicked on from there.”

It’s been an ‘up and down’ year for McHale and Knockmore. Beaten by Ballaghaderreen in the first round, they eventually progressed from the group without uprooting as much as a sapling.

McHales says losing in Ballaghaderreen was ‘definitely not something we planned for, especially with the home quarter-finals this year.’

“Getting beat by a point up there, while it seemed like a disaster at the time, it mightn’t have been the end of the world.”

Far from it, in fact. From the ashes of defeat rose a Knockmore team that saw off Claremorris, Belmullet, Garrymore and a fancied Breaffy en route to a third county final in five years.

That Breaffy game had more subplots than Pulp Fiction. But the one that captured most public imagination was the appearance of 17-year-old Billy Ruane, who came off the bench to score a game-winning goal for the Saffron and Blue.

David McHale knows Billy better than most because he passes him regularly in the corridor in St Muredach’s College in Ballina, where he has taught woodwork and drawing for the past two years.

“It’s nice having Billy around the place. It’s a bit different to last year when I had Luke Feeney in the classroom at the other side of me,” McHale offered with a smile.

“Billy is a good bit of stuff. I saw him play a good bit of schools football last year. They could really see then that he’d have an impact at senior football whenever he was coming through. He was playing a fair bit of rugby [with Ballina and Connacht] and it stood to him. He’s come back with us since the academies finished and he made an impact the last day.

The qualities of a good scrum-half have clearly translated well onto the football field.

“His decision making is very good,” says McHale. “You could see that when he came in the last day he was very calm and used the ball well.”

A county final is nothing new to McHale, except the prospect of bringing the Moclair Cup into a classroom deep behind enemy lines on Monday/Tuesday morning.

“Ah look there is obviously that edge to it with it being a local rivalry. But you can’t dwell too much on that either because you can kind of lose your focus a small bit,” he says, when asked about the Ballina-Knockmore rivalry.

“It’s still a game of football. They’re still fifteen fellas and we’re still fifteen fellas and we got to just focus on our own game and on our own strengths and hopefully put a performance together for sixty minutes.”