Ballina Stephenites ‘desperately disappointed’ after penalty heartbreak

OUT on the pitch the noise of celebrating Coolera Strandhill supporters danced across the greying Sligo sky. In the dressing room area the sound of speeches and applause seeped out the windows as Ballina Stephenites digested a heart-wrenching defeat at the end of a long season.

Soon, Niall Heffernan emerged to speak with The Mayo News and put words on the disappointment felt by the entire Stephenites group, who saw a two-point lead evaporate in the dying moments of a war of attrition on the Markievicz Park sod.

“It’s a desperately disappointed dressingroom in there and I'm desperately disappointed myself, but Coolera Strandhill deserved to beat us. They showed a great attitude and worked really hard. They inflicted their game on us which is a testament to them. We tried to speed it up and get a grip on the game, but that didn’t happen. We had a lot of performances around the pitch which weren’t up to our usual standards but it wasn’t through lack of effort on behalf of the players who worked their socks off,” the manager added.

“We came here absolutely gunning to go for it. We knew the battle that was waiting for us playing against back-to-back champions of Sligo on home soil. We knew we were up against it and at the end of it all it came down to penalties which are a lottery. We shouldn’t have got ourselves into that lottery. We were two points up with two minutes to go and didn't hold onto it. Overall, we didn't show the same energy levels as we have all year, maybe all the travelling last weekend over to London took it out of the legs today, I’m not sure but it’s something we’ll have to look at,” he continued before speaking about the game just finished.

“It was very low-scoring. Coolera Strandhill set up that way. They look to stop you scoring and then get enough to beat you at the other end and that’s what they did today, but in saying that, they missed chances to put us away near the end of normal time and didn’t take them. We were lucky to get to extra time and when we went two points up we thought we were going to hold out, but we didn’t.”

Finally, Heffernan had a word for all who worked so hard and gave so much for the Stephenites’ cause.

“Ciaran (Treacy) had to make his flight back to Dubai and had to leave before the penalties were taken. That’s just an example of the huge sacrifices being made by Ciaran and so many other players and members of the backroom team. A massive effort has been put in by so many. We’ve won back-to-back titles in Mayo. We wanted to get to the Connacht final and have a cut at that, but we failed so we have to look at ourselves and see where we failed.”

Will Heffernan be back for a fifth season when the 2025 campaign gets underway?

“Now isn’t the time to decide such things. It has been a massive effort over the past four years and a lot of people put in a huge amount of effort in the background. I’ll have to discuss it with them and see what their appetite is before we think about anything else.”