Big guns

TOGETHER AGAIN Tommy O’Malley and Peter Ford are reunited this year as part of the Castlebar Mitchels management team. Pic: Michael McLaughlin

Big guns go head to head

Castlebar host Ballina in the match of the day

Daniel Carey

TWO days after the fourth Indiana Jones movie hits our screens, another star-studded event comes to Castlebar. The Mitchels’ meeting with Ballina Stephenites is the ‘Alien Versus Predator’ of the opening round, a clash of two big beasts with proud histories.
Shane Conway has seen both sides up close in the 2008 league. His Kilmeena side went down by two points to Ballina back in March, and the gap was the same when Castlebar got the better of them ten days ago, though at one point it looked like the margin might be much greater.
“They exploded out of the blocks, really; we couldn’t get to grips with them at midfield,” Conway told The Mayo News. “Shane Fitzmaurice was very good. A lot of people would have been critical of him when he was playing for Mayo, but he’s a fine footballer – he controlled the middle for the first 15 minutes.”
Conway was also impressed with Mitchels full-back Rory O’Grady, while full-forward Eamon Tiernan proved effective under the high ball.
“They seem to be playing a very direct brand of football, and their forwards are all interchangeable,” he observed. “Dwayne Flynn started at 10 against us, but he was full-forward, he was corner forward, he was out in the half forwards; they all just seem to swap, which makes them very difficult for any defence to mark.”
In fact, he suggests, Mitchels ‘could have been 14 points to nothing up after 10, 15 minutes’. Yet it wasn’t all one-way traffic and Kilmeena’s second half dominance will be have been a cause for concern to their management team. “In the last 20 minutes of the game, we were actually the better team,” Conway says. “And they didn’t seem to have answer, really – that was the thing that surprised me.”
The Rice College teacher reckons that midfield will be crucial on Saturday evening. Ballina were missing quite a few of their All-Ireland semi-final team when they met Kilmeena in March, but Pat Harte and Ronan McGarrity were ‘just phenomenal’, he recalls. Barry Moran may line out at full-forward for Castlebar, but ‘if they play him in the middle of the field, it’ll be one hell of a contest … and I’d say whoever wins midfield will probably win the game’.
Conway identifies McGarrity as the key reason why Ballina beat Kilmeena, and sees his absence as the cause of their downfall against Tourmakeady. The Stephenites midfield, he reckons, ‘was the best we’ve seen this year’ and McGarrity ‘owned the game … unless you see him in a club match, you really don’t appreciate how good he is’.
Conway reckons Liam McHale ‘will have a job’ to replace David Brady, but his high praise for Stephen Hughes. The Stephenites attacker is, he says, ‘developing into a great footballer’ and is ‘is one of those guys who can just nip in at the vital moment and get you a goal and finish with a 2-4 tally’.
While Castlebar mixed good and bad in their game with Kilmeena, Conway notes that Ballina displayed an age-old trait – the ability to ‘just go up another gear when they really need to’ – and eke out a result.
“I know Castlebar are on the crest of a wave,” he observes. “Everything is going the right way [for them], there’s a very positive attitude, and I hope things go well for them, because everyone’s expecting a lot of them. But you can never write off Ballina. Charlestown were very unlucky not to win the county championship last year, because I thought they were the better team [both] throughout the championship and on the day. And yet, Ballina just knew how to utilise their players to the best of their ability … Ballina weren’t my tip last year, so I wouldn’t bet against them again!”