Dromore are making steady progress says McCusker

By Niall Gartland

HE missed the three previous games with a hamstring injury, but young Dromore half-back Ryan McCusker marked his return to the field of play with a scintillating goal against Trillick last Friday night.

McCusker leathered the ball into the stanchion of the net midway through the second-half, and Dromore never looked back as they emerged with a merited 1-8 and 0-6 victory away to their biggest rivals.

So Dromore are top of the table after five rounds of action, and while they haven’t so much as dropped a single point, McCusker knows they’re in the middle of a major building process that will naturally take some time to perfect.

“This is a young team – I’m not too old myself – and there’s a lot of young lads getting their chance to impress and we’re happy with that.In 2017 Trillick hammered us with a big score in the championship, but I think we’ve responded well in the last few years.

“We got a good win over Omagh in last year’s championship so we feel we’re making progress. We can’t set a target every year of winning a championship. The last time Dromore won the championship was in 2011, this is a different team, and if we keep on chipping away year-after-year, hopefully good things will happen.”

Dromore lost last year’s Division One final on penalties, and they’ve been arguably the standardbearers in league football here for the last decade. McCusker is undeniably pleased with how things are going, but it knows it’d be foolish to read too much into victory over a Trillick side shorn of their county men.

“Trillick are a very good team, we’re happy with the win but we’ll not pay too much attention to it. Trillick are missing four county players and have a few injuries. We’re missing a few lads as well but we’re glad about the win and we have been consistent.

“We haven’t done an awful lot of training and have been lucky on the injury front so things have been going well in fairness.”

See this week’s edition of the Ulster Herald for the rest of our interview with Ryan McCusker