Kildress manager sees Clonoe as the ‘benchmark’

INTERMEDIATE CHAMPIONSHIP QUARTER-FINAL

By Niall Gartland

KILDRESS manager Sean Murtagh knows they will have to produce something special if they’re to buck the season-long trend and topple Clonoe this Sunday.

The O’Rahilly’s are strong favourites to advance from Sunday’s Intermediate Championship quarter-final showdown at Dungannon, which isn’t exactly surprising when you consider they haven’t lost a single game all year.

But records are there to be broken and Kildress manager Sean Murtagh is embracing the underdog tag.

“We’re under no illusions about the scale of the task ahead, Clonoe are a serious side and have been the benchmark all season. But this is exactly the kind of challenge you want in the championship, to see where this Kildress side are at. You embrace the opportunity to play the top teams, and we know we’ll have to be at our absolute best to compete for a place in the next round.”

The Wolfe Tones have fared well in recent months and clinched a hard-earned victory over Naomh Eoghan in the first round of the championship. It was their first championship win in four years, making it all the more important to halt their run of first-round exits.

“I’d been told it was four years but at the same time, Naomh Eoghan were very hungry going into that match as well. Both teams would have looked at the draw and said ‘this is a game we can target.’ I was very pleased we got over the line.

“We’d been building nicely through the league. Early on we played a lot of the bigger teams, but then we went on a run of seven wins in-a-row which brought us great momentum.

“We lost our final two games, against Eglish and Greencastle, but we got what we wanted out of those matches. We pushed Eglish really hard, while we ran out of steam a little bit against Greencastle in the second-half. We’d been pushing the lads hard in the league so after that it was about getting freshness back in the team for the championship.”

A native of Eglish, Murtagh knew plenty about first-round opponents Naomh Eoghan, having managed them in recent years before joining Kildress.They stepped it up a gear in the second-half to record a deserved 0-13 to 0-11 victory at O’Neill’s Healy Park.

“I don’t think we were particularly good in the first-half. I was with Naomh Eoghan for the last three seasons, so I know what they’re about. I knew they had a couple of injuries but the lads who came in really stood up and gave us a real test.

“I said to the lads at half-time that we weren’t the better team in the first-half but we were still a point ahead, and we thought with their injuries that we had a good opportunity to see the game out. I thought we played well in the second-half, we hit a few bad wides but we got some good scores as well and that allowed us to keep control on the scoreboard.”