*Kildysart’s Rory McMahon. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill.
A “great rivalry” between Kildysart and Lissycasey will be ignited this Saturday evening when the sides battle for the last of the quarter-final spots in the TUS Clare senior football championship.
Back competing in the top tier for the second season after winning the intermediate crown in 2022, Kildysart will lock horns with their neighbours Lissycasey for the second year in a row. They ran out 0-13 0-8 winners when the sides met in the third round of the championship last season.
There will certainly be more spice to this affair as it is a knockout clash. Speaking to The Clare Echo, Kildysart manager David Butler acknowledged the derby element. “There’s a great rivalry down there, both clubs love their football, they will be disappointed with losing to Éire Óg but they probably knew after losing to Kilmurry Ibrickane that they would be in a preliminary quarter-final like ourselves and the two Griffins didn’t play so you can’t read too much into it”.
Although he felt a two week window is easier to manage, Butler would have preferred to advance straight through to the quarter-finals. “I’d take coming out of the group as one of the first two but it is a long gap, they have four weeks, two weeks is perfect but I’d have rather finished first or second but it is not to be”.
For Kildysart, a first round win over Corofin was followed by a second round beating at the hands of St Breckan’s where they conceded four goals but they bounced back to seal their spot in the preliminary quarter-final when overcoming a previously unbeaten St Joseph’s Doora/Barefield 1-12 1-11.
He admitted there was almost an acceptable prior to the third round that Kildysart knew the best they could hope for was a place in the preliminary quarter-final. “We knew a win over Doora/Barefield would get us there, with the scoring difference from the Spa game two weeks ago we knew we wouldn’t beat Doora/Barefield by seven or eight points. No more than last year we didn’t care what the score was when Cratloe were playing Ennistymon, we needed to get a win to get back up, it was a tough defeat two weeks ago but we did two really good weeks of training, we’re very happy and we’ve two wins in the group”.
Level eight times over the course of sixty minutes, Butler praised the character showed by Kildysart to grind out the win with Luke McGrath kicking the match-winning score on fifty five minutes. “In fairness to Doora/Barefield they are on a great run, they will take beating because they had a lot of injuries and lads that went down there, they are going week on week and we are lucky, we only have one lad playing with Ballyea but that is it. The character in the group is something that might be questioned but when it went 1-11 each we went up and got the last score, they have that character in abundance so we’re delighted”.
Up front, the inside line of Emmet McMahon and Diarmuid O’Donnell operate as twin threats which most defences will do well to curtail. “The lads are probably disappointed with how they have been doing up to now but we know the quality that is in there. Maybe we weren’t playing as good with our setup to get them the scores, we did a bit of tweaking,” David said.
After conceding Nicki Hardminan’s goal on twenty eight minutes, Kildysart responded with the next four scores, two at the end of the first half and two within four minutes of the restart. “After shipping four goals a few weeks ago the response to the goal today was excellent but it is something that you drill into them, you have to respond because there’s so many moments in a game. That was a huge turning point and in fairness Doora/Barefield really came at us in the second half, I thought it was a very good game. We’re delighted to get a win which was the most important after the shipping we got a few weeks ago, it’s been a tough two weeks”.
Particularly in the second half, Kildysart did well on retaining their own kickout, losing just one of their eleven in this period. “We were the cause of our own four goals two weeks ago, a good team like the Spa will punish you. Kieran (Eyres) has been very good all year and he’s good players around him, young Conall Casey is eighteen years of age and he was playing today and did really well so I’m delighted for him”.
