Online Club Football Championship coverage brought to you by the Shannon Springs Hotel—home of The Old Lodge Gastropub.
*St Joseph’s Miltown forward Darragh McDonagh. Photograph: Gerard O’Neill.
ALTHOUGH they suffered a third round “blip”, St Joseph’s Miltown will enter the knockout stages in confident spirits.
Having won the Cusack Cup in July, Miltown carried through their league form with wins over Cratloe and Doonbeg to qualify for the Clare SFC quarter-finals where they have been paired to meet Ennistymon.
Round three with champions Éire Óg was to determine who finished top of Group 1 and claimed a seeded spot with Miltown emphatically defeated 1-22 0-12 by the Enins side.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, St Joseph’s Miltown manager Seán O’Brien didn’t hide his frustration with the loss. “We’re disappointed, we were missing a few bodies which opened the door for other lads, we knew we would be up against it but we were still disappointed with the manner of the defeat”.
Cutting down on turnovers will be the subject of a lot of attention for the West Clare side as they prepare for the quarter-finals. “We won some really good kickouts when Cóilin kicked great ball to our lads but when it was on the ground we didn’t come out the right side of that battle so you’re giving away possessions essentially. We gave them the platform, we lost the first six breaks in a row, then we won three and got back into the game, if you give Éire Óg the ball on a break then they are going to work a shot, they don’t have massive amounts of turnovers, they are very methodical, if you give them six extra possessions at the start of the game then you are fighting a losing battle, you need to break even if not get on top for the breaks and we weren’t, we improved on it and got back into it but that was an awful start to give them”.
Darragh McDonagh has been very threatening at full-forward for Miltown in league and championship. He scored two points in the opening half but O’Brien felt the supply of ball to Darragh needs to be better. “The good quality we put into Darragh he won and we put a few in along the ground that are just a nightmare for a forward and a back wants to see one dribbling along the groud, those real low ball flights in don’t suit forwards but they suit backs, it becomes a wrestling match then whereas when we put in nice ball to them then Darragh won possessions and got scores, got other lads involved. We had a few nice moves where he won the ball, popped it off and we might have missed the shot for the point but you would get over that, the quality of the ball needs to be better, the low balls don’t suit any forward really”.
Injury ruled out Eoin Cleary of the third round and restricted Cormac Murray to just appearing in the second half while Oisin Looney has returned to his teaching post in the Middle East. O’Brien is hopeful both Cleary and Murray will be available from the off for the quarter-finals. “Oisin is away, he is in the Middle East, Cormac is coming back from the injury he got against Doonbeg, he had half an hour in him so we didn’t want to risk starting him and put yourself under pressure by taking him off, he needed a half an hour to try ramp up for the quarter-final. Eoin has a bit of an injury but we would be hopeful he will be back relatively soon”.
Guaranteed not to meet Éire Óg until a semi-final at the earliest, the three-time Clare SFC winning goalkeeper believed Miltown would be able to cut the gap if they met the reigning champions again in the championship. “You’d like to think so or that it will be closer, you can be putting lads in and out of the team but Eoin and Cormac are very prominent players for us, even if you had them and lost as many fifty fifty battles as we lost then you could name any player in the team and it won’t affect the outcome. We have an extra appreciation for everything that Eoin and Cormac do for us after a game like that, if you don’t win the fifty fifty ball against Éire Óg then it is a lot harder to beat them because they are very efficient”.
Mark McInerney proved to be too much for Miltown’s defence to deal with, O’Brien noted but he said they won’t let the third round loss impact on the strides made so far in 2026. “It is about the order of things that can happen, you can win your last group game and bounce into the quarter-finals but the way the draw happened I don’t want to take away from us having a decent year and a decent run in the Cusack Cup and winning our first two games which put us in that position, you don’t want to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater because you lost the last game, there is a lot of confidence that the group can take from the way they have played all year and we had a bit of a blip the last day and no better man than Mark McInerney to put you under major pressure when you’re not quite at it, we couldn’t really handle him to be honest”.
