*Breffni Horner and Michael Browne watch on anxiously for the final few moments in Ruan. Photograph: Ruth Griffin .
CRUSHEEN are in successive Clare SHC quarter-finals for the first time in eight years with a tie against Feakle awaiting them in a fortnight.
A 3-19 0-18 final round win over St Joseph’s Doora/Barefield coupled with Newmarket-on-Fergus’ inability to see off Sixmilebridge saw last year’s finalists reach back to back quarter-finals, the first time the champions of 2010 and 2011 have achieved that feat since 2016.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, Crusheen manager, Michael Browne said they could not control what was happening between The Bridge and The Blues where a draw was the final outcome, a Newmarket-on-Fergus draw would have required the need of scoring difference which would have knocked Crusheen out of the championship.
Browne stated, “All we wanted to do was make sure we won here. We had no control over what happened in the Park. When the game was over, I refused to even hear what was going on. I didn’t want to know. We had to win our game here and we did that. That was our focus”.
Goals from Jamie Fitzgibbon, Fergus Kennedy and Éanna McMahon were decisive, the former Clare selector maintained. “Once we got the couple of goals it created the space and gave us the opportunity to express ourselves a little bit more. The gap was there. Having said that we have died away in the last 10 minutes of both halves in our first two games. So we were really working to make sure that didn’t happen to us. It might have happened to us a little in the first half but we certainly finished strongly”.
Having finished bottom of the Clare Cup with seven defeats in nine games, there has certainly been improvement from Crusheen. “I think we’ve developed. We had a desperate spring and a desperate Clare Cup. We had a load of injuries. You couldn’t imagine how bad things had gone. Really we needed these three games to get us back in sync and get us back playing reasonably right”.
Of concern for Crusheen was the forced substitution of key forward Breffni Horner due to injury. “Unfortunately Breffni Horner seems to have hurt himself. We’ll have to assess it and see what the story is. He’ll be a huge loss to us if we can’t play but hopefully that won’t the case,” Browne said.
To date, it has been a very exciting championship, the former primary school principal noted. “There isn’t one inch between teams. Newmarket ran the Bridge so close and should have beaten them by the sounds of things. I thought early on that Clonlara will be a shoe-in for this – they’re definitely going to pick up two-in-a-row and look at what happened? They’re not gone yet and nowhere near it but it’s a great championship”.
