Footballers target a place in All-Ireland quarter-finals

THE Limerick senior footballers are now targeting a place in the All-Ireland quarter-finals.
Amid the devastation of yesterday’s Munster final loss to Kerry star midfielder John Galvin rallied his colleagues to lift their spirit for the All-Ireland qualifiers.
Limerick will be back in action on Saturday, July 24 and will have to wait for two weeks to find out who their opponents will be.
The list of potential opponents reads: Dublin, Armagh, Cork, Galway, Mayo, Down, Fermanagh, Derry, Cavan, Kildare, Wexford, Leitrim, Tipperary, Offaly, Longford and Westmeath. That list of 16 will face two rounds of action before Limerick enter the equation.
“Right now it’s hard to be positive to tell you the truth,” said John Galvin, who was selected as Man of the Match for the Munster final despite Limerick’s loss to Kerry.
“I know that we are down to the last 12 in the country now and I just hope that we have learned from last year.
“We never lifted ourselves last year after the Cork game and I just hope that we learned from last year and hopefully we can pick it up,” said Galvin who finished with 1-2 in a heroic performance.
“We saw what Meath did last year after they beat us. We just have to pick ourselves up and see that we still have a huge chance of getting to the All-Ireland quarter-finals.”
John Galvin had played for Limerick since 1999 and yesterday was the fourth time that he has narrowly failed in a provincial SFC decider.
“They are all very hard to take - when you set a goal for yourself for so long and each year it is so hard to come back. It’s heartbreaking. I’m just gutted. This is absolutely gut-wrenching,” said the towering Croom midfielder.
“It’s utterly disappointing again. It’s another Munster final that I think we didn’t throw away, but one we could have won. We made an awful lot of mistakes in the first half - we gave ball away and we kicked wides. I think we should have been up another five or six points with the amount of ball we had in the first half. They went and scored 1-7 without reply in the second half and it’s very hard to win a game when a team does that. When we brought it back level I thought we were going to take it - whoever got the next score, but unfortunately they got it and then tacked on a bit at the end.”
As the wait for a Munster title stretches into the 115th year Limerick are left to rue 13 wides in a game that they dominated for long periods.
Supporters will also question what might have been if Tomas O’Se had been dismissed in the first half for any one of three different altercations with Stephen Kelly.
In the dying seconds there were calls for a Limerick penalty, but Galvin accepted that it wasn’t clear-cut.
“To tell you the truth it was 50-50,” John Galvin said.
He explained: “I caught a ball in the square and there was five or six of them around me and there was slapping, pulling and dragging. If the referee wanted to call it he could have and I would say no one would have said anything, but he didn’t call it. Maybe if it was the other end, he would have called it!”
Attention now turns to tomorrow night’s Munster junior football championship final when it’s Limerick versus Kerry once more.
Limerick are bidding for a fifth-ever provincial title at this grade and a first since 1950. Indeed, it is Limerick’s first final appearance in 47 years. The final takes place in Newcastle West at 7.30pm this Tuesday evening.
The Limerick team shows two changes from the team that defeated Waterford in the semi-final - David Finnerty comes in for the injured Darragh Woods and Robert Browne comes in for Liam Costelloe.
Limerick junior team: Paudie Ivess (Kilcornan); David Finnerty (St. Senan’s), Kevin O’Connor (captain, Fr. Casey’s), Eddie Mulcahy (Pallasgreen); Edmond O’Donnell (Castletown-Ballyagran), Brendan Teahan (St. Patrick’s), Eoin Barry (Dromcollogher-Broadford); Edmond Horan (Glin), Michael Behan (St. Senan’s); Robert Browne (Fr. Casey’s), Thomas Collins (Fr. Casey’s), Derry McCarthy (Dromcollogher-Broadford); John O’Connell (Pallasgreen), Thomas Butler (Castlemahon), Ray Lynch (Dromcollogher-Broadford).
Subs: Conor Wallace (Hosptial-Herbertstown), Timothy Begley (Mountcollins), Eoin Fitzgibbon (Oola), Liam Costelloe (Adare), Seamus Mulcahy (Pallasgreen), Wayne Enright (St. Senan’s), Michael Galvin (Fr. Casey’s), Mike Lyons (Adare) & Gary Egan (Dromcollogher-Broadford).
Elsewhere, All-Ireland honours were returned to Limerick on the double yesterday when both Monaleen and Monagea were victorious in the Peil na nOg finals in Derry.
In the All-Ireland under-14 club football championships Monaleen defeated Donegal side St. Eunan’s 1-9 to 2-4 to claim the Division Three title.
In Ladies Football Monagea were 1-4 to 1-1 winners over Dublin’s St Laurence O’Tooles in the Division Two decider.

JEROME O’CONNELL