Success was years in the making - McGrath
The celebrations just keep on coming for Cormac McGrath and on the same weekend he had his stag ahead of his upcoming nuptuals, he guided Templederry to their first county senior hurling title in the O Riain Cup.
The Ballinahinch clubman is in his second year with his near-neighbours and complimented the contributions of recent managements in putting the building blocks in place for this success.
“It would be easy to say it was this twelve months but that is not the way it works. It comes from years and years of work,” he said.
“The lads had so much work down and had gotten so far they knew they were good enough. It was just about tweaking a few different things, a different approach here and there, a few positional changes and a small thing like that can spark it.”
One of those is Darragh Carey, who was tremendous on the day at centre back, in a new position having played most of his underage hurling as a forward but McGrath and his management so a new role for him when the returned from a lengthy injury layoff.
“In fairness to Darragh Carey, when we played the ‘Mines, Darragh hadn’t played a game in thirteen months,” McGrath revealed.
“He came on in the last ten minutes and got thirteen stitches in his eye and you were wondering how much back luck can this lad have. Darragh Carey is a serious hurler, he has a set of hands on him that are unreal. He would play anywhere.
“Over the years, Templederry put up big scores but were also conceding big scores so when Darragh came back from injury, Liam McCutcheon was playing at six all year and his positioning is unreal but today we put Liam on the wing and Darragh at six as we knew Bubbles was going to start at eleven and he was excellent.”
Templederry were fortunate to go in at half time on level terms after Killenaule dominated the first half but didn’t take their chances, while the Kenyons men hadn’t gotten into their flow.
“We felt the game was very stop-start, very slow and wasn’t suiting us,” McGrath said of the first half.
“Our big mantra this year was not to play the scoreboard. If you were winning by ten points after the first quarter, it didn’t matter. The end is when it matters so we kept tipping away and came in at half time we weren’t out of first gear and still level.
“We won a league final this year in similar circumstances against Sean Treacys. It was very tight at half time and the message was, would you expect anything else in a final?
“Our levels of fitness and our trainer Mark Gleeson needs a lot of compliments for, and we knew if we kept going and working harder, the space would come open and it did.
“We worked so hard on the delivery of the ball going in so the scores we are putting up isn’t just the front six who do their job, and the likes of Seanie Ryan has gotten 5-20 from play but all the forwards were excellent but out distribution zone and use of the ball has changed and that has been a big part of it.”
He added: “We felt we were really getting beaten on the breaking ball in the first half, almost individual as it was a puckout here and there and hope for the best, so we put more emphasis on the puckout as when you have the ball you know where it is going.
“We drew out our corner forwards a bit and Gar went as a third midfielder which left more space for Seanie (Ryan), and we felt Killenaule would go man for man and leave pockets of space which we made the most of."