Ryan’s patience pays off

By Liam Hogan

At the start of the year, Enda Moloney was the Roscrea number one keeper and Daryl Ryan was his understudy. Injury to Moloney paved the way for Ryan to take over during the campaign and since then he hasn’t put a foot wrong and on Sunday he made the headlines with two fantastic saves which were the winning of the game.

“At the start of the year I wasn’t on the team,” he revealed.

“But Liam England explained what I had to work on. It’s all about putting your head down and coming to train.

“They were big moments in the game. In the last five minutes they (Gortnahoe) threw the kitchen sink at us, and I was lucky enough to be in the right place to get a touch on the ball. It’s all about the pressure outside. We worked on it all week about working the lines. Thankfully at the end of the day we had a bit of luck.

“We always knew we had the hurlers. You are not going to be on top all the time. we knew if we weathered the storm our hurling would get us through.”

Another impressive performer on the day for Roscrea was Michael Campion. The wing back has been playing with Roscrea seniors for almost a decade and he now has a second county, following on from a junior ‘A’ medal when he was just eighteen.

“It’s been a tough last decade in Roscrea,” he said.

“There is relegation and we have been up in the Dan Breen and fighting for our lives. Last yar we got the drop and it’s hard to go down. But if we stayed here (in Premier Intermediate) for more than two years it would be difficult to get back up. But these are a great bunch of lads and they bought into it straight away.

“I know it’s not the Dan Breen and we will be compared to the team of the seventies, but we are trying to make our own little bit of history. We are the 2022 team. We will go into Munster now and we will meet Ballysaggart, and we will give it a lash.”