One of the criticisms, rightly or wrongly, often tossed in Derry’s direction is an overreliance on Shane McGuigan for scores. But in Celtic Park on Sunday, Cormac Murphy – making his full National League debut – delivered an attacking performance indicating another significant scoring threat has emerged.
Murphy scored 0-3, used his blistering pace and direct running to wreak havoc in the Tyrone defence and created several scoring chances for his colleagues – including the disallowed goal netted by Conor Glass.
Murphy made his first league appearance the previous weekend as a second-half sub against Kerry, and he made an impact in Tralee as well. The Magherafelt man cut through the Kerry defence in the closing stages to win what turned out to be the match-winning free.
“He does bring something different to the table,” says Mickey Harte. “He has got electric pace, he has the ability to take people on in a tight space and use the corners to get away from them and he knows where the posts are, so he’s a very valuable asset to this team.” Gordon Manning
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[ Nothing personal, just business for Mickey Harte as Derry maintain strong startOpens in new window ]
Pitfalls of representing county and party
The controversy over Justin McNulty losing the SDLP whip at Stormont because he left Saturday’s historic proceedings to manage the Laois footballers is the latest example of politicians combining representative duties with leadership roles in Gaelic games.
It’s not clear why McNulty couldn’t simply have let his selectors take charge for the Division Four match in Wexford. Given the habits of politicians, it’s not as if there would be any further clashes on a weekend. He had been apparently warned that the Laois position was fine until the Assembly got up and running again – a prospect he could have been forgiven for considering far from certain.
As the internal SDLP complexities play out, a quick survey indicates that such crossovers whereas historically not that unusual, are less common these days.
In the 2000s, Wexford’s Tony Dempsey and Mayo’s John O’Mahony were both intercounty managers and TDs at the same time. Dempsey was elected for Fianna Fáil in the 2002 general election with O’Mahony following five years later for Fine Gael.
Dempsey had one championship in the dual role, running Kilkenny close in the Leinster final and losing to Clare in the qualifiers. O’Mahony had a more traumatic experience, getting spanked by Galway in Salthill four days before the election.
Having been elected, he served four years in his second stint with the county, winning a Connacht title in 2009 and stepping down a year later and only retired from politics at the last election four years ago.
Mayo had already seen this crossover at close quarters in the 1950s. Seán Flanagan captained Mayo to what are still their most recent Sam Maguires, in 1950 and 1951 – the latter five months after he had been elected for Fianna Fáil in Mayo South.
Another All-Ireland winning captain, John Donnellan of Galway won the Galway East by-election in 1964 and went on to hold the seat for many years. It had happened because of the death of his father Michael, which poignantly took place in Croke Park the day his son captained Galway to victory over Kerry, the first of the county’s three-in-a-row.
Donnellan was pictured raising Sam Maguire with an enormous beaming smile on his face. He wasn’t informed of his father’s death until after the presentation. Seán Moran
Spotlight is always on Mayo manager job
We were well into the wrap-it-up-there-lads phase of the post-match media huddle on Saturday night when one of the local pressmen threw in a question about Fergal Boland. Mayo’s match-winner against Dublin has become a bit of a stick to beat the current management with, having now shown well in his first two league games back after being left off the panel last year. And so, like any good local reporter, our man didn’t put a tooth in it – he asked Kevin McStay straight out: “Was it a mistake to drop Fergal Boland last year?”
Well. The full force of the Mayo comms department came raining down upon him. “Ah Jaysus, lads. Jaysus ...” McStay himself didn’t exactly refuse to answer but he clearly didn’t want to get into it. Maybe if the rest of us had had the wit to ask it earlier than leaving it to the end, he could have explored the Bolandectomy a bit. But just right at that moment, sitting top of the league with two wins from two, he wasn’t minded to.
The broader point, of course, is that there’s nothing handy about being Mayo manager. As you’d expect, McStay is as open and giving with the media as any manager in the country. And his team is doing well. They were the only team in Division One with a six-day turnaround between games and yet they end the opening series top of the table with two wins from two.
Better again, they’ve beaten both Galway and Dublin now, their two biggest rivals put away to start the year. Last time they beat both those teams in the same league campaign? You have to go back to 2007.
So yeah, McStay will probably have to address the Fergal Boland issue somewhere along the way. It’s not a massive thing – Boland has been around the scene since 2017 and has rarely been a fixture in the side under any management. But any year Mayo fail, the carcass gets picked over for months and months.
McStay knows his people well enough to know that if it wasn’t this, it would likely be something else. On Saturday night, Mayo were top of the league and a couple more points away from not having to worry about the drop. He was happy to take that and move on. Malachy Clerkin
Young star Cillian Burke looks the part for Kerry
The press box at St Tiernach’s Park has a habit of filling up fast, no matter what the opposition, and while waiting for Sunday’s showdown between Monaghan and Kerry the conversation turned to Jack O’Connor.
It’s an open secret that any time O’Connor has won the All-Ireland title with Kerry he’s also won the league. The nine-point victory over Monaghan certainly pointed positive in that regard, early days as it is, although of far more interest to O’Connor in the here and now is blooding the sort of young players he can call on come the heat of the championship.
Which is why afterwards the conversation turned to Cillian Burke, the 20-year-old from Milltown/Castlemaine unquestionably looking the part in filling the number 12 shirt. Burke might well have contributed to three goals in the first half alone, after being pulled down for the penalty on three minutes (which was overruled) and narrowly losing control of the ball close to goal on 15 minutes.
When Graham O’Sullivan’s deft pass across the face of the goal on 28 minutes fell into Burke’s path he made no mistake, rifling an unstoppable shot into the top right corner. Kerry were up 1-8 to 1-5 and never looked back.
O’Connor is already well familiar with Burke, having watched him play alongside his sons Cian and Eanna as Milltown/Castlemaine beat Fossa (and the Clifford brothers) to win the Kerry intermediate title last November.
“It was great for him. He is a young lad, we think he is a great prospect with a lot of potential and that will do him wonders now. You know yourself, young lads need a bit of confidence to grow and whatever.
“Regardless of how he went last week, we were going to go with him this week again. The same applies to a lot of the other young lads like Dylan Geaney, Conor Geaney and those fellas. They just need to keep being exposed to days like this and they’ll grow from that.”
O’Connor then revealed another open secret: “We are trying to find players. Maybe we didn’t find enough players last year and maybe it came back to bite us in the end. But we are going to continue giving young lads a go and have a good share of experienced players there.
“That’s the template ... it’s the only way.”
Nobody knows it better than O’Connor. Ian O’Riordan
[ David Clifford returns with goal to put Monaghan to the sword at ClonesOpens in new window ]
Group think
One of the anomalies about the restructuring of Division 1 of the NHL is the means of selecting the seventh team. The top three counties in 1A and 1B automatically qualify for next year’s top flight and that has added urgency to this year’s league campaign.
The remaining team, however, is to be chose on the basis of which of fourth-placed counties has the better record, which is determined by match points and then scoring difference. The problem is that the two groups are not of equal strength.
Antrim, Westmeath and Offaly have all recently been in the McDonagh Cup and are viewed as development teams. They lost their three opening league matches by an accumulated 70 points. Two of them, Antrim and Westmeath are in 1B and just one, Offaly, is in 1A.
Rinse that through the system and it’s clear that points will be harder won in 1A, to say nothing of scoring difference. Croke Park is keen to thin out fixtures and a play-off between the two fourth-place teams has been ruled out.
But on the weekend of March 23rd and 24th, the Division 1 semi-finals are being played. Surely a play-off for the 2025 league’s final place in the top division could be played then. Seán Moran
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