By Shaun Casey

AODH RUADH, BALLYSHANNON have enjoyed a brilliant 2022 so far as they sit joint top of the Division One table on 15 points, alongside county champions St Eunan’s.

“So far, it’s been a very enjoyable season,” said boss John McNulty. “We’ve been playing well, and we set out our stall at the start of the year, we got the ball rolling.

“The boys have given a great effort to me, and they’ve trained hard, anything I’ve asked so far, they’re willing to do it. We’ve had success from that in terms of the league and where we’re at in the table.”

The Ballyshannon club have won seven of their ten league games under former Kilcar manager McNulty in his first year in charge.

“I’m enjoying it with the boys, obviously you get to know each other at the start and even simple things like getting to know names and figuring out where they’re at and what they’re doing, whether it be jobs, college and all the rest.

“You have all that to figure out and obviously working with your backroom team and just getting going at training and seeing what they’re at and see things you like to do at training and why. That all takes a wee while to integrate between the management and the players. Thankfully we’ve got on well so far.

“Winning is definitely a habit. For a team in their first year back up from Division Two, it’s a big, big thing. The league has given the boys confidence that they can play against the best.

“I guess every team has targets, but I don’t really set too many targets. You just work on it week to week, and you see how things go and you see where you’re at and you look at it from there.

“I’d say that for them coming up from Division Two, really a lot of them wouldn’t have any experience of any kind (of Division One) so I’m very happy with the way they have performed.”

The team will enjoy a two-week break until their next game while McNulty hopes they can get a few injured players back to full fitness in the coming weeks.

“We have the next two weekends off now. I think it’s probably no harm, it’ll do us the world of good I would say, hopefully. But also, there’s one of the guys getting married next weekend so I’m sure the lads will have a good time at that. So, the break has probably come at the right time for them.

“We’ve a few injuries to come back, Johnny Gallagher and Jason Granahan and a few like that, that have been out the last number of weeks really. Johnny has been out since the second game, so he’s been a long absentee and he’s been a miss.

“He’s near back to full fitness and hopefully Jason now over the next couple of weeks we’ll get him back to full fitness too. It would be great to get them boys back and there’s a few other lads as well that are injured and missing but hopefully over the next few weeks, we’ll get them all back.”