Dunloy’s winding road to dreamland

By Michael McMullan

IT’S Tuesday and the clock is ticking towards six o’clock. The previous 48 hours morphed into one big party.

Dunloy manager Anthony McQuillan has eventually taken a few quiet minutes to at least try and to piece what ending an 89-year famine looks like.

“It’s just been absolutely crazy since the final whistle on Sunday,” said the man who has been cajoling the core of Dunloy’s winning team since losing to Rossa in the 2012 Féile final.

The message was simple. Stick together and they’d win an Antrim Minor Championship within four years. They did with Seaan Elliott and Aaron Crawford still underage when they repeated the feat two years later.

Then came a five-year wait to land an intermediate title before realising they belonged in the senior championship.

It all came to fruition on Sunday against four-in-a-row chasing Cargin. The benchmark of benchmarks.

“My standout moment from the game was when they (Cargin) kept the ball for the first two or three minutes and we overturned it,” recalls McQuillan, mentioning the roar from the Dunloy crowd.

“We took off with an attack and just set our intent from there of how we were going to play the game.”

It’s no secret. Dunloy’s game is all about pace and when McQuillan sensed that electricity on the breakaway fed into the fans, he knew they were in with a chance.

Rewind the clock. After taking their time at winning an intermediate title, their 2023 taste of the senior ranks went all the way to the final.

“We beat St Gall’s away in Milltown,” McQuillan recalls of the win that ensured they’d book a quarter-final berth.

“Creggan came to Dunloy two weeks later and beat us by two or three points,” he added of the lightbulb moment of pushing the 2021 champions all the way.

“That was the day I just said to myself, if Creggan are the standard, then we weren’t as far away as we think.”

After losing the 2023 final, Dunloy licked their wounds before coming back fitter, stronger and faster.

Having a core of players of a similar age was a significant help. A circle of friends. A band of brothers.

“They want to win.” McQuillan said. “They want to be together and they want to play together.

“Even when we’re not training, if you see one of them round Dunloy, or anywhere, there are three or four of them. They’re all together.”

Another factor was losing the hurling semi-final to Loughgiel the previous week. The hurt was there.

With virtually an entire squad of dual players, they were left on their own on Monday. Tuesday was video night with the players not back on grass until the Wednesday. Freshness was important.

“When we met on Wednesday night, in the circle at the start, ‘Coby’ (Conall Cunning) was leading the messaging,” McQuillan said.

Hurt was the word of choice. The village was hurting but they didn’t need to a year to put it right. The football final was a passport to glory.

“I’ve never seen boys more determined going onto a football pitch than they were on Sunday,” he added.

“They had just lost a game and let nobody down, but they felt they let everybody down and they weren’t going to do it two weeks in a row.”