Kingscourt starting with a clean slate in 2021 says O’Reilly

KINGSCOURT Stars have drawn a line under 2020 after coming agonisingly close to winning their first Senior Championship title since 2015, according to their new manager Finbar O’Reilly.

They probably should have seen it out in their Senior Championship final drawn encounter against pre-match favourites Crosserlough, and is so often the way the underdogs fell short in the replay, in this instance losing out by five points.

Their new manager is former county player O’Reilly, who has already shown he has what it takes in the world of management.

He led St Pat’s, Cavan to their first MacRory Cup success in 43 years in 2015 before leading his native club Lacken to the Division One title a year later. He also had a spell as the Cavan senior team’s selector and trainer during Mattie McGleenan’s time in charge.

O’Reilly has already touched base with the team and says that they excited about the prospect of returning to the field of play, whenever that may be.

“I think they feel they’ve drawn a line under last year. They had a fantastic run, the only game they lost was the county final replay.

“However they’ve moved on, it’s a long way back to a county final and we all know that. We’ll have league games and in the championship you effectively have four first-round games before you can even talk about knockout football. We’re in the pre-season so we just have to get ourselves in the best shape possible to go at it again.”

It’s fair to say that O’Reilly doesn’t hide away from a challenge; he succeeded Mickey Graham at Mullinalaghta after they won the Leinster Championship two years ago, and the quiet expectation in Kingscourt will be that he can get them over the line in the Breffni county.

“When you’re in the business of coaching and managing, you like to challenge yourself and work with good players and clubs.

“Kingscourt have a fine tradition and history. They came close last year but it’s back to the bottom of the mountain this year.

“They’ve had some retirements in recent years – ome of the McCormack boys, Mossy Malone and Philly Smith – but there seems to be a good wave of young talent coming through and that was evident last year.”

O’Reilly spent two years at Mullinalaghta. In his first year, he steered the Longford club to the senior league double, but last season ended in fairly frustrating circumstances as their championship semi-final clash against Longford Slashers was called off when the South entered a stage five lockdown last October. O’Reilly has moved on and it looks like that outstanding fixtures will be played in July at the earliest.

“The championship wasn’t finished, it reached the semi-final stage. There was a dispute with Killoe over an underage match that wasn’t played the year before. They were fined and thrown out of the competition so everything was held up for about a month.

“Ultimately we went into lockdown so we didn’t get to finish the competition. So that was frustrating.”