‘We always had confidence in ourselves’ insists Clann star
Two county titles in the last three years ensured that any suggestions that Clann na nGael were ‘written off’ in advance of last Saturday’s county senior final against St Brigid’s were more than a little exaggerated.
Nonetheless, even allowing for the steady trickle of established stars that came back into their starting team over the course of the campaign, it was impossible to ignore the stark contrast in form between the two clubs going into this decider.
Neutrals looked at St Brigid’s landslide win over Clann when the two sides met in Kiltoom, but also the contrast in how Clann were tested by teams like St Dominic’s and Éire Óg, while St Brigid’s ran up big scores against those opponents.
To the rest of Roscommon, it felt like the changing of the guard was imminent. In the Clann dressing room, however, it was merely a case of timing their run.
“It’s all about peaking at the right time!” said a delighted Róise Lennon afterwards.
“We always had confidence in ourselves, even as a few results didn’t go our way. Yeah, we were beaten by Brigid’s in a league final, but this is the one we wanted.
“We were probably written off all year by people outside our camp but inside our four walls, we knew what we had inside. Some girls were coming back from injury, I had surgery, Jenny Higgins was coming back from her ACL.
“Others are still out, Caoimhe Lennon did her ACL in January and Kimberley Finlass, so it’s within ourselves, that belief we’ve always had, and the experience helps as well,” added the full forward, who plundered 2-5 over the hour.
And did she still keep that faith at half-time, when they were seven points adrift?
“We probably didn’t get out of the traps,” she admitted. “It was a shaky start, including myself, but we turned it around. We went after their kickouts and I think that was the changing of the game, we put them under an awful lot of pressure as they were trying to kick out the ball.
“We were frustrated with ourselves, and I was frustrated personally. We were making stupid mistakes that we wouldn’t normally make and you have to punish the opposition when we had the opportunity and we didn’t in the first half.”
Suffice it to say, that changed completely. And while Kilkerrin-Clonberne still cast a long shadow over the club scene in the west - most recently beating Salthill-Knocknacarra in the Galway SFC semi-final by 3-23 to 0-2 - Lennon feels that just as Clann retained their self-belief throughout this summer, they would feel the same if they get another tilt at the three-in-a-row All-Ireland champions. “Absolutely. We back ourselves whenever,” she said.
After witnessing their second half tour de force last weekend, it’s easy to see why.