From rock bottom to rock solid contenders

Three minutes. That’s how close Mick Regan says Kiltimagh came to being ‘relegated’ to this year’s county junior ‘B’ football championship. Instead his team stands 60 minutes from promotion back to intermediate.

Had Kilmovee Shamrocks not conceded a stoppage time goal which consigned them to defeat against Tourmakeady in Round 3, then they - and not Kiltimagh - would have advanced from Group 2 to the ‘A’ quarter-finals. But on Sunday next, Kiltimagh, who only squeezed through on scoring difference having lost two of their three group games, will contest the ‘A’ final and Kilmovee the ‘B’, on what is a big day for East Mayo GAA given Eastern Gaels are also Kiltimagh’s opponents.

“They made us look minnows in our two previous games,” claims Mick Regan, whose Kiltimagh side faced Gaels in both the divisional championship and the league this season. He’s not talking up the opposition without supporting evidence: Eastern Gaels hammered Kiltimagh 5-11 to 0-10 in the East Mayo JFC and more modestly in Division 3B of the Mayo SFL, by 1-15 to 1-12.

“They’re a good team and they’ve a squad with a lot of good players. They wouldn’t be the tallest team but they’re a physical team and a good running team. Paul Hickey has them well tutored, he’s with them the last three years, he knows them inside out.” 

Where Kiltimagh stand currently is a far cry from when they contested three county intermediate finals in just five years (2016, ’17 and ’20) or from when in his first spell in charge, Mick Regan guided the club to an All-Ireland junior final in 2010.

Indeed it was a very different Kiltimagh dressing-room into which he walked at half-time during a league match away to Ardnaree Sarsfields in 2023. The team were already trailing by nineteen points when Regan popped inside the door before the start of the second-half to let the players know he’d be returning as manager before the next game.

Gallantly, two of those players, Donovan Cosgrove and Mattie Cummins had been trying to hold the whole show together simply because no one else would, but as Regan observes: “You cannot play football and manage and do everything at the one time.” 

The ebb was that low before Regan took charge, that 23 lads who had played championship for Kiltimagh inside the previous three years were no longer involved. A team and a half. From a small club.

“You don’t go looking for lads, you work with what you’ve got because sometimes if you go looking for lads to come back, it’s sending out the wrong message,” he opines. “You need to get lads who will turn up on merit and want to be there.” 

A build it and they will come mentality.

“Different lads did come back to the fold to try and steady the ship and get a base for us to work off,” he says.

But that’s not to say things didn’t get worse before they began to get better.

By the end of Mick Regan’s first half-season in charge, they had been beaten “left, right and centre” in the intermediate championship and the only game Kiltimagh won was the relegation final against Bonniconlon. It was only a temporary stay of execution however, as Kiltimagh last year ended up in exactly the same place but this time “just didn’t turn up” when beaten by an Islandeady team that had played the entire second-half of the intermediate relegation final with only fourteen players.

And yet everything might have been different had the Gods – and Hollymount-Carramore – not conspired against Kiltimagh in the very first round of that championship campaign.

“Nobody in the earthly world knew leaving the ground that day how Hollymount-Carramore came away with a win,” reflects Mick Regan after Kiltimagh had conceded the final four points of that match to lose by one.

“Sometimes you just get that feeling that things aren’t going to go your way and as it happened, they didn’t.” 

Subsequent defeats to Davitts, Castlebar Mitchels ‘B’, Kilmaine and the aforementioned Islandeady meant that Kiltimagh were demoted to the junior championship for the first time in fifteen years. But Mick Regan was determined to look on the bright side.

“When you go down you can regroup, you can change the culture, change the attitude. You’re not afraid to do that when you’re down there, there’s only one way you can go and that’s up.” 

But after opening this year’s championship campaign with a victory over Kilmovee Shamrocks, Kiltimagh suffered back-to-back defeats at the hands of Tourmakeady and Northern Gaels to leave their fate in the hands of others.

“Against Northern Gaels we had a load of lads at a wedding and more lads probably thinking about the wedding,” smirks Mick Regan now.

It raised a few eyebrows then when Kiltimagh, having only scraped through to the quarter-finals as much due to the misfortune of others, claimed a one point win away to a fancied Shrule-Glencorrib side. But things appeared to be unravelling again when they trailed Ardagh by four points at half-time in their county junior semi-final last Saturday week.

“Ardagh got seven minutes on us coming near the end of the first-half and to be fair to them, they should have put us away and didn’t,” admits Regan.

“We came out fighting in the second-half. Lads know at that stage that their year is on the line, everything is on the line, and they gave an extremely impressive performance in the second-half.” 

Nine of the team had also started last season’s relegation final but of the six additions, goalkeeper Jamie McNicholas, Fionnan Burke and Thomas Keegan contributed ten points between them. The vastly experienced Paul Kelly and Stephen McDonnell had also returned to provide a new look, old school midfield pairing while Jack Mahon slotted into full-back in what was the only change to the back six over that twelve months.

GAA president Jarlath Burns this month visited the home of Kiltimagh GAA to officially reopen the redeveloped Gilmartin Park. What better way to round off an historic year then, than for the club to lift the McDonnell Cup.

“It would be amazing. To win a county title is the best way to finish off a season, no matter what grade you play in, no matter what age group you’re playing in. But there’s nothing to say we will finish off the season like that,” cautions Mick Regan.

Nor is there much to say they won’t. When you’ve gone from within three minutes of oblivion to winning quarter-finals and semi-finals as underdogs, anything must feel possible.