Hard work pays off for Balla

Sometimes, a final scoreline can be misleading but for Balla Secondary School, it was a fair reflection of their dominant All-Ireland semi-final victory last Saturday.

From Carrigaline Community School’s perspective, you don’t get to this stage without having something about you but Balla never game them a chance and the work the boys in blue have put since the start of the season is paying off, according to joint-manager Adrian Phillips.

“It's absolutely fantastic,” said Phillips. “The lads put a massive shift in the last two weeks. We’ve trained three times since the Connacht final. We put a plan in place, and we're just absolutely delighted it worked. We were against the breeze in the first half and led at half-time. We went to Glenamaddy training on Wednesday on an astro because this is our first time playing on astro.

“We've done 35 training sessions outside school, over holidays. We trained last Sunday night in Parke at 7 o'clock in the evening. These guys have done two hours in a Sunday evening at 7 o'clock like so they deserve to be an All-Ireland final for the work they're putting in."

Bar a loose third quarter showing, which saw Carrigaline get on top of Balla, the Connacht champions dominated the game. But Phillips feels Balla’s desire to keep pushing for more scores instead of control matter led to the momentary slip.

“I think the lads wanted to really, really punish and really, really, really put up a big score on these lads, but maybe they forced things a little bit. We could have controlled it a little bit more, but again, these are lads who are in school who just love playing football. They want to spray the outside the boot passes. They want to do the outside the boot kicks. They want to pick it in top corner, and we just kind of let them off to a certain extent.

“We knew if we defended the arc against the breeze there'd be no issue with conceding much. Thankfully it worked out. Carrigaline are really good side. The scores they put up in Munster I think they were averaging on 3-15, 3-16, huge scores like so we had to put a plan in place to stop that and we wanted to cut their conversion rate from about 70 to 40.

We had to do that and we knew we had to defend the arc. I think they got 1-9. We've averaged about seven so it's a little bit over average but look we're in the final we don't care!” 

 Phillips also spared a special word for man of the match Charlie Fallon, who scored 1-3 and proved too hot to handle.

“Charlie's brilliant. We just said ‘get the ball and take on your man’. He's absolutely brilliant. He's so elusive. He'll sell you dummies. He's with the Mayo minors. He's going to be a brilliant player for Mayo Gaels and Mayo. He's absolutely fantastic. Lovely left foot and a lovely finish and he's a good guy. Really good temperament and just an all-around good guy.”