Teachers by trade, managers by desire

If there was one thing that might have pleased the Balla management more than the scoreline of their side’s All-Ireland semi-final victory over Carrigaline, it could have been the scoreline of the other semi-final.

What better way to quickly return the feet of your players to earth after a fourteen points victory than to tell them that their next opponents were after winning their own semi-final by 31 points.

It’s hard to comprehend how the best team at their grade in Leinster could lose by that amount to the best team of the same grade in Ulster, but it was a sobering afternoon for St Paul’s College of Raheny when they ran into the juggernaut that is St Ciaran’s College of Ballygawley in Co Tyrone, who emerged as 5-20 to 0-4 winners over the Dublin lads. It made Balla’s 3-17 to 1-9 triumph over the Munster champions look a quite competitive game in comparison.

“At this age you can get ahead of yourself very quickly with a good semi-final win so to see the other team put up such a scoreline, I think it was no harm to focus the minds of the lads again because we definitely know what we’ll be up against,” Gareth O’Donnell told the Western People last week.

Gareth, the well-known Charlestown Sarsfields footballer, is joint manager of the Balla team along with Adrian Phillips, a goalkeeper in the Mayo senior football panel last season. The pair of geography teachers are getting their students ready for a very different examination this week.

“I don’t need to say any more about what we’re up against than to look at the scoreline of their semi-final,” chimed Ballyhaunis man Phillips.

And yet for all that their game against the Leinster champions turned into such a one-sided affair, St Ciaran’s have actually had some tighter squeezes than Balla along the way to next Saturday’s Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan Cup final.

The closest anyone has got to the West Mayo outfit has been when Gortnor Abbey, in the Connacht final, and Holy Rosary College Mountbellew, in the semi-final, were both beaten by five points. Other than that Balla had ten points to spare over Ballinamore in the provincial quarter-final, were a dozen points better than Carrick on Shannon in the group stages, and they had already beaten Gortnor Abbey by fourteen points when the pair of eventual Connacht finalists met in the very opening round of the competition (and yet still entered the final as underdogs!).

In comparison, in between St Ciaran’s demolishment of the Raheny boys last time out and their 40 points mauling of St Columb’s of Derry in the very opening round of the Ulster senior ‘C’ championship, they were put to the pin of their collar more than once within their own province. They had just the one point to spare (2-11 to 2-10) over St Mark’s Warrenpoint in the Ulster quarter-final while the semi-final was a high-scoring shootout that saw them eventually overcome St Columba’s of Glenties by four points, 2-18 to 3-11.

The Ulster final was an absolute epic, one where St Ciaran’s trailed Carndonagh Community School by six points in the first-half, led by four in the second but trailed again by a point entering stoppage time before eventually pulling through by three points, 4-12 to 2-15, thanks to an injury time goal from substitute Conan Canavan, who would go on to start the All-Ireland semi-final and strike another goal and three points.

But the real star of the campaign for St Ciaran’s has undoubtedly been Shea McDermott, an attacker who flirts between the centre- and full-forward positions. If an asterisk could be placed beside the 1-11 he scored against St Paul’s, such was the weakness of the opposition, then the 3-10 he also scored across both the Ulster semi-final and final should make Balla extremely wary of the threat posed by McDermott who like Canavan, is a member of the famed Errigal Ciaran club.

McDermott scored 1-1 for Tyrone when sprung from the bench in last year's All-Ireland U20 final win against Louth so factor in that St Ciaran’s can also call upon three members of the Tyrone side that won the 2025 All-Ireland MFC title and it’s as formidable an opponent that Balla could ever expect to meet at ‘C’ level. Wing-back Elliot Kerr and midfielder Darren McAnespie were starters for the Red Hands against Kerry in last year’s final while St Ciaran’s centre-back Miceál Mullin was among the substitutes. Unquestionably, the Ballygawley boys are a well-hardened team.

“But I think we will be too,” Gareth O’Donnell says bullishly.

“We definitely know what we’re up against, we’ve got a good bit of preparation work done on them and we know what they can do. But it’s about what we can do now and I think we’ll definitely give ourselves a serious chance come Saturday.

“These fellas, particularly over the last few years, I’ve been struck at how together they are. That comes down to having Balla, Mayo Gaels and Ballintubber as our main feeder clubs. That togetherness, from a small number of clubs, has really helped us. The lads get such a buzz out of playing for each other.

“Schools football is totally different because for the rest of your lives you’re going to be playing against each other. I think that’s what makes it so enjoyable and you could see as the year has gone on, it’s been a really tight knit group,” says O’Donnell who admits the season has not been without its ups and downs.

“We took a bad beating to Ballyhaunis in the Flanagan Cup back in October and I think that really focused us. We lost 3-16 to 0-12 and were very poor, we could have been beaten by more, and then you’re kind of scratching your head on the bus on the way home wondering how are we going to fix this. But the lads have really knuckled down.

“Another turning point I think was when we had our group championship done, we took off down to ATU Sligo to play their Freshers team on a wet Tuesday evening in December. 25 lads were waiting on the bus at 4 o’clock ready to go. There’s serious dedication and this (final) is just reward for it.” 

To say this is an exciting time for Balla Secondary School would be an understatement. Last Monday week, the senior soccer team – eight starters of whom are also part of the Gaelic football team – contested the FAI National ‘B’ Cup final where they were beaten 3-1 by Gaelcholáiste Reachrann of Donaghmede while today (Tuesday) the school begins a three night run of its musical Grease, the cast of which will feature up to seven members of the football team.

“We have real performers… in every sense,” quips Adrian Phillips who didn’t see the soccer team’s progression to its own national final as any sort of hindrance to the ambitions of the football team. Quite the opposite in fact.

“I think it was a help. The lads just got used to winning matches. They were going off on a bus at 10 o’clock on weekday mornings and they were winning matches and they kept winning matches. They just built a habit of winning and a togetherness, a connection between them. Connections are huge in successful teams.” 

But there was probably no win quite so satisfying for the footballers all year as their Connacht final triumph over Jesus and Mary, Gortnor Abbey where Kobe McDonald was the standout among a number of star names featuring in the opposition’s ranks. One week later McDonald was scoring 1-4 from play in a 16-minute cameo on his senior inter-county debut for Mayo but that evening at a wintry Connacht Centre of Excellence, he was restricted to three points from play, and a two point free, because of a massively disciplined Balla performance.

“We spoke as a group beforehand, about how nobody outside the management team and our group of players gave us a chance, but we came up with a plan to stop Gortnor and to beat them and thankfully it worked on the evening,” reflected Phillips.

“Gortnor have some unbelievable players so we had to come up with a collective plan to try and negate them as best we could and thankfully it worked out.

“Everyone dug deep in the second-half when it got really cold and wet and snowy. They worked so hard collectively, we got an awful lot of tackles in and our defence was excellent. Keeping them to seven points, when you look at the players they have, it was just unbelievable.” 

What followed in the All-Ireland semi-final against Carrigaline was what Gareth O’Donnell suggests was “probably the best thirty minutes of football we have played all year”, when Balla, having played against the wind, led 1-9 to 0-4 at half-time. By the 47th minute they had moved sixteen points clear of the Cork boys.

Stretch that level of performance to a full sixty minutes next Saturday and like O’Donnell said, they’ll have a serious chance.