County U16 'B' Hurling Final

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

County U16 ‘B’ Hurling Final
8 November 2008

Kickhams Creggan 1-04
St. Galls 0-10

It takes a good team to win back to back championships, but in the real world of juvenile hurling with teams changing from year to year, and throw in to the mix an injury, a suspension and a player at work this was always going to be a tough task.

Creggan played against a strong breeze in the first half and it took a good ten minutes for both teams to settle down before Oran McCann opened the account with a point. This was followed by constant St. Galls pressure resulting in them scoring 5 points, but the best score of the half was provided by Conor McCann who pointed an excellent free.

The half time score of 0-05 to 0-02 could have been a lot more only for Tiernan McLarnon who was kept busy with great goal keeping and clearing the ball well out of defence.

Even with Creggan frees being missed, they felt that they hadn’t played well and the game was still there to be won.

A couple of minutes after the restart, Martin Johnston hit a ‘65’ that went over the heads of the players and ended up in the net, levelling the game at 1-02 to 0-05. St. Galls though scored two further points and a converted free in reply from Conor McCann kept the teams close.

St. Galls scored another point but this was once again cancelled out by another Conor McCann dead ball conversion. Creggan hurled away and the height advantage of some of the Galls players didn’t battlers like Conleth McGrenaghan, Ronan Devlin, Conor ‘Corleone’ McCann and Conal McLarnon who turned in to ‘real wee warriors’.

10 minutes to go and Creggan were down to 14 men, when Big Marty Johnston got a second yellow card. The Creggan heads began to drop and nothing seemed to go in their favour and St. Galls scored two further points to win 0-10 to Kickhams 1-04.

It was an entertaining game played in blustery conditions with a lot of this team hoping to be back for a hat-trick appearance next year.

Kickhams Scorers – Martin Johnston (1-0), Conor McCann (0-03), Oran McCann (0-01)

Report kindly supplied by Paul O'Neill