LEINSTER CLUB FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: EVERY YEAR, practically without fail, the club championship throws up romantic and heroic tales of great endeavour, sometimes entwining them into the one, distinctive game such as tomorrow's meeting of Celbridge and Kilmacud Crokes.
On paper it's just another quarter-final of the Leinster football championship, yet it encompasses so much more. Last Monday, Celbridge won their first Kildare senior football title - beating 12-time champions Sarsfields after a replay - which may not sound like too big a deal, except when considering the club has been in existence since July 1885, less than a year after the GAA itself was founded.
Now the club finds itself coming up against Kilmacud Crokes, one of the modern powerhouses of Dublin football, and who last Monday also won the county title, but for the sixth time since 1992. Later today, Kilmacud also contest the Dublin county hurling final looking to become the first club to pull off the championship double since St Vincent's in 1981.
In a further twist to this sort of David and Goliath affair, Celbridge are managed by former Dublin All-Ireland winner Barney Rock, who has been with the Kildare club for the past two seasons, and many believe is one definite reason behind their long-awaited breakthrough. Yet even Rock is unsure why it's taken Celbridge so long to finally earn their true place in club football history and put their name on the county football roll of honour.
"They are obviously one of the oldest clubs in the country," he says, "going, really, since the GAA was set up itself. Yet last Monday wasn't just their first senior title. It was their first senior final. I can't really say, though, why it's only come together for them in the last few years. Obviously there's been a lot of progress made over the last 10 or 20 years, with more work being done by the committee that's there, and more young people coming into the area as well.
"I've no ties at all with the club, just met a man named Mick O'Reilly, a couple of years ago, who said he wanted to have a chat with me. They asked me was I interested, and when I got the low-down and the history of the place I decided to go with it."
Rock won his All-Ireland with Dublin in 1983, but lost in the 1984 and 1985 finals. He won a fourth Leinster championship in 1989, and continued playing with Dublin until 1991. He started his club management with Stabannon Parnells in Louth, winning a senior championship with them in 1994, and again in 1999. He then moved on to Garretstown, winning an intermediate title, and in 2004 won the intermediate championship in Meath with Duleek.
"Yeah, I would have been flicking around with a few teams all along," adds Rock, but then stops himself well short of revealing any ambitions of taking over a county team, such as, say, his native Dublin. "Well, I've been asked to do county jobs, with different counties, but I'm quite happy to do what I'm doing. I like the quiet involvement of club teams, and at the moment I've had success with them all."
Yet his commitment to Celbridge is absolute. Though he lives in Ashbourne, Rock works in Tallaght, which makes the commute that bit easier, and without fail he's made the trip every Tuesday and Thursday, and usually Saturday as well. Like any first-time finalists, the fear was they may have left the title behind them when drawing with Sarsfields first time out, but last Monday's 1-9 to 0-10 win, built around a brilliant individual display from young forward Mark O'Sullivan, and a more collected defensive display, earned them the long-awaited victory - and a crack at the Dublin champions.
"It wasn't really a surprise to me, no," says Rock. "I always believed they could win, but it's like everything else, we set out our goal at the start of the year, and that was to do well in the league, which we did, making the final, and then progress along in the championship after that. For the last couple of years they'd been beaten in the quarter-finals, so that was our main aim this time, to get over the quarter-finals.
"After that everything just grew, and the team wanted to go and win it. They had to ensure first of all that they made the final, because they'd never gone that far before either. They're a young team though, and we wouldn't exactly have a load of players from senior intercounty background. Mick Wright was there for a while, but we do have a lot of experience there from minor and under-21 level, fellas that would have played with Kildare over the years at that level, so they're not shy or inexperienced either."
Clearly, they can't afford to be shy coming up against a team like Kilmacud, who have, among others, county names such as Paul Griffin, Darren Magee and Mark Vaughan.
"Our ambition, obviously, is to arrive in Parnell Park focused on it, and go out and give the best performance we can possibly give. If we do that then we'd hope we'd be in with a shout. You always need that little bit of luck as well. It's a daunting task though, because they're third favourites now for the All-Ireland.
"This is a whole new ball game for us. And if we were to win this it would be like an All-Ireland, or a Leinster title, for the fellas in Celbridge, because we weren't expected to be anywhere near a team like Kilmacud this year."
