All-Ireland League First Division Final: For the third year running the best team over the course of the regulation campaign were beaten in the final of the AIB All-Ireland League. But on the day, Clontarf couldn't have too many complaints for cometh the decider, Ballymena just had that little bit more.
As Gary Longwell said afterwards, Clontarf are a special side and it took a special performance to beat them. With a dozen full-timers in their starting line-up to Clontarf's three, and the cohesion brought about by a five-match winning streak coming into the decider, it was perhaps no surprise that a team with far more experience of big matches - be it tests, a European Cup final or big nights in Europe - rose to the occasion as they did.
They had the better platform, particularly their lineout, and applied far more continuity. Up front, Neil McMillan, who packs a remarkable punch for such a relatively light and young player, and Matt McCullough were outstanding.
Yet for the majority of the first half, when they preferred to pummel away at the blue-and-red line inside rather than outside, they ran into some fearsomely aggressive and unyielding tackling. On the resumption, though, they played with more width, and revealed a sharper attacking edge with three third-quarter tries that turned a 10-6 interval deficit into a 25-13 lead.
Adam Larkin emerged as the match-winner with his two tries and last-kick, insurance drop goal, but James Topping's stunning try was the pièce de résistance. Taking a pacy right-to-left, diagonal line on James Downey's inside shoulder off a lineout move, he eluded the despairing hands of Ben Gissing, Niall O'Brien, Mike Walls and finally, with a change of feet and hands, Dave Hewitt to complete a weaving 60-metre run by the corner flag. A cracking try to decide a cracking final.
"It's just a wonderful feeling, I was crying out there, I couldn't keep the tears in. I lost it," admitted Tony D'Arcy, Ballymena's soft- spoken and eminently likeable Australian coach.
"We've worked very hard as a club. After 120 years it's been a long time coming. Two very good football teams out there, and I was pleased we were just able to get in over the top because Clontarf never stopped coming. It was a fantastic final."
Clontarf will rue the play-off system yet this final was the best proof yet of the benefits of this system to Irish club rugby and because of it, Clontarf have never been bigger. The upwardly mobile Dublin northsiders provided the vast bulk of the 10,200 crowd, about 300 of whom had sent the team coach noisily on its way from Castle Avenue and a Garda escort hours before kick-off.
Rarely has Lansdowne Road reverberated to the chanting of a club side quite like this, and certainly not to chants of "Clontarf". Agonisingly for them, they fell just short, literally coming within inches, or a borderline double movement, of forcing extra time. For a truly part-time team, who were a third division outfit half a dozen seasons ago, it's been a great odyssey.
Clontarf looked dead and buried after Ballymena's triple whammy in the third quarter, but responded brilliantly. No one upped the ante more than Dave Moore, giving the lie to the notion that he might just be a 60-minute player.
Ben Gissing and James Downey had punched the holes for Darragh O'Shea's first-half try, and now Warren O'Kelly, Bernard Jackman and especially Moore made the hard yards for Walls, Andy Dunne, Downey, O'Shea and the talented Hewitt to create a well-worked try in cramped room for Ollie Winchester.
At the apex of their stirring effort to take the game into extra time, Moore was adjudged to have made a double movement after manfully breaking through the combined tackles of McMillan, Russell Nelson and Larkin. Strictly speaking, the covering Andy Graham had dived on the prostrate Moore before he made his secondary lunge for the line. You've seen them given, and in the Super 12 it wouldn't even have been an issue, but as ever, the excellent Alain Rolland was perfectly placed.
Clontarf will also rue their decision to opt for a lineout rather than a scrum in first-half injury time in the moments after Mark Blair was sin-binned, and perhaps most of all, some apparent lapses in concentration in that pivotal third quarter.
It wasn't so much that two of Ballymena's tries came off a Moore knock-on or Dunne's missed touch, more the loose defending and missed tackles which followed, particularly for the one-two between Larkin and Paddy Wallace for Ballymena's first try.
For in the heel of the hunt, Clontarf had many of the game's outstanding performers, namely Hewitt, Moore, the ever-industrious Andy Wood and, in the loose, Jackman. But as their coach, Phil Werahiko, admitted, "I'm obviously disappointed for all the lads because they've worked so hard this season, not only to achieve for the club but for themselves. I thought maybe as a team we weren't as collective as we would like to have been but there were some outstanding individual performances.
"It would be hard for me to put things in perspective as a foreign coach," he said when reflecting on the overall scale of Clontarf's progress. "I judge things by results and I don't look for excuses, such as whether teams are professional or not professional. For the players if they want to be in there on the same stage as professionals they have to act like professionals even before they become professionals."
Still, Werahiko and Tarf can feel a certain amount of pride over their achievements in this past couple of seasons, no less than the victors.
Scoring sequence: 2 mins - O'Shea pen 3-0; 10: Wallace pen 3-3; 15: O'Shea try and con 10-3; 21: Wallace pen 10-6; (half-time 10-6); 43: Larkin try, Wallace con 10-13; 53: Larkin try, Wallace con 10-20; 57: O'Shea pen 13-20; 58: Topping try 13-25; 65: Winchester try 18-25; 85: Larkin drop goal 18-28.
CLONTARF: D Hewitt; N O'Brien, D O'Shea, J Downey, O Winchester; A Dunne, R O'Reilly; W O'Kelly (capt), B Jackman, A Clarke, B Gissing, A Wood, D Quinn, D Moore, S O'Donnell. Replacements: D Higgins for O'Brien (60 mins), J Wickham for O'Kelly (84 mins).
BALLYMENA: P Wallace; J Topping, M Waterhouse, H Jones, S Young; A Larkin, P Spence; S McConnell, P Shields, B Young, M Blair, G Longwell, M McCullough, R Nelson (capt), N McMillan. Replacements: N McKernan for McConnell, Maxwell for Jones (both half-time), A Graham for Blair (57 mins). Sin-binned: Blair (39-49 mins).
Referee: Alain Rolland (IRFU).
