COMPETING with a strong programme of AIB club championship matches tomorrow is the seventh All Ireland B football final.
After a disastrous flirtation with moving the competition from its autumn spot last year left Tipperary the most unsung of the six winners to date, this year's reversion has produced a final which will command a good amount of interest at Carrick on Shannon, where Fermanagh take on Longford.
The Leinster county has already unsuccessfully contested two B finals, last year and 1991, and will be slight outsiders, although occupying a higher division in the National League than their opponents. Fermanagh have already beaten three of their notional betters, Monaghan, Antrim and Roscommon, who currently are joint leaders of Division Three.
Longford's fortunes have been in recovery since former Derry manager Eamonn Coleman took over just over a year ago. They passed Fermanagh at the end of last season - being promoted from Division Four as the northerners were slipping into it and narrowly lost their first championship outing against Wicklow. Only three weeks ago, they recorded a good League win over Galway.
Fermanagh, however, have been coming from rock bottom. A dismal defeat by Tyrone last June ended a year which saw them win only two matches and complete a three year slide from Division Two to the basement. Terry Ferguson resigned as manager and there were plenty of mutterings about players not being sufficiently committed. It was a sour shambles in a county that had come close to beating Armagh in the 1993 championship and had won an Ulster under 21 title a year later.
Ferguson was succeeded by Pat King, the former Tyrone player and father of Shane, who plays for Fermanagh. King is unusually frank about his ambitions in the competition which brought to prominence both first winners Leitrim and their successors in 1991, Clare. Both went on to win provincial titles.
"It was very much part of my plans even before I took the job. As far back as the interview in August, I remember mentioning that I would like a run in the B which I felt would be very valuable in team building. Winning at all was a priority. Fermanagh had been losing games in the third division, not by much - just falling away in the last quarter. I felt that if a match was in the balance, could we not be the team that would come out on top?"
Into tomorrow's match he brings a team that likes to play out of defence before moving the ball quickly into a forward line that includes the prodigious Raymond Gallagher, who has overcome a bad knee injury to have a profound impact on the team's run.
The team's attacking prowess runs deeper than just Gallagher - with Rory Gallagher, a cousin, Shane King and Collie Curran in good form. It is their superiority in this sector together with solidity in the middle where the talented Paul Brewster currently operates, that makes them favourites to beat a Longford team too reliant on 34 year old Dessie Barry and uncertain looking at the back.
. President elect of the GAA, Joe McDonagh will tomorrow unveil a statue to commemorate the memory of former Limerick hurler, Jackie Power at Lisnagry at 2.30 pm.
. Tyrone's Brian Dooher and All Ireland winning Monaghan women's captain Margaret Kierans have been named Footballers of the Year in the Ulster GAA Writers' annual awards ceremony in the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran.
