They have a freshly-minted All Star in Éire Óg.
Ross Dunphy’s individual award may have come on the back of his excellence in the second tier Tailteann Cup competition with Carlow but it remains a landmark achievement all the same.
No Carlow player, let alone one from Éire Óg, had ever previously won a football All Star of any sort.
Meanwhile, the Kilmacud Crokes team the Carlow town club will host under lights this Saturday evening in the AIB Leinster club championship contains six All Star award winners.
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Galway’s Shane Walsh, nominated for Footballer of the Year in 2022, Paul Mannion, man of the match for Dublin in July’s All-Ireland final, and the evergreen Rory O’Carroll are all current or former All-Stars. There are plenty more All-Ireland medals, for club and county, jam packed into that high-achieving group too.
And all of that is only part of the reason why they have been installed as near dead certs to take care of 8/1 outsiders Éire Óg this weekend.
Crokes are reigning All-Ireland champions of course and are chasing a first ever provincial three-in-a-row. Ominously, they produced their best performance of the season so far when dismantling form side Ballyboden St Enda’s in the county final.
An alternative take is that, in provincial terms, there’s as good as nothing between these two teams. Crokes have six Leinster titles but Éire Óg have five. And if Éire Óg had held on to their late lead in the 2019 decider against Ballyboden St Enda’s, instead of losing narrowly, they’d be evenly split on six apiece.
“That one still cuts deep, it’s still a very sore one,” said current Éire Óg captain Jordan Morrissey of the 0-8 to 0-6 defeat to ‘Boden. “That’s the nature of sport, sometimes something is within your grasp and then the next minute it’s gone.”
That’s a statement that neatly sums up Éire Óg’s latest journey to the provincial quarter-finals. They needed extra-time to defeat St Joseph’s of Laois in Round 1 and, at one stage in that additional 20 minutes, were four points down. Rewind back even further to the county semi-final against Rathvilly and they were 3-1 down early in a penalty shoot-out.
Manager Turlough O’Brien later admitted he thought it was all over. Éire Óg rallied though and a combination of goalkeeper Johnny Furey and teenage forward Josh Brady nudged them to a memorable sudden death win. Brady scored two penalties on that occasion and added another goal from the spot against St Joseph’s in extra-time.
“There’s definitely a never-say-die attitude there, we’re willing to dig down deep for it, even when the odds are stacked against you,” said Morrissey, who shrugged when asked if it’s footballing ability or sheer character that is winning games for them this year.
“You need a blend of both. You won’t get too far without football ability either. I think it’s hard work that gets you into those positions to win games and then it’s your football ability that comes to the fore. We feel like this group has a blend of both.”
Éire Óg were down four of their county final players – Cormac Mullins, Darragh O’Brien, Reece Denieffe and Kelvin Chatten – for the St Joseph’s game. Midfielder Chatten is expected back this weekend though Mullins (cruciate) and both O’Brien, the manager’s son, and Denieffe are unavailable again.
Crokes look set to be without injured Dublin panellist Craig Dias as well and, naturally enough, Éire Óg will believe they can produce an upset.
O’Brien, when managing Carlow, always railed against his native county’s whipping boys tag and quipped after the recent county final win, when it was noted that they were on the same side of the Leinster club draw as the Dublin champions, that “it’s a tough route alright – tough for Dublin!”
The RTÉ TV cameras will be on hand to record what unfolds.
“They’re the All-Ireland champions – that’s the scale of the task for us,” said Morrissey, a key figure too for Carlow this year. “You don’t have to do a whole lot of homework because everyone knows the qualities they have in their side. Household names a lot of them.”
