Joe Carroll: Championship odds have a couple of us dreaming of something big

Inter-county championships are over for another season, and now the lights shine on club football. It’s not that there hasn’t been any activity at local pitches up and down the country; but, while county teams were in action – in the leagues as well – club teams, in most cases, had to make do without their best players.

Mickey Harte’s Louth students have been back in action for a number of weeks, and the team to benefit most are St Mary’s.
The Ardee outfit had as many as eight at Darver training sessions, but now all are back in blue.

Though up among the leaders in the Cardinal O’Donnell Cup, it hasn’t been going all that well for Mary’s. Still, this hasn’t deterred the bookies from making them the hot favourites for the championship, which gets underway on the last weekend of this month.

Boylesports, whose name was carried on Louth jerseys at one time, make last year’s champions even-money favourites to retain the Joe Ward Cup. After that it’s 9/4 Naomh Mairtin, the team Mary’s claimed a controversial win over at the semi-final stage last year when the Monasterboice side were going for the hat-trick.

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Newtown Blues are 11/4 third-favourites, and after that there’s a gap, St Mochta’s next best on 12/1. St Patrick’s, showing some signs of rejuvenation, are 14/1, with Geraldines and St Fechin’s on 20/1.

You can have 25/1 on Cooley Kickhams recapturing the glory days, with Dreadnots, a number of times beaten finalists since the turn into this century, on 28/1. St Joseph’s are 40/1 and St Bride’s 50/1.

And would you believe it, Dundalk Gaels are rank outsiders at 100/1? (Don’t all start shouting ‘yes’.)

It hasn’t been good for us in recent weeks. (‘Us’ is used because, as some might know, I’m a card-carrier with The Ramparts outfit – longer than I care to remember.)

We needed the recent win over O’Connell’s to make sure of staying in the intermediate league, and having been lumped in with Naomh Mairtin and St Mochta’s in the championships preliminaries, will have to pluck something special from the bag to make the knock-out stages.

Still, it doesn’t stop us from dreaming, and last week, on seeing the betting for the first time, I engaged in a bit of that.

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I was in the company of one of the latest generation, a young man who plays minor football in Armagh. And while we were at it, we looked up his club senior team’s odds to win the Gerry Fagan Cup. Another ton to one, 100/1.

And then we did a bit of calculating. What would a Fiver double on Gaels and Shane O’Neill’s to win their respective championships net us? A jaw-dropping, eye-watering, even mouth-watering, life-changing £50,000, plus a few hundred euro which we would probably share with whoever gave up the docket and colleagues.

As I said, you’re allowed to dream. It costs nothing, not even a ‘Godiva’, which, in case you didn’t know, is the rhyming slang for a Fiver.