Colm Nally helped Cooley to Intermediate success by keeping things simple

Colm Nally came in at the end of the league and guided Cooley Kickhams to their first championship title in 32 years. Trying to regroup a set of players that experienced relegation From Division 1, the turnaround in form has been phenomenal.

With such a short time frame to get his team ready for action Nally reckons it was all down to the players mentality, alongside keeping it simple on the coaching front.

 “I just said we would work on three things" he explained. "We worked on kick out strategy, we worked on our defensive shape without the ball and we worked on our attacking shape and that's all we did.

 “For my first time I just took a different sort of slant in terms of training. We hadn't time, we just had to repeat, repeat, repeat. We hadn't time to throw in loads of new things.

"I focused on those three areas and just worked with the lads and in fairness they were brilliant, they were open minded to everything and towards the end, they were looking for more ideas.”

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Those three coaching pointers were crucial to the win on the day. Peter Thornton’s switch to midfield helped Neil Gallagher and piled pressure on Kevin’s keeper Danny Crosbie.

That helped keep the Philipstown men to three second half points at one end, along with creating the attacking shape that was needed down the far end for Brian White to be seen to full effect. 

Nally explained that it was hard to change a winning team but talismanic White never put pressure on him or his selectors that he should start. And that selfless attitude was seen throughout the successful campaign, right from the opening day. 

“In fairness it is simply the fact we are on the back of three matches on the bounce and when that is happening and the team is winning the team deserves to hold their positions and start I reckon. 

“Brian was improving every night in training, you could see him looking and he was brilliant, he was A1. He was putting no pressure on, just going 'whatever the team needs I'm ready to do'.

“We just tried to stick with the momentum of a winning team, but we knew that Brian was itching to go and that's the earliest we sprung him."