Inside Track: Seamus Flood Cup will satisfy Kickhams – for now

It’s not the title they crave, but until they get back in the hunt for the Joe Ward Cup – and that will be next season – Cooley Kickhams will be happy to take custody of the intermediate championship.

Kickhams’ defeat of St Kevin’s at Ardee on Sunday gave them a first championship win at adult level in 32 years. Anyone who remembers how the green-and-golds dominated Louth football in the 1970s and as the next decade gave way to the ‘90s will wonder why this could have happened.

But happen it has, and now the team tutored for this campaign by former Louth goalkeeper and respected coach, Colm Nally, can look forward to a place in the top competition. This will compensate to some degree for their failure to retain a place in the Cardinal O’Donnell Cup.

There’s no-one alive who can recall when Kickhams last won the intermediate championship. The competition was having its first run in 1907 when a team captained by Charles P Kearney beat Annagassan in the semi-final and then accounted for Dromiskin Mitchels in the decider, played on January 12th, 1908. Dundalk’s Athletic Grounds was the venue and none other than Joe Ward was the referee.

That was then – right now the Fr McEvoy side are celebrating a win that owes much to a power-packed second half performance, spearheaded by the magnificent Brian White.

But as they considered their options at the break, at which stage St Kevin’s deservedly led by four points and should have been further in front, the sideline team of Nally, Leo McGuigan, Brian Rafferty and David Thornton needed someone who’d be able to add substantially to a meagre five-point tally.

They looked to White, as they had done at the interval of the dramatic semi-final win over Hunterstown Rovers, and to just say he repaid them is not doing him justice.

He did it by the bucket-load, coming up with the point that gave his side belief and then adding five more, a couple of these from his hands, easily the game’s best.

There was also a goal from Michael Rafferty nearing the end of the third quarter, and whereas they had played with a lot of authority in the first half, Kevin’s, attempting to win the title for the first time, were at this stage not only on the back foot but limping.

The Philipstown side regained some of their composure in the last ten minutes, but by then Cooley were being cheered home by supporters, many of whom had been in Dunleer’s Pairc Ui Mhuiri earlier in the day to see their ladies’ team beat neighbours, St Patrick’s, in the LGFA senior final.

A glance at the Kickhams 1907 team shows there was a Tom Marks included. On Sunday, the Seamus Flood Cup was presented to Darren Marks. The same lineage?

Whether or not, Darren was a proud man as he took possession of a trophy commemorating a man, who, among the many posts he held in Louth football, was a one-time chairman of the Cooley Kickhams club.