Inside Track: It’s 68 years since Newtown Blues weren’t involved in the O’Donnell Cup
Inside Track with Joe Carroll
Results from games in the latter stages of local GAA leagues don’t usually cause much of a stir. Okay, so there might be a place, or places, in finals to be decided, and at the other end of the table, a decision to be reached on who’s going to be relegated.
Most times, however, these issues would be more or less resolved before the last round, with the outcomes causing little or no surprises.
If it was different this time around in the senior league it was because Newtown Blues were implicated, not in the fight for a place in the final, but in striving to avoid relegation.
And it happened. Second-last going into the final round, last year’s championship runners-up needed to beat Naomh Máirtín to keep their hopes alive of at least getting a play-off. A defeat for fellow strugglers, Mattock Rangers, in their game with Dreadnots would also have helped, as would Geraldines losing to St Patrick’s.
But not only did Blues lose to Máirtíns, Mattock and Gers both won. And what this means, the many times winners of the competition have finished last, while Mattock can retain their senior league status by beating intermediate league runners-up, Young Irelands, in a play-off. Intermediate winners, Roche Emmets, will contest the senior league next season.
Senior football in 2027 mightn’t be lost completely to Blues. They play in group 3 in the league section of the championship along with Dreadnots and Cooley Kickhams, and if gathering enough points to qualify for the knock-out stages, they’ll be safe.
But there’ll be no Cardinal O’Donnell football for the Drogheda team and that’s something that hasn’t happened since 1958. They won what was the second-tier championship that year, the junior, beating St Bride’s in the final.
That won them promotion to senior, and once there, it didn’t take them long to establish themselves.
A championship win in 1961 was followed by six more before the decade was out, and along the way there were many wins in the O’Donnell Cup and another knock-out competition, the Old Gaels Cup. Indeed, they won the O’Donnell Cup four years in succession and five in all during the 1960s.
There was nothing to suggest Blues were going to struggle in the league this year. They made last year’s championship final, and although set to play the first section of the competition without their county players, the feeling was they’d have enough in reserve to keep them afloat.
That wasn’t the case, however. The absence of Ciarán Downey, Daire Nally, Emmet Carolan, Conor Brannigan, Conor MacCríosta and Eoin McCoy in the first half of the competition was too heavy of a burden for the rest to carry. When the county players became available, there was too much ground to make up.
The leagues, junior and intermediate as well as senior, have two phases. The first has all 12 teams competing with each other. When that’s over, there’s a divide, the top six teams playing for the title in a separate competition, the bottom six trying to avoid relegation.
Blues and others with a big county team representation can’t call on their county players while they are involved in provincial championships, and that puts them at a disadvantage. Most observers at the season’s start, however, wouldn’t have put Blues down as relegation candidates.