End of the road – Brian McGuigan

Action during Ardboe’s defeat to Dromore

THERE’S few worse feelings in football than that which envelopes you when your season comes to an end. Ardboe’s heavy defeat at the hands of Dromore in the quarter-final of the Tyrone club championship brought the curtain down on my own season, one which has to be viewed as a disappointment on all fronts.

At the start of the year my only aim was to do well with the club. I wasn’t part of the Tyrone set-up, so the club was my sole focus. We had a new management team in place, I had been named as captain, and we were heading into a 2012 campaign confident that we could bounce back strongly after a few disappointing years. Our aspirations were high.

Unfortunately, injuries and absences meant that it quickly turned into a much more difficult task than we would have imagined it would be. A wee club like Ardboe really can’t afford to lose players, and although we did manage to get a few men back on the field for the Dromore match, we were far from being in the position we would have wanted to be for such a tough assignment.

We can have no complaints, Dromore were a far superior team to us and could easily have won by more than the nine points they did. But the most disappointing thing was the lack of a fight put up by this Ardboe team.

There was no fight, there was no purpose, there was no spirit. And that’s not something that could or should ever be said about Ardboe teams. I really felt sorry for the Ardboe supporters who paid in to watch that, because they deserved so much better.

The game before ours at O’Neill Park in Dungannon was the intermediate clash between Moy and Rock. Moy have been perennial underachievers at this level when you consider the talent at their disposal, but they were confident that things were different this year. Rock though had other ideas, and won the game by 1-8 to 0-10.

Philip Jordan tweeted on Sunday night that as you get older, defeats get even harder to accept. “Even more disappointing when personally & as a team we didn’t perform.”

The full story is in the current issue of Gaelic Life, published on Thursday September 6. Buy your copy now in your local newsagent, or you can purchase the online version – for only 90p – by clicking here