By Michael McMullan

BUTLERSBRIDGE captain Caoimhin O’ Reilly said his side need their best performance of the season if they are to land a first ever Cavan intermediate title.

After losing last year’s decider to Ballinagh, they are back with one hand on the Tommy Gilroy Cup.

“We got beat badly in the final and I don’t think we performed at all,” O’Reilly said of their 12-point defeat.

They play Ballyhaise on Sunday aiming to right the wrong of last season.

“It was the first intermediate final the club ever got to, so it was massive excitement. This year it is just the 60 minutes of football and the other stuff doesn’t really matter.”

Butlersbridge finished mid-table in division 2A of the league. Finishing fifth in the championship group stage set them up for a quarter-final with Bailieborough.

“We didn’t play well in the league stages, but we still got through,” O’Reilly admitted. After pulling away in the last 10 minutes for a 3-14 to 3-10 win, it set up a semi-final with league leaders Cuchulainn’s.

“We were underdogs again. They would’ve been favourites to win the intermediate,” he added.

Butlersbridge lost by seven points in the league, with Killian Leddy, brothers Caoimhin and Fionntán O’Reilly were among those on the absentee list.

“We were confident in ourselves that we’d be capable of beating them.”

Three goals shot Butlersbridge to Sunday’s decider, a second championship meeting with Ballyhaise since the 2015 intermediate quarter-final.

“It was my second year of senior. We played them in Breffni and they were big favourites,” Caoimhin remembers. “We put it up to them for a while, but they beat us (0-17 to 0-14) in the end.”

Ballyhaise won easy in the group stages 12 months later.

Looking ahead to Sunday and it’s another seismic challenge. Ballyhaise are a ‘seasoned intermediate team’ who have been holding their own in the senior league this season.

“We are going to be up against it and we know that, so we might as well just give it a go,” O’Reilly concludes.

“We know we are going to have to pull out a bigger performance than we have, if we are going to beat Ballyhaise. Everybody will have to play to the peak of their powers if we are going to beat them.”

Aside from this weekend’s crunch game, the O’Reilly is content that Butlersbridge have put their ‘yo-yo team’ tag behind them. The days of rising from junior, only to fall back down, have morphed into something more sustainable.

“The underage has completely changed in the club,” he explains. No longer do they rely on amalgamating with Redhills or Drumlee to field underage teams.

“Our primary school has got far bigger. We are on the outskirts of Cavan town. There used to be 10 in my class, but now it’s 30 per class,” O’Reilly adds.

“When I was playing at underage, we were on our own but we were in division four.”

This year’s U17 crop reached the division two semi-final. The U15s take on Ramor in Saturday’s division two final and his younger brother Fionntán has helped steer the U13s to a division one decider.

A first intermediate on Sunday would be the perfect tonic for a club on the rise.

BUTLERSBRIDGE… Caoimhin O’Reilly