By Niall Gartland

CARRICKMORE native Ryan Daly has enjoyed an immensely successful first season in charge of Cavan club Crosserlough, who have earned themselves a crack at Kilcoo in Saturday’s Ulster Senior Club Championship quarter-final at Páirc Esler in Newry.

Ryan is a dyed-in-the-wool Carrickmore man and led the club to a Tyrone Senior Championship appearance in 2022, where they fell a few points short against Errigal Ciaran in the decider.

Part of his backroom team at Carmen was Stephen ‘Archie’ Beattie, a native of Eskra, and the duo have embarked on a fresh new challenge at Crosserlough. who recently came up trumps on Cavan county final day with victory over Ramor.

Asked to draw a contrast between managing his beloved home club and taking on a team 90 minutes down the road, Daly said that it isn’t entirely chalk and cheese.

“Carrickmore have got high expectations, they want to be competing at the top table, and you have to take decisions that aren’t pleasant with the people you grew up with and that can be hard.

“To be honest, you still have to make those hard decisions elsewhere but the only difference is you go home and don’t hear about it until you come back again a couple of days later.”

Daly added: “When you put yourself in that role as manager, you have to be willing to make those tough decisions and as I said it’s not pleasant, but people do realise that you’re doing your best for the team and trying to prepare them as best they can to get over the line.”

Opponents Kilcoo are outright favourites for Ulster, but Daly says Crosserlough are determined to make the most of their opportunity, especially as there was no provincial championship when they last emerged from the pack in Cavan back in 2020.

“I’ve been chatting to spectators and they never got to celebrate in 2020 due to Covid. Needless to say they made up for it this year.

“The lads deserve to play at provincial level and this is where every senior club wants to be, it’s the cream of Ulster.

“We’ve a young squad and they’ll be hoping it’s not a once-off. We hope to see this year where we stand against the top teams and hopefully that’ll stand to Crosserlough in the future.

“Kilcoo are a seasoned outfit and they’ve got a lot of intercounty experience.

“We’re up against that but we’re not going to Newry to make up the numbers, we’re going to compete and it all comes down to the day.”

It’s been a steep learning curve for Daly who has had to conduct a crash-course into Cavan football, and their surge to Cavan Senior honours is all the more impressive given their talismanic full-forward Paddy Lynch sustained a cruciate injury earlier in the year.

“I suppose in our first year, we didn’t have expectations of lifting the title but we wanted to bring the team forward. Crosserlough had that title in their sights, they’d been beaten in the last few semi-finals so they’d been knocking on the door.

“We lost Paddy Lynch at the start of the season and that was a massive blow but credit to the players, they circled the wagons and grew in confidence as the season went on.”