By Shaun Casey

FOLLOWING a hard fought two-point win over Naomh Conaill, Kilcar were crowned as Division One league champions.

Conor Cunningham, enjoying his first year in charge of his home club, admits that getting their hands on the league title wasn’t the main target at the start of the season, but the extra game and the chance to give a few more players game time was welcomed.

“It’s more about developing players. Regarding the league it wasn’t on the radar, but the way results panned out over the past six weeks, you thought then there might be an opportunity that you might even get to a final.

“I think the standard of football was pretty good considering the conditions. The ball to hand was pretty good from both teams and there wasn’t a score for probably the first 12 or 13 minutes in the game. I suppose both teams were feeling themselves out.

“We’d a really young team starting at the weekend, nerves were part of it.

“We wouldn’t have been happy with our own start, but we grew into the game and there were good scores got.

“I don’t think it was too defensive, I think both teams played the best they could considering the monsoon conditions that happened on Saturday evening.”

Focus will swiftly shift to the championship where Kilcar meet Milford in the opening round.

“What the league final gave us was an extra game, it filled up a weekend as well. We’re three weeks out from the championship so it gave us an extra game that we ordinarily wouldn’t have.

“It gave a few of the younger fellas more game time as well so they’re definitely in the reckoning to start the championship and that’s a bonus.

“It’s a great boost within the club, it’s a competition that means a lot within the club and it just brings things forward and helps with the buy-in within the squad.

“We play Milford who are in Division Two at the moment but they’re in a play-off this weekend to get promoted to Division One so hopefully we’ll get to watch them this weekend. The three weeks won’t be long coming, it’ll come round fairly quick.”

Kilcar are hoping to end a five-year wait for a championship title, having last won the Dr Maguire Cup in 2017.

“It was 1993 when we won it previous to 2017 and I suppose back in ’17 it was a huge relief within the club that we won it. I suppose people would have thought we would have kicked on from then, but it just didn’t happen for various reasons.

“Our goal this year is to win the championship but obviously we believe we have a lot of work to do, I’d put St Eunan’s and Noamh Conaill still ahead of us there.

“We’ve introduced new players into the squad this year and we utilised them well at the weekend in the league final and we believe our squad is definitely stronger than 2017.

“And we’ll need everybody, it’s a long competition. It’s a tough competition, there’s very few free
weekends within that so every panel is going to be stretched to the limit.”