By Niall Gartland

DEVENISH boss Sylvester ‘Sid’ Mulrone insists that this season will be his last at the helm, no matter what happens in the coming weeks and months.

The 68-year-old is in the fourth year of his latest stint in charge of his home club, leading the team alongside former Fermanagh player Marty O’Brien.

Having achieved promotion from Division Two last year, they maintained their top-flight status ahead of schedule so the next task is ensuring they don’t drop out of the Senior Championship.

Whether it’s a fruitful championship campaign or not, a man indelibly associated with Devenish football says he’ll be taking a permanent step back at the end of the season.

“I’ve been involved on and off a whole lifetime between managing Devenish, moving onto somewhere else and then coming back.

“Myself and Marty were going to stop last year. The club did their best in the off-season to try and find a new management team but they couldn’t really get anybody. Nobody wanted it to drag into the new year so we decided to come back again, but this will be the final hurrah – it’s time to hang up the boots and ride off into the sunset.”

Devenish can afford to lose their final league game of the season when they take on Derrylin this weekend, but Mulrone says they are mindful of ending their recent streak of poor results with the championship just around the corner.

“Our goal at the start of the season was maintaining our Division One status and we achieved that with about four games remaining. Maybe that didn’t help us in a way as we possibly got complacent and have lost three games in a row.

“We’ve Derrylin on Friday night in our last league game and it’s important to us as we’d like to have a bit of momentum heading into the championship. We want to maintain our senior championship status as well.”

While Devenish have a commendable amount of talented young players coming through the ranks, Mulrone doesn’t underestimate the influence of their older brigade. On that note, it was a body-blow to the team when stalwart Joe O’Brien suffered what is likely to be his fourth ACL injury last weekend.

“We unfortunately lost Joe O’Brien to injury last Friday night against Derrygonnelly, it’s looking like a fourth cruciate injury which would be the fourth in his career. It’s horribly unlucky, and he was having as good a season as he’s ever had for us. It’s a massive blow to Joe and it’s a big blow to the rest of our lads as well.”