By Niall Gartland

HOLY Trinity in the semi-finals of the MacRory Cup. It’s the stuff of dreams for the Cookstown school, and their joint-manager John McKeever recognises that their opponents St Patrick’s Maghera are rather more accustomed to playing in the big leagues in the famous Ulster Schools’ competition.

This is uncharted territory for Holy Trinity, who are managed by McKeever and Peter Canavan, whereas Maghera are 16-time winners and have come out on top of four of the last eight MacRory Cup competitions.

It’s a happy position for Holy Trinity to be in, however, with the pressure well and truly off ahead of Sunday’s meeting between the two teams.

“There’s a great atmosphere around the college at the moment,” said McKeever.

“This is obviously our first MacRory Cup semi-final so it’s new ground for us. For St Pat’s Maghera this is very common, they compete in semi-finals every year, it’s nothing new to them.

“We’ve come up through Vocationals and then the MacLarnon Cup, so we’re probably big underdogs out of the all the teams left. I’m sure any of the other three teams would’ve been happy enough to draw us.”

Holy Trinity tested themselves in a couple of challenge matches against Maghera before the start of this year’s MacRory Cup. St Patrick’s, managed by Derrytresk man Paul Hughes and legendary Derry defender Sean Marty Lockhart won both games, so a massive task awaits Holy Trinity.

McKeever said: “We’re familiar with St Pat’s, they beat us two years ago in the quarter-finals so we obviously know how tough the task will be.

“They beat us by two points, Sean Kearney got a late goal with about 12 minutes to go and that made the difference.

“There wasn’t much between the two teams and I’m sure this weekend will be no different. We played a couple of games against them earlier in the season and St Pat’s won them both so it’ll take a big performance from us to get to the final.”

Holy Trinity reached this juncture with a breakthrough quarter-final win over Abbey CBS a fortnight ago. A late goal made all the difference as they snatched a two-point victory.

“The big target for is this year was to progress and get to a semi-final as we were beaten last time out in the quarters.

“So that was our main focus and we didn’t think too far ahead of that to be honest.

“From a neutral point of view the game against Abbey was very exciting and it looked like the game was going to go to extra-time.

“It just happened that we managed to turn over the ball in injury time and get a goal and that was really the difference.

“We were delighted to get of the line, we definitely showed a lot of character in the last ten minutes of the game to come from two points down to win the game, that’s the most pleasing thing about it.”