Hard work reaping rewards as Sean MacCumhaills underage hurlers triumph again

Sean MacCumhaills have been leading by example at underage level in the hurling ranks in the county and manager Jamesie Donnelly is hoping their success can help push the senior team back towards the top level.

With the seniors back into the semi-final of the Senior Hurling Championship for the first time in seven years, it’s been a long journey back for a side that got to the final five times in the early 2010s.

But a hat-trick of minor titles, completed on Thursday with a 1-20 to 0-12 win over Aodh Ruadh, has given the Twin-Towns men hope for what’s to come, while they already won the county title at Under-14 level.

“It’s a lot of hard work being put in by a lot of good people,” senior manager Jamesie Donnelly said, who also manages the minors along with Anthony Patton.

“From my own brother Martin, Conor Malone, Stephen Byrne, it’s been a lot of hard work from a lot of people, and right from the Under-8s up, the whole club has one goal, which is to make the club a better place.

“The senior team is in transition, and a lot of these players will be playing for them in a senior semi-final this weekend.

“2018 is our last senior semi-final, so that’s a long time for our club and a lot of players from that have stepped away. Five or six of us retired, which made it hard for the team to handle, and we didn’t have that conveyor belt of players coming through at the time, so the senior team suffered.

“But we’ve been trying to build that back up and we’re competing against the big ball all the time, all of these players are dual players, and that’s something we’re pushing massively. We want our club to be a full dual club.

“There’s a long way to go, St Eunan’s, Burt and Setanta are well ahead of us yet and we’re just trying to catch them.”

And a quality crop of minor players is helping them on that mission to close the gap towards the aforementioned ‘big three’, although there is still work to be done, as the side pushes towards a third Ulster minor campaign after a disappointing end in the Shield final last year, losing out to Eoghan Ruadh of Dungannon.

But their performance on Thursday showed their strength at this level, and an eleven point win against a good Aodh Ruadh side will have them full of confidence going into the provincial journey in the winter.

“Ballyshannon gave us a good run for it but I felt once we got the goal, we really settled down and used the ball well, especially in the last quarter.

READ NEXT: Setanta look for revenge on holders Burt in the SHC semi-finals

“It was our third year in the final in a row. Last year we were disappointed because we fell over the line against Setanta, and the year before that against Aodh Ruadh, we didn’t put in much of a performance, so we were really chasing the performance this year. 

“We worked hard on the training field and we’re delighted for them, we showed our true colours in the second half and got some lovely scores.

“We only lost around two from last year and we were missing one of our better players so we’d hope to have Dan (Donnelly) back for Ulster and Lorcan Byrne, they’re two big players for us so the future is bright and we’ll hope to push on for Ulster, we got to the final last year and we were disappointed with it so we’ll hope to go on further.”