M&L Contracts Derry SFC Final
Ballinderry v Slaughtneil
Sunday, 3.30pm, Celtic Park

By Cahair O'Kane

Some day, Slaughtneil will win that elusive second championship. It will be some day soon, too. The question, however, is whether they will win it on Sunday.

The 2004 final was such a joyous, momentous occasion for the Slaughtneil club. No better place than at the home of their neighbours Glen, too. But they would have expected to have backed it up by now. That joy has been replaced by an entire decade of hurt.
It hurts them so much because they’ve been so close on so many occasions. Every second season since, they’ve had a good championship. On four of the five occasions that they’ve come close since (2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012), it’s been Ballinderry who have blocked their path to success.

The last two of those were in finals. There were things on both of those occasions that they might have done differently, things they could have done better. Perhaps they were more unlucky in 2008 than in 2012 though. Their last final will be a source of regret for them, but it was one after which they couldn’t complain about the result.

And yet, in this decade of dominance that Ballinderry have enjoyed, Slaughtneil have been their most consistent nemesis. They’ve reached three finals since 2004 and while Loup have matched that, the anomaly is that they haven’t met Ballinderry in the championship since the 2006 decider.

Slaughtneil’s achievement has been to remain competitive through the transition. There’s still a core of experience that backbones the current team, with five of the team that started the 2004 final starting on Sunday, and another three on the bench.

But through making the ten changes since, they’ve remained competitive. Over the last three seasons in particular, they’ve almost seamlessly bled as many as seven new faces into their starting fifteen.

It should be no major surprise that their challenge has been reinvigorated rather than weakened by that change. The players coming through have been second only to Glen in recent minor championships, and many have school and university experience that underlined their quality.

It’s a very young team, still. Six of their starting line-up will be 22 and under. Chrissy McKaigue, Antoin McMullan, Paudie McGuigan and Peadar Kearney find themselves in the middle, with the other half five tipping the scales at 30 and beyond.

They have an average age of 25.6, compared to Ballinderry’s, whose average is 27.6. The four-in-a-row chasing holders of the John McLaughlin Cup have eight players 28 or above, with two at 33, one at 34, one at 36 and Enda Muldoon still going strong at 37.

The last time these two met, the obituaries were being written on the careers of some of them. And who was the match-winner? Muldoon. His pass over the top for Coilin Devlin’s goal was absolutely sublime. Unforgettable. And it’s a move they’ve a habit of trying to replicate.

Daniel McKinless gave it a go against Coleraine, the exact same movement off the back of the defender, and Muldoon spied it. The pass was overcooked by a yard but such is the danger of his playmaking skill, still.

Everyone says that Ballinderry have won the last three championships because they’ve better forwards than everyone else. That’s partly true. They do have better forwards than everyone else.

But that lazy statement does no justice to their defence over that time. Since this run of 19 unbeaten championship games began, they have conceded just seven goals.

They conceded two to Lavey in the quarter-final this year, and one to Ballinascreen in last year’s final. The other seven games in the last two years, they’ve kept clean sheets.

Notably, and this is the key, they have kept clean sheets against Slaughtneil every time they’ve met in recent years. The 2012 final, they won by 1-10 to 0-10. The 2010 quarter-final, it was 0-13 to 0-11. In 2008, the Shamrocks won the decider by 0-10 to 0-8. There’s a very clear and obvious pattern: if Slaughtneil don’t score a goal, they will not win this game.

The other side of the coin is that the margins have been so wafer thin that one goal might be enough, and any team on any given day is capable of scoring one goal.

Christopher Bradley holds the key for the Emmets. The three goals they’ve scored in this year’s championship, he has two of them and laid the other one on for Paul Bradley.

Gareth McKinless has been excelling at full-back for Fabian Muldoon’s side, prompting his manager to label the 20-year-old as “the best defender in Derry at the minute” earlier in the championship. He’s done restrictive jobs on Colm McGoldrick (twice) and Cailean O’Boyle. His performance on O’Boyle in the second half saved Ballinderry’s season.

There is debate over whether he will pick up Bradley but look, McKinless is Ballinderry’s best defender and Bradley is Slaughtneil’s best forward. If Ballinderry don’t play McKinless at six, they may concede that goal and they may lose this game.

Ballinderry will fancy their chances against the rest of the Emmets’ forward line. But while Gerald Bradley’s scoring rate is at an average of just over a point per game, he has played superbly in the ball-winning role, drifting well away from his full-forward line.

Mickey Moran will more than likely stay with the 15 that started the semi-final replay win over Dungiven. That means Sé McGuigan will retain his place in the corner ahead of Padraig Cassidy.

The Emmets have to get their defensive match-ups right. While they will no doubt deliberate over what to do with Ryan Bell, it remains highly unlikely that they will bring Chrissy McKaigue back to the edge of his own square. Brendan Rogers is best suited to dealing with the aerial threat.

It was a favoured county final tactic of Martin McKinless’ to load a few early testers in on top of a big full-forward, and it worked to stunning effect against Kilrea in 2011. The Slaughtneil defence, as excellent as it is, isn’t blessed with height. It might be worth Ballinderry trying again in the first five minutes.

They’ve had a lot of effective tactics in their armoury. In 2012, despite Patsy Bradley’s heroic best efforts, the four big men that they loaded across the middle – Muldoon, James Conway, Martin Harney and Ryan Bell – Slaughtneil suffered from a deficiency of possession.

But Paudie McGuigan has grown massively since then. There was criticism after that final of Damian Barton’s decision to stay loyal to McGuigan and start him ahead of the fit-again Shane Kelly. There will be no such debate now. McGuigan has become one of the best fielders in the county.

Ballinderry were barely tested last year at all. Only a late Ballinascreen goal brought them within seven points in the final. This season, they got out after a sloppy performance against Lavey, coming from five down to win by one.

It was Coleraine that Ballinderry had most concerns about, but come the semi-final, they shut the Eoghan Rua system down completely.

Individually, Slaughtneil have better footballers than Coleraine, so they won’t be as easy to stifle. But unless they manage to raise a green flag against Ballinderry for the first time in this generation, it will be blue and white ribbons on the cup again.

Verdict: Ballinderry

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