Mangan now focused on Castletown's mission to retain title
By Gerry Buckley
With his Castletown-Geoghegan troops safely through to the Westmeath SHC decider, team manager Alan Mangan was pragmatic in his thoughts when he spoke to the media after last Sunday’s round robin win against Raharney (3-16 to 0-17).
While defending champions Castletown are in the final, Raharney will meet Lough Lene Gaels (finalists for the past two years) in the semi-final.
A Leinster senior football medallist in 2004, Mangan stated at the outset: “We wouldn’t be overly happy with today’s performance but, in fairness, conditions were very poor out there. It’s very hard to play when it’s spilling rain and it’s windy, and the ball is skidding off the hard ground.
“We knew that Raharney were going to bring great intensity, as they always do. It was a decent game for the neutral supporters, without being a great game. We got over the line and if it’s a shorter way into the county final, let’s do that. The lads will play football next weekend and we’ll knuckle down for the final after that, please God.”
When asked about the decisive brace of rapid-fire goals in the 53rd and 54th minutes which put his side firmly in control, Mangan remarked: “The second of them (by Johnny Bermingham) was soft, but the sun was very bad. You can’t really blame Aaron McHugh for that goal. It was a shot for a point and it ended up in the back of the net.”
He went on to outline the injury concerns in the holders’ camp: “Peter Clarke picked up a bad injury and it will be touch and go whether he is back for the final. We brought him on with a minute to go just to stand in the corner, because our intermediate team is in the semi-final in a few weeks’ time and we didn’t want to lose a player off that for the sake of one minute. It was one of those innocuous things that happen in training and he probably won’t play football (for Tyrrellspass) next weekend.
"We have a lot of sore lads in there. We got three belts in the head and we had to take the three of them off. We’ll have to see how they are in the next week or two.”
The men in the famous black and amber jerseys have been rock-solid favourites for the title for many weeks now, but their bainisteoir remained cautious. “How many teams have we seen winning all their (round robin) games and then getting caught in the county final?,” he asked.
“If it’s Raharney again, they’re going to have a full whack (of players) with them by then, and so will Lough Lene Gaels. We know that we’ll have to be at our very, very best to have a chance of winning the county final. That’s how good the club hurling scene is in Westmeath,” Mangan continued.
“We’ll come here in three weeks and have a gander at the semi-final to see who we are playing. Hopefully, we can work on a few things between then and the county final. It’s been a long, long time since we retained the county championship, all the way back to 1958. There’s a lot of pressure on these young men to rectify that,” he concluded.