Connemara carry too much class for Roscommon rivals

Connemara 25

Creggs 6

Kevin Egan at the Sportsground

TOO strong, too powerful, too competent, too good.

Connemara and Creggs were introduced to the crowd at the Sportsground in Galway last Sunday as the two best junior teams in the province, and results for the year would suggest that this was a very uncontroversial assertion.

Yet within the top two, there can be no argument as to the overall pecking order right now after Connemara dominated this Junior Cup final to make it three wins out of three in big head-to-head games, running in three tries and easily holding their opponents at bay for long stretches of the game to do so.

Creggs’ improvement in advance of this season was significant, and results throughout the campaign would suggest that the further into the year they went, the better they got. Connemara’s win at the Green in February to wrap up the league title will have stung more than a little, but if the improvements kept coming, there was every reason to believe that a sixth ever Junior Cup crown might not be out of their reach.

It wasn’t to be as the winning side gave a masterclass in efficient, controlled play. They soaked up the early pressure, struck clinically on the break, and then swallowed up the ball and starved their opponents of possession after half time, running down the clock on a hugely impressive win.

The last time these sides met in a Junior final, a Ger Dowd drop goal and a Kieran Dowd penalty gave Creggs a 6-3 win in the 1993 decider. Junior rugby is a very different landscape now with exponentially increased scoring rates, and once Creggs lined up with the wind at their backs, they would have known that they needed to put up a decent tally in the opening 40 minutes to give themselves something to defend after half time. Their hopes were dashed by the interval when they failed to do so.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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